If Only It Would End

If It Would Only End

By Hilary Huddleston

Roughly shoved through two identical double white doors only to have your senses assaulted with the smell of cinnamon and 45 minutes of questioning. As soon as you’re at your most vulnerable, half naked and in a strange bed, they come at you with the second load of questions. Do you smoke?, Do you drink?, Are you pregnant?, on and on and on and on. It seems never ending, while you’re laying there screaming in complete agony and trying to remember the exact date of your late period. After what seems like hours but could only have been at least forty five minutes it stops and all is quite. Everyone leaves. The doctor, the nurse with the clipboard, the nurse running around like a blind idiot, and all the other people who weren’t doing much besides telling you stop screaming because that just makes it worse.

Then you’re alone. In this newly found silence you don’t know if it’s better this way or if you actually prefer their nonsensical questions and “advice” that someone in your amount of pain could never use.

You lay in that perfectly white bed in that white gown with the little blue flower print trying to calm down and just waiting for them to come back with the medicine. You squirm and breathe heavily through your teeth, trying not to tear off small sections of your skin. Finally you hear someone on the other side of your curtain. Someone appears. They seem nervous and you can smell their sweat.

You find out that they’re new. They sit next to you and begin to strap that blue piece of rubber around your arm, shaking as they do so. In their oh-so-unconfident hands they hold the needle. All they need to do is find a vein. Just one and it will be all over.

You close your eyes and turn your head. They tell you its okay and won’t hurt a bit. You feel something long, thin, and metal slide into your arm. It burns. They pull it out. They didn’t hit a vein. They try four more times before your own father has to do it. You feel the medicine enter your veins and the smell is over whelming. The pain still persists but the drugs are making you not care. You close your eyes and wait to drift off to sleep knowing that when you wake up you’ll feel better and you’ll get to do it all over again the next day.