candy striper :: l.h.

six » so cold

;

i felt like i couldn't breathe

my aching body fell to the floor

it's so quiet here, and i feel so cold

this house no longer feels like home.

- so cold ; ben cocks ft. nikisha reyes pile

fallon.

"She still hasn't changed her mind?"

I shook my head even though Adrianne couldn't exactly see me over the phone, "No. I'd be such a priss to demand her to change her mind, anyway. She's already paying for my tuition next year, you know? Like, in reality, a job's really the only practical way for me to earn money for this trip."

"Practicality comes with a price though," Adri sighed from the other end of her line, and I imagined that with the loud shuffling I heard, she was shifting and rolling around in her bed. "You're working in a hospital, Fal, it's gonna be a while before you've even worked up five hundred dollars, let alone nearly a thousand."

I twisted my lips to one corner. This trip to Rome was something Adri and I had been fantasizing about for a while already, and I knew it meant a lot to her. "I'm going to do the best I can, okay?"

She hummed on the other end of the line, "You're still up for diner food with Cal and I later, right? At midnight?"

"Right. If I manage to finish all my work before then," I told her. As much as I genuinely loved going out for food with Adrianne and her stepbrother Calum at midnight, I'd just finished running eleven errands for Mom around the hospital and for all I knew, she might have a few more tasks for me to do.

After promising to call Adrianne once I'd wrapped everything at the hospital up, I slid my phone back into the back pocket of my shorts and followed the overhead arrows on the ceiling leading back to the LTC unit's lobby, turning my head every now and then in hopes that I may just catch sight of my Mom.

The moment that I'd turned around and started to make my way back to Luke's room after dropping Michael off, my Mom had automatically popped up and shoved a list of errands to run and meds to deliver into my hands, claiming that she couldn't tick the tasks off herself since she had a last minute meeting to attend.

I'd been working on checking off each task for about four hours now, which does sound pretty long, but in all fairness, Mrs. Jekensky from the unit below took a solid hour and a half to tell me all about her arthritis-disease story from beginning to present (I almost fell asleep somewhere around the middle where she was talking about her grandchildren trying to find a dating site for elderly women with chronic diseases, since Match.com just wasn't exactly cutting it). Point is, within the past four hours, I've gotten to meet a ton of the patients here - from the elderly, to teens, to kids - from patients with Alzheimers, to Gastroparesis, to Diabetes, to other cancer patients like Luke and Michael.