Her clothes were still wet, and she started to shiver from the cold air blowing through the waiting room. The writing on the page was reduced to scribbles as her hand shook from the cold…from everything. This ER visit was going to cost her again. Money she didn’t have, and neither did her mother.
“Phoebe, what are you doing here?”
She glanced up, confused, then tried to smile when she saw her friend, Charlotte, standing there. “Hey, I didn’t know you were working today.”
Charlotte was a nurse in pink scrubs today. She hurried over and gave Phoebe a hug just as the tears started to fall. “Your mom in again? What happened this time?”
“I left her alone, went to visit Dad,” Phoebe whispered through the tears. “I was gone a few hours, but I thought she’d be fine. They said she’d be fine, but she locked herself in the bedroom and fell! She hit her head. She could have died! She almost did.”
“It’s all right, I’m sure she’ll be fine.”
But Phoebe shook her head. “Something else is wrong with her.”
“Is her doctor here yet?”
She shook her head as she glanced around. “Whatever medicine he put her on isn’t working. We have to do something else, and they haven’t told me anything.”
“Okay, just sit right here. I’ll go see what I can find out, all right?”
Phoebe nodded and watched her friend go to the nurse’s station to see what she could dig up. Charlotte had been helping her through so much lately, and Phoebe wasn’t even sure she deserved a friend like that. Things had been rough since her mom got sick and her father died of a heart attack that came out of nowhere. She’d been left to deal with everything. She had no other family, and no one close except Charlotte.
A few minutes later, Charlotte came back over and sat down with a chart. “They’re stitching up the wound now. It looked worse than it was. I think she passed out from shock more than anything else. She should be finished soon, and her doctor just entered the building.”
“Thank God. He better be coming up to see her immediately.”
“He is, but you’re freezing. Let me get you my change of clothes. I’ll be right back. Then you can go see your mom and him, all right?”
Phoebe really couldn’t argue. She wanted to be able to yell at Doctor Chambers without her teeth chattering. Kind of took away the intimidating edge she wanted to have. Not that she was all that scary. She was barely five-foot-three and thin. There was a time she didn’t look so skinny, so pale. That was a long, long time ago.
Twenty minutes later, she wore a fresh pair of jeans and a sweater and was marching towards her mom’s room where Doctor Chambers stood, looking over her vitals.
“Ah, Phoebe, there you are,” he said when she entered. “I’m sorry this happened.”
“Again…sorry this happened again,” she snapped as she hurried to her mom’s bedside. There was a bandage on her forehead, but other than that, she looked perfectly healthy. Phoebe was a spitting image of her mother, minus the streaks of grey and white that ran through her mom’s hair. “We have to do something else. Please, there has to be another drug to stop this.”
Doctor Chambers sighed and went to close the door. “Please, have a seat.”
Phoebe let go of her mom’s hand and went to the small table and chairs in the corner. He sat down across from her and took off his glasses, looking much older all of a sudden.
“Phoebe, we’ve talked about this. Your mother has a tumor in her brain.”
“Yes, I know.”
“But what you don’t seem to understand is that drugs will not help her. Not in this state.” He reached out a gentle hand and patted hers. “She needs surgery. The tumor is in a place it can be removed, but it might not stay that way for long. If it continues to grow…if it gets any worse, we will lose our chance.”
Phoebe’s eyes filled with hot tears she quickly wiped away, sniffing hard to try and stay in control. “I can’t afford that surgery,” she whispered. “Mom’s money is gone, my savings are dried up…I can’t even get a loan from the bank.”
“Her insurance will help—”
“Not enough, and the last time I talked with them, they told me there was a chance they might not cover anything. I can’t…I can’t help her.”
Doctor Chambers held her hand as she cried. They’d had this conversation before, numerous times, but Phoebe knew there was nothing he could do. This was the way the world worked. She couldn’t pay for the surgery. She was going to watch her mother suffer before the tumor finally killed her and put an end to it all.