Brenna
“I wish they never called you,” my mother said. I had been waiting in the hospital for almost twenty minutes. The staff had finally let me into my mother’s room after I rushed here following their call. She had been brought to the emergency room. She was still undergoing treatment and had the nerve to tell me that she didn’t want me to worry about her.
Oh my god, that was where I got it from. She was stubborn and pushed people away when they wanted to help her and so was I. The key difference was that I wasn’t the one fighting for my life against a deadly disease.
“Too bad. They have to,” I said. I didn’t want to show her just how worried I was before getting here. I had to be the strong one. She wasn’t weak but the disease was eating her away. If anything, I wished she would act more like someone who was terribly ill. The disease could take her hair, her health, energy and money but it couldn’t break her spirit.
Bless Barry and his lack of respect for traffic laws. When I asked whe
ther he was worried about getting a ticket or something, he said fines were nothing to worry about. Mr. Hampton would deal with any charges that came up. Basically, the law didn’t apply if you were rich. I channeled my anger for that into worry for my mother because Charlie’s money had been doing me a lot of favors lately. It was paying for both this hospital stay and the very expensive ambulance that had brought her here.
She sighed and looked away from me. We were in the room with a nurse who was politely ignoring the back and forth.
“Can you tell me anything? I’ve been waiting almost half an hour,” I asked her.
“We’re all very thankful that she wasn’t home alone. That could have been a disaster. We were able to get to her before anything bad happened. Her home-care aid called it in. She was shaky on her feet. Almost fell over.” I looked at my mother accusatorially. Dark thoughts fought for the position to make me feel the worst in my head.
What had I been doing when my mother was basically on the brink of death? She looked fine, I knew she wasn’t really on the brink of death but the point was keeping her from getting there. That was my job but I had been fooling around with Charlie while she was being rushed to the hospital. The guilt sat on my chest and made breathing a little bit difficult. I thanked the nurse then I swallowed the guilt down so I could talk to my mother.
“How are you feeling mom?”
“A bit light-headed but it’s okay. Much better than before.”
Before I chastised her out of my own fear and insecurity, the doctor walked in. She greeted me and I told her who I was.
“We’re glad you're here. Your mother is lucky she wasn’t alone. She’s stable now but we want to keep her for more tests.”
“You’re admitting her?”
“We need to know that she remains stable. It's too soon to tell yet.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“I understand your frustration but we simply need to make sure that this isn’t a reaction to her treatment. Otherwise, she’ll be right back here as soon as she needs it again.”
“But she was responding well previously,” I said. I realized how petulant and small I sounded. It wasn’t this woman’s fault that my mother was unwell. She was trying to help her and I wasn’t making her job easier by being paranoid and rude. I tried to reel it back in.
“Treatment is not linear unfortunately, the body is in constant flux. Something that worked could stop with no apparent reason. We need to run the tests to know where to go from here. We’re moving her at the moment so you can wait in the waiting room and someone will let you know when she’s ready.”
I wanted to complain. I was so worried, guilty and hurt that I didn’t want to feel that way alone. It wasn’t fair and it was stupid. The doctor was doing her job and she was trying to help me. I couldn’t make that harder for her and the rest of the medical staff. I left the room, feeling drained. I was on edge the whole ride here thinking about what had happened to my mother. Now, I was tired, almost worn out, weak, like I could lay down and sleep twelve hours.
More tests, more treatment, more time in the hospital being poked and prodded. She didn’t deserve all this. Thanks to Charlie’s down payment, the money wasn’t a problem anymore. I thought that it would make these feelings better. Basically, the money seemed like the biggest problem, even bigger than the fact that my mother was sick. I thought I wouldn’t feel like this anymore. It was supposed to fix it. No. It would just pay for all the treatments she had to get done, it wouldn’t make me any less stressed that my mother was sick and there was a chance she wouldn’t get through this.
I trudged into the waiting room ready to simultaneously cry and lie down.
“Brenna?”
I looked up hearing my name. Charlie, looking like he had run all the way here from the house rushed up to me.
“What happened? What are you doing here?”
“What?” I asked. He grabbed my shoulders.
“Is it the baby?”
I blinked, catching up to him because we weren’t at the same speed. “No. No, it’s not the baby. I’m fine. The baby is fine.”
“Then what happened? Why are you here?”