It started with back pain…

Disclaimer: this is from a writing class, edited versions might show up later.

“It started with back pain.”

How many times have I started with that line? How many times have I thought it? How many times did I fight with the doctors- no, you’re wrong, it’s just a pulled muscle!

“No,” they said again and again, quiet and reserved when my Earth was shattering like plate glass, “he has back pain because he has tumors on his spine. He has tumors on his spine. He has tumors on his bones making compression fractures on his spine. He has tumors on his abdomen, they aren’t ulcers.”

“They’re just ulcers,” I fight, determined to be told something else. It was just back pain from a muscle sprain.

Two weeks before I was circling the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner while the kids were in bed and he lay on his back on the acorn-squash colored linoleum.

“Ugh,” he groaned in pain, trying to stretch out while I stepped around him. “Baby, is this how you felt when you were pregnant?”

I laughed and started wiping down the island we had bought from Ikea- a cool cupboard to store our drink-ware with a cutting board on top and wheels to make it move around. “Oh, for sure,” I said. I’d already told him I would treat him like a pregnant woman, bolstering him with his hated (and my favored) couch throw pillows. I still had the big pillow shaped like a C, he could use that if he wanted!

“Baby, why would you let me do that to you again?” he lamented, shifting again on the floor.

“Do what?” I asked.

“Get you pregnant! I mean, the first time you didn’t know, but the second time you did! This is awful.”

“You’re welcome,” I said, finishing with the cutting board and moving to the sink to wash dishes.

Now they’re telling me it wasn’t just back pain. And he wouldn’t get better. This wouldn’t end the way we wanted. We wouldn’t grow old together. But we aged together. In a year we grew ages older than we started. And when I tell my kids more detail about what happened, I’ll try to leave out how anxious I get when I have back pain. And repeat that we ran the tests, it’s nothing they can get.

A freak accident. A run of bad luck. A freaking shit show of a day. And it started with back pain.