One Month Earlier (June. 06, 2023)
It was quiet. Only the beeping of the electrocardiogram hooked up to a brown-haired boy who lay slumbering on the adjacent bed could be heard throughout the room. However, from the looks of it, his sleep wasn’t a pleasant one.
Every few seconds, the boy would grimace in pain. It appeared that even while sleeping, he could not escape whatever torment he had to endure. At sudden intervals, the boy would let out a pained moan, his face twisting as if he was being burned alive, only to relax after a couple of moments.
This went on for a while, the constant back and forth of agony and relief. Fortunately, he was able to sleep through most of it. Yet, even this reprieve wouldn’t last for long.
Suddenly, a young blond-haired nurse quietly entered his room. An expression of sadness crossed her face as she approached the boy on the bed. After placing the tray she was holding on a nearby table, she began checking his vitals. When she saw they were stable, she couldn’t help but smile.
He had been in a precarious situation the last few days and it had worried her. Although she was just his nurse, she couldn’t help but think of him like a baby brother. It probably didn’t help that she had been in charge of his care for the last seven years.
While shaking her head, she chided herself for getting attached to patients despite knowing she shouldn’t. Sighing, she walked over to the windows and opened the blinds, letting sunlight flitter throughout the sterile room.
The brightness of the light caused the sickly pale-skinned boy’s eyes to flutter, awakening him from his slumber. However, as he awoke, the minor pain he felt while he slept magnified into extreme discomfort.
“Ellington, it’s time to get up,” the nurse said cheerfully as she walked back over to his bed. Picking up a small plastic medicine cup filled with pills on her way. “The sun is already shining, the birds are singing, and it’s a beautiful day, so wake up and take your medicine!”
‘Beautiful day, my ass. It’s just another day of the torturous hell I call life that I have to endure.’ Groaning, Ellington slowly sat up on his bed and reached for the glass of water on his bedside table. He downed all the pills in one gulp before lying back down, letting out a deep sigh.
If anything, he would rather stay asleep and never wake up again, but the brown-haired boy knew he could never get away with that. The doctors get paid way too much to ever allow him to rest in peace.
“Don’t be such a grumpy bear,” the nurse said, seeing his pout. “It’ll make you feel better.”
‘I know that, you stupid c***, I have been taking them for years,’ he thought, mentally rolling his eyes. However, his decorum would never allow him to say that out loud. Instead, he gave her a sweet smile before nodding.
A perky grin spread across the nurse’s face as she began his daily bloodletting. Which means she will draw his blood for the doctor to do tests. Once she was finished, she replaced his IV bag with a new one.
“All done. If you want, you can nap for a bit. I will be back in an hour with your breakfast,” she said, before walking out of the room, leaving Ellington alone with his thoughts.
‘As if I could just go back to sleep,’ Elli scowled, as currents of pain traveled throughout his body. He was used to it. After all, he had been experiencing it since he was young. He couldn’t even remember his life without it.
However, the memory of when it started was crystal clear in Ellington’s head. It all began when his mother took him to the hospital for a routine checkup. A nurse noticed something strange in his throat and called a doctor, and just like that, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer.
He was only nine years old at the time. Even though he might be smart for his age, he never in a million trillion years thought that something like that could happen to him. It was something no child should ever have to deal with.
Ellington had to watch as his once proud mother cried, begging the doctor to do something, while his dad, who had always been so strong in his eyes, broke down in despair. Despite not understanding what his illness was, he knew his world would never be the same.
After three years of getting poked and prodded, he finally learned what his illness was. His parents sat him down and explained everything to him in a way that a child could understand. They told him he had cancer, which was a disease that was very hard to cure. And even though there wasn’t much they or the doctors could do, they would never give up trying to heal him.
The treatments were brutal and didn’t always work, but Ellington fought tooth and nail to live. He couldn’t give up. He needed to make it through this for himself and his parents.
There were so many things he wanted to accomplish in the future. Go to school, make friends, and most important of all, become a figure skater. That had been his goal since his father took him to watch it at the Olympics when he was five.
However, after five surgeries, chemo treatments, and agonizing pain, the fight drained out of him.
Ellington knew he was lucky; not everyone who had terminal cancer lived this long. But it still didn’t make the pain any easier to bear when he woke up each morning feeling like a truck had hit him or when the doctors would tell him that the cancer had spread again despite all their efforts.
The only thing that kept him going was his parents. They never gave up hope that one day he would beat the disease. Ellington knew it wasn’t their fault, but he always felt indebted to them. After all, they sunk all their money into healing him.
His parents never once gave up hope. They were always flying in different doctors from around the world to see if they had any different techniques. Thankfully, his parents were well off, which enabled them to try every viable treatment that might be able to help him.
