22 | breakaway

1.8K 140 263
                                    

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.


CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

BREAKAWAY

          ALL I WANT TO DO IS SCREAM

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

          ALL I WANT TO DO IS SCREAM.

          I keep hearing all these people talk about how easily treatable pneumonia is and how Bishop is going to be okay, but things are contradicting what they say. He keeps getting worse, even while being locked in the hospital and while being treated with those fancy antibiotics, and I feel him slipping between my fingers like raindrops.

          The doctors believe it might not be bacterial pneumonia or, if it is, the bacteria that has caused all this might be immune to these particular antibiotics. Either way, they're not working, everyone is slowly freaking out and I'd hate to be the person who says 'I told you so', especially when it comes to Bishop and his health—or lack of it—but I wish they had listened to me in the first place.

          It doesn't explain why we haven't gotten sick as well, especially me. Maybe what caused his pneumonia acted a lot softer inside our bodies, leaving us with mere colds and the flu, or something, and was brutal with him. Everything surrounding his condition is a massive question mark to me, especially when the doctors ask me questions about what might have caused this, what were his habits, whether he's a smoker or not (he isn't) or if he had engaged in any behaviors that could possibly leave him exposed to bacteria or any viruses . . .

          I don't know. I don't know anything, and it kills me. It kills me knowing there are plenty of things I could be doing to help him and the doctors if I had paid more attention, if we had dragged him to the hospital months ago, if we had chosen to not believe his word when he said everything was fine.

          Perhaps he had no idea either. Perhaps he's as terrified as we are, connected to machines that help him breathe.

          They let me visit him sometimes. I have to use a mask—all of us do—which only raises the already massive distance between us; it's only worse when I get there and he's unconscious, so it's not like my visits have been of much help to him, as I can never find anything remotely interesting to talk about. The doctors all tell us to talk to him when he's like this, even if our voices come out muffled thanks to the hospital mask we're forced to wear, as if he was in a coma, and it's not like we would say no.

Until the DayWhere stories live. Discover now