Short Story One: Chemo

Chemo

Jimmy paced in the hot room as his mother received surgery in the next one over.  She’s had cancer for the past four years. It shouldn't surprise him as much as it does, but something’s getting to him today. There’s this feeling of dread in the pit of his stomach. It’s something that he has had for the past month. A feeling that something will go wrong. He finally sat down in the waiting room outside the operating room. He was determined to think well about the situation.

It’s all fine he thought she’ll be fine.

After sitting down in the room, he took out his phone to try and kill time. The nurse had said that the operation might take four hours. It seemed like forever. His mother on the other side of these walls, struggling to live. Finally having the cancer in her liver be taken out after four years of chemo, radiation, and other forms of medicine that seemed to never work. The cancer was under control. It was staying in the same place. She kept working. He picked up extra shifts waiting tables at Chili's, which just barely helped them scrape by the skin of their necks.

He kept changing seats. There were no other people in the room. No one to comfort him. To tell him it will be alright. Not even anybody who is going through the same pain of having somebody under the knife. He decides to call his friend. His mom went under surgery a few months ago, just a minor blood clot by her ankle. But they wanted it out. So they got it removed.

“Hey, what are you doing?” Jimmy said as soon as his friend Philip answered the phone.

“Not much, just out shopping for food.”

“Can you just tell me that everything is going to be okay?”

“Why, what’s going on?”

“My mom is having her liver cancer removed.”

“Dude, that’s great.”

“Yeah, well we don’t know if the operation is successful yet, she’s still under the knife.”

“Oh, well I hope it goes well.”

“Yeah, me too.”

He hung up the phone. His friend might have been enthusiastic about the situation, but it isn’t what he needed.

His father had already been dead for about three years. Shot himself after he found out about everything with his mom. He had come back home from a work retreat that everybody was taking. He had no cell service for six months, and didn’t even call or text home for the whole six months he was there. When he got back, he felt like shit. He was out having fun in Fiji while his mom was undergoing cancer treatments that costed more than they could afford. He was really shaken up, especially the first time he saw Jimmy’s mom’s bald head.

He shot himself in their car, using the shotgun that they kept around for protection. After all that, they had to fend for themselves.

His mom was becoming more and more weak as the chemo treatments continued. The cancer was eating away at her. They tried everything that they could to stop her from working, but they couldn’t. His job didn’t pay enough that he could pay the hospital bills and their basic bills every month, with medication costing $10,000 or more every month. He could only pay one. That meant that his mom had to keep her job.

For a good portion of his life, she worked at Walmart. She would count and stack cans of beans. His dad had a nice office job. When he got home from school, he would be home alone for 15 minutes, and his mom would show up, and take care of him. Starting middle school, he had more freedom. The middle school was closer, so he would spend more time there alone. This meant that his mom could take more shifts at Walmart. So she did. From 3 o’clock to 6 o’clock every afternoon, he would be home alone.

The announcement of his dad going on a work retreat was big. Everybody was excited for him. It was only a few weeks after he had left when Jimmy’s mom got cancer. It was tragic. She started coughing up blood, so they took her to the doctor. They said it had already progressed to stage three. That meant that it was just starting to spread in her body. Using certain veins, the cancer was starting to take over their lives. They had to start paying lots of bills as they tried to get it treated. When his mom asked for a bonus, they greeted her at Walmart with a “demotion” to the management department. She was getting paid three dollars less than she was before, which was a problem because they needed her to make three dollars more an hour.

When it got even worse, after his dad killed himself, they had to take more action. Jimmy was already working at full capacity, so he started to ask around to his friends. Begging, really. Philip started to give them money that he didn’t need from his job. He worked and got paid plenty, so he gave plenty to them. After two more years, here he was. Standing outside the operating room getting ready to either have really good or really bad news thrown at him. Either the cancer has spread even more than it already has, or they were able to remove it.

He was pacing again. He started to think of anything to do. He didn’t want to leave the room, because the operation might finish while he’s gone. He didn’t want to stay in the hospital because hospitals show death and overall suffering. He was completely torn. All he could do was sit.

He started thinking again. What if this hadn’t happened? What if she didn’t get cancer? Would they all just be a big happy family? How was he supposed to know? He was a little speck in the grand scheme of things. There are seven billion people on this earth. Are him and his mother really worth it at all? If they’re so insignificant, then why would they be there in the first place? But there was one question. One that has been eating away at him for the entire time his mother has had cancer.

Why does God hate us?

If god is real, then why would he let his mother get cancer, his father to kill himself, and his family to be put through the pain it has been put through for the past four years?

If god is real then why is his mother in the other room with her stomach open so that she can have god’s mistake fixed inside her?

If god is real, then why shouldn’t I hate him?

His head was spinning. He felt like he was going to throw up. He rushed to the bathroom across the hall from where he was. Opening the door, he threw himself at the toilet, and started right away, no hesitation. No holding it back. He was in fear for his mother’s life. She was only forty years old, and she could die today, leaving a 17 year old to keep her house and pay her hospital bills.

Then what? He spends the rest of his life in mourning of his mother who died of cancer too early in her life. He leaves his friends alone, lives in a small apartment, gets a little bit hurt, only gets disability checks for the rest of his life, drinking his life away. That isn’t the Jimmy she raised. That isn’t the Jimmy he wanted to be. He wanted to be a doctor when he got to the age. He wanted to help people. He wanted to make the world a better place. He wanted to be able to go to any office and know more than any person their. When he walked into the room, he wanted people to think, that’s the guy who saved my daughter. Or he’s had three successful brain surgeries last month.

He was just scared that his mom’s death would interfere with this. He didn’t want to have to subconsciously think about his mother every time he was putting someone else under the knife.

He sat back down in this room, wiping more throw up off of his chin. He wasn’t drinking anything, so he had a disgusting taste in his mouth. The burning in the back of his throat went away after a little while, and he was just looking around again.

Seconds turned to minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into sleep.

When he woke up, there was a nurse in front of him, tapping his shoulder. She had the results.

“Well then, what are they.” Jimmy said, scared but excited at the same time.

“Well, I have good news and bad news.”

“Give the good news first.”

“Well, we have taken the cancer out. All tumors have been removed from her liver.”

“Well, that’s great news, but what could be bad about that?”

“The cancer has actually spread to her kidney, and has reached stage four.”

Jimmy’s heart dropped. He thought that this was it. Either she lived for a long time, or she dies a young death. But it feels like she is in purgatory. A stage between the two. Between life and death. She’s been there for four years, and she isn’t leaving now. They had two options. Number one: they gave up and let his mother die just around the age of forty; Number two: they continue to fight and keep their fingers crossed that eventually something will work.

Number one means accepting death. Letting his mother die. Letting her, hypothetically, go to a better place. No more pain. No more suffering. She would just die.

Number two means that they would have to work harder. Spend more money than they did before on chemo and other drugs that they need to save her life. Have more and more surgeries. Be in debt for a long time.

They decided number one.

Six months later, his mother died, in her normal bed, in her normal house, when she layed down to take a nap. Jimmy cried at her bedside for ten minutes before he called anybody to come over. First, he called nine-one-one. Then his friend Philip. They both showed up about the same time. They both asked the same questions about his mother. When they were done, they went inside and looked at the body. She was peaceful. Serene. Despite the pain that she had been in in the last four years, she finally seemed to not have any.

In the last six months, Jimmy and his mother had bonded more than they had the rest of his life. She had told him her life stories. They were like open books with each other.

He was depressed for months after she died. He lived in the same home, went to school on his own, and paid taxes every month. He had already turned 18 before she died. He stayed in the home to take care of her. Now that she’s dead it’s the only thing that reminds him of her.

The end.

The point of this story was to see if I could write a short story that told a message, made sense, and had character development all in just five pages. It took me about 45 minutes to write this story, which happened around 11 o'clock. Here it si for your viewing pleasure.