Coffin Money - 1

Day 1 at the hospital

An 83-year-old woman named Sarah is in the hospital with bad stomach aches. She’d been brought in by her son David, despite her kicking and screaming.

“I don’t want to go to the doctors! They will just kill me! All those doctors are killing people!”

“Mom, let’s just have you checked out. I can see you are in horrible pain,” he would tell her patiently, like to a petulant child.

“It will pass on its own! I’ve had this ache before, it will just go away by itself once I eat! It’s just because I’m hungry!”

“Ok, let’s get you something to eat then.”

“But no grits or pancakes, I want meat!”

“How about eggs and sausage?”

“That’ll do, I guess. But make it eggs and ham.”

The pain only got worse, so Sarah’s son took her to the hospital.

The hospital was dealing with another wave of the pandemic, and Sarah had to be put in the hallway with other non-viral patients in the elective surgery and treatment wing. They gave her some painkillers which numbed her pain. It would be a couple of hours before they’d be able to run diagnostics on her, they said.

“Take me home!” she ordered her son, “I’m feeling much better now!”

“I can’t take you home just yet, mom, they need to run some tests on you. Besides, I have to go to work now. I’ll come back in the evening to check on you.”

“In the evening!? I don’t want to stay here that long! Don’t you see, it’s madness here! I’ll get something bad from all these sick people!”

“They are not contagious, mom! They’ll put you up in a separate room soon. If there’s anything urgent, call me, but only if it’s really urgent,” David said and left for work.

She called him at least 10 times that day, yelling and demanding to take her home.

When he came back in the evening, she was still in the hallway, miserable and angry.

David went to talk to the doctor assigned to his mother.

“Has she always been this mean?” the doctor asked. “All the nurses are afraid of her and don’t want to deal with her.”

“She is particularly mean when she is in pain,” David responded.

“You poor man. Buckle up, it’ll get only worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“We need to run some more tests, but in addition to her old untreated ulcer she seems to have a stomach cancer. The biopsy and other tests will show if it really is cancer and how far advanced it is. We will need to keep her for a couple of days, for tests and observation.”

“Can you at least move her into a room from the hallway?”

“Not tonight, but I’ll do what I can tomorrow. We just don’t have enough beds.”

“I can see, you are overwhelmed. But I think mom will be happier if she is in a room. She doesn’t trust doctors and hospitals, you know.”

“Many of them don’t, at this age. But tell her that if she’s mean to our nurses, we’ll send her home.”

“She’d be happy to hear that.”

“Well, then tell her that we will move her to the morgue,” the doctor chuckled.

David sat by his mom’s side in the hallway until she fell asleep for the night, trying to explain to her why she cannot go home. She just won’t take it.

“I’m as strong and healthy as a cow,” she kept saying. “I want to go home!”

“Let’s just wait for the results of the tests, mom,” David insisted. He finally was able to go home at about 11 pm.

“How is she?” David’s wife Anna asked.

“As usual, grumpy and miserable.”

“Grumpy is a nice word for what she is,” Anna said.

“She is my mother.”

“You are a good, respectful son,” Anna said, kissing her husband on the cheek. “Let’s go to bed, you’ll need your strength tomorrow.”

Day 2 at the hospital

David was not able to see his mother before he went to work in the morning, for which he received about 30 scolding phone calls during the day. When he came after work, she was moved out of the hallway into a room with three other stomach ache patients.

“See, I told you they kill people here. I only got this bed because someone died this morning,” David’s mom hissed in his ear when he sat next to her.

“Mom, no one kills anyone here. People die at the hospitals because they are too sick and come here too late.”

“Yeah, right! They experiment here on people too, you know. Don’t let them experiment on me.”

“I promise you, mom, no one will experiment on you without your permission. Did the doctor come to see you today?”

“Nope. Just the nurses. I’m telling you, they want to kill me slowly. But you’d be happy about it, won’t you? Then you won’t have to take care of your sickly dying mother.”

“You are not dying, mother. You just said it yourself, you are healthy, it’s just that they need to check everything out completely.”

“Sure, right. Like I believe them. Tell them to prescribe me the pills they are giving me for the pain, and I’ll just go home. My children are missing me.”

“I’ll check on them and feed them tonight,” David promised.

On the way home, he stopped by his mother’s one-bedroom apartment and put the food out for her three cats and a dog. The dog was a friendly and old dachshund and the cats were running her and the place. Never trained to use the litter box, they used the entire apartment as their bathroom. In the three years that his mother lived in the apartment after selling the farm she couldn’t work anymore, the apartment accumulated a strong stench that hit your nostrils as soon as you opened the door. David scooped up what he could find, petted the dachshund named Rose on the way out and went home.

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