A World Of Hurt

He watched her sleep, or try to, at least. Her hair was a fright, her face was lined from pillowcrush, and her skin was a worrisome sallow color. She hated hated hated it here, but there was no other option.

The previous afternoon, he'd dropped by his parents' house on some errand or other, to find his mother rocking back and forth on the couch and keening. His sister sat calmly at the kitchen table doing her makeup: "she's been doing that for hours. She won't go to the hospital, and she won't let me call Dad. Heck with it, I'm going to work." She insisted it must be the flu; he was dubious, but let it go, and went to work. Several hours into his shift, his other sister called: the pain had doubled, and they had taken her to the hospital, and no one knew anything. Later that night, no one knew anything. The next morning, no one knew anything and the pain meds were useless. It might be diverticulitis. It might not. They stuck her with needles and gave her IVs and wouldn't let her take her thyroid pills. She had entered her own personal idea of hell. He spent Friday night on the couch next to her hospital bed.

Finally, after an ultrasound, they figured out that she'd had an ovarian cyst that had burst, and the gurgling she'd felt was the extra blood and guck from it swishing around. After consultation (only the second time she'd seen the guy instead of a minion), her OB-GYN advised against surgery, and to just let the system flush itself out. Well, fine Doc, but pain medicine is useless on the Hieftje constitution: her mother drank and smoked herself to death because the release just never came. Mom finally escaped the hospital, but then all the next day she had the worst headache of her life; it made her incoherent and wild eyed. The only halfway comfortable position she could find was sitting at the kitchen counter, on a barstool, leaning forward, a pillow cushioning her beleaguered gut against the edge. He spent the whole night there with her, changing ice packs, fetching water, dithering and watching her suffer, not knowing how to fix this. He owed this woman a life without pain. He owed this woman his existence. He owed this woman fifteen hundred dollars. He was not much of a prayer, but atheism is hard to maintain in the face of suffering mothers, so he said a few silent entreaties, watched her shallow breathing, and tried to read a book.