didn’t get.” She gave herself a shake as she pulled into the driveway and parked the car.
Amie Campbell was outside, in the middle of watering the bedraggled front garden. Amie had always enjoyed gardening, and even in ill-health had never quite let her discomfort and fatigue prevent her from maintaining the carefully-planted gardens around her house. Weeds were multiplying in the front garden and some of the bushier plants needed to be trimmed back, but most importantly, everything was alive. Mia shut off the car and climbed out carefully. Her stitches had dissolved a couple of weeks before, but everything from her ribcage to her knees still felt ever so slightly unsteady, and not quite the way it had been before her pregnancy.
“Hey, Mom!” Mia closed the driver’s side door and hurried around the hood of the car to get to her mother, hoping that Amie’s presence in the garden meant that she was feeling a little better than she had been recently.
“Hey, baby girl,” Amie said, turning to watch Mia approach.
“How are you feeling today?”
Amie shrugged. “Like my joints are on fire and my nerves are doing a tango,” she replied with a sigh. “But everything needed a good dose of water, so here I am.”
“Mom, you knew I was coming over,” Mia said firmly. “You could have let me do it.”
Amie shook her head. “There’s more than enough for you to help me with. If I can do something, I feel like I should at least make the effort.”
Mia sighed, reaching out to take the hose away from her mother. “Well I’m here now, and I’m here specifically to help you around the house today,” she said, meeting her mother’s gaze. “So you can let me go ahead and get started, right?”
Amie turned the spray nozzle of the hose halfway towards Mia, raising a challenging eyebrow. “I’m almost done anyway,” she insisted. “I’ll let you get to work in a minute, but I wanted to do this part for myself.”
Mia relented, telling herself that if it made her mother feel better to get something done on her own, it was better not to try and argue her out of it.
After a few minutes, the two women went into the house. A peek in the fridge showed Mia that her mother had enough basic components to make a decent pot of soup—something she would be able to heat up and eat throughout the rest of the week. Mia set to work, gathering up laundry and sorting it for the washer, then going from room to room to empty the wastebaskets.
As she was emptying the basket beneath the desk in her late father’s study, Mia noticed the logo of one of her mother’s doctor’s offices on a sheet of paper that had been ripped through twice. “Huh? That’s weird. If it’s a bill, she shouldn’t be throwing it away.” Mia fished out the pieces and laid them on the desk, moving them around until she could work out the text on the page. Dear Mrs. Campbell, it began. I’ve consulted with several of my peers on the issue of your particular problems with finding a medication that works for you…
Mia read the letter slowly, trying to understand what it was saying and why her mother would have ripped it up and thrown it away. At this point, considering your rapid tolerances to steroids, NSAIDs, and other medications, the best course of action that I can see is chemotherapy. I’m concerned that if we don’t treat your disease aggressively, we will have to begin preparing for organ failure a lot faster than we normally would.
As she came to the end of the letter, asking that Amie contact the office within the next two weeks if she wanted to schedule her treatment, Mia felt anger flare up inside of her. Why had her mother hidden this? She had been so worried that nothing seemed to be helping her mother’s condition for more than a few weeks at a time—and here