the body itemized: symptoms that develop symptoms
He weighed fifty kilos and his skin was the color of summer squash. He had terrible shivering-attacks and also perspired. He had a sty that had scraped one eyeball as pink as a bunny’s. His nose ran like twin spigots and the output had a yellow-green tinge he didn’t think looked promising at all.
Context
The lived medical texture of kicking, catalogued in Poor Tony's fastidious idiom against the abjection it describes: fifty kilos, squash-colored skin, the bunny-pink eye, the spigot nose. The clause "his symptoms themselves developed symptoms" is the theme's exact description of how Withdrawal compounds — a fractal worsening he can only chart "with morbid attention," a connoisseur of his own dissolution.