I Want It Bad - Narry

Chapter Fifteen

Harry never liked hospitals. He always found them foul smelling, like a stale aroma of too many disinfectants to mask all the death and sadness. And then there were the rooms, so dull and white, and somehow everything was too clean. The nurses would put on a fake smile every time they came in to change out the bag of your IV drip, then they would ask how the pain was on a scale of 1 to 10, and if you’d say a number greater than five you’d get a shot of morphine. (But it all really depends if you got a young nurse, or an elder, who in which isn’t so easy to convince.) They were usually a disgusting amount of cheery and elated, acting as if you weren’t just another patient slowly withering away on a bed that’s hard and uncomfortable, despite how many sheets and pillows you get.

By now you probably have noticed that Harry knows hospitals far too well. He’s been in so many that he knows things the average teenager shouldn’t – unless you were a med student, of course – like when to know when your Platelet Count level was in average range, or that Aspartate Aminotransferase is originally found in the liver, myocardium, and skeletal muscles, but when in blood, it indicates organ disorders. He’s learned that, and more, from sitting in a plastic chair on the far right of the hospital room as doctors would talk about these confusing things and diagnostics and even though Harry didn’t remotely understand those long-worded terms, he nearly remembered them by heart, like lyrics to a song. Those doctors would gather with their clipboards around his sickly mother, poking and prodding at her with needles and other metal utensils. She lay there and suffered; slowly dying in a pain that couldn’t be lessened by the buckets of medicine they pumped into her veins. 

He also had his fair share in a hospital bed, usually because of his lungs. Sometimes they’d give out on him, become weak little bags inside his chest that struggled to work properly, struggled to keep him alive. (This affected Harry’s mother, Anne, greatly. She became more depressed than she already was, so of course to lessen her pain she turned to alcohol.) At first the doctors thought something was wrong with him, like lung cancer, or possible tumor developments, or some other disease settled in his lungs, and possibly else where. All the tests they ran came up negative or inconclusive, so they settled with the simple diagnosis of Asthma, since all the candidates basically pointed to that. He was prescribed loads of medication and slowly his lungs grew stronger by the years, and eventually it seemed that he grew out of being Asthmatic. (That it is until he hit his senior year of high school, of course. His Asthma came back, the horrid thing.) He didn’t really care at the time though, because by then his mother had died. It was a day before she passed away when one of the doctors had found a protein called AFP in her system, ultimately indicating it was liver cancer.

He never did trust hospitals again.

And that’s exactly why he didn’t want to go to one now in the first place, but Niall wasn’t having any of Harry’s excuses. Of course, his excuses were lies, because he didn’t want to tell Niall the truth. He didn’t think it’d be an appropriate time to say, “Hey! I used to be stuck in hospitals all my childhood because I had suck-y lungs and my mother had cancer because she was an excessive alcoholic but the doctors didn’t do a damn thing about it! Please don’t make me go through the trauma of it again!” So, he decided to keep his mouth shut and deal with it. He didn’t want to be a bother to Niall more than he already has.

***

Niall lazily flips through a magazine ever so nicely provided by the hospital in the waiting room of the ER. The room is filled with crying children and moans of pain, people holding bloody rags to their hand because they cut a finger off, and the common concussion from falling during a footie game.