Nutshell

Down in a Hole

First came the finger pain. Then the toe pain. Then the near-death experience. Then the stomachache. As the day went on, Lily's misfortunes refused to end.

After her enjoyable hike with Gumi, Lily banged her knee when trying to get back into the car. She then banged that same knee into the dashboard when trying to sit down. At dinner, she bit down on her food too hard and chipped a tooth. When she got in the shower afterwards, she came very close to losing her balance and slipping. At last, she had a terrible headache by the time she checked in for the night.

"The universe is out to get me," Lily sighed in defeat.

The rockstar could not shake the thought of Sonika's friend Ann. What terrible disease would cause her fingers to feel so strange? Part of her wanted to know, but she also knew that seeking the answers would only make her worry more. She regretted asking Sonika about it in the first place, so it did not make sense for her to seek more disconcerting information.

Logic did not stop Lily from acting. By the time she was able to settle in her bedroom, her laptop became the center of her attention. As she removed it from the nightstand she kept it on, she started to second-guess herself.

"Do I really want to do this?"

The pained young woman fully understood the consequences that could arise from what she was about to do. As a matter of fact, it was not the question of which disease she had that motivated her. Deep down, she wanted relief. She hoped that by seeking answers, she would find some grain of information that would tell her she was going to be okay.

"Maybe fingers just randomly hurt sometimes," she kept telling herself.

In spite of her reconsiderations, Lily sat up in her bed and placed the laptop on her lap. After booting it up, she felt anticipation running through her at an increasing speed. The longer it took for her to open the internet, the more all her negative thoughts would rot inside her. She could not let the subject go unresearched.

Once she had an internet browser opened on her monitor, she ran her fingers across the tiny keyboard to type something in. Upon searching "finger and toe pain," an endless slew of results hit Lily all at once. From one glimpse at the screen, Lily saw the names of several diseases that concerned her. However, they were mixed in with several other conditions that were easily treatable. She needed to dig deeper if she wanted to know what she had.

One after the other, Lily clicked through articles about health. She opened several different tabs in order to check some of the more troubling diseases she read about. As expected, many of them could lead to possible death.

After closing in on the conditions that worried her the most, Lily read through the symptoms for each of them. Almost all of them included headaches and stomachaches along with paresthesia. For the most significant ones, she went through the symptoms one at a time and related each of them to herself.

"Hunger? I have been a little extra hungry lately," Lily thought as she scrolled through a health site. "Easy bruising? I have been getting hurt a lot more than usual. Irritability? No question about that one. Loss of balance? You know, now that you mention it..."

The rockstar had gone down a dark path of which she could not return. Just as Sonika suggested, the hardly noticeable pains she felt were a sign of something much more damaging. Her heart started to race and increasingly pounded through her chest with every new page she opened up. Even if every last word slapped her with dread, she could not stop reading.

Even through all the terrible things she read, Lily did not lose the possibility of hope. She thought she would be able to find a harmless condition with all the symptoms she exhibited. Much to her misfortune, the less serious ailments were far more uncommon than the lethal ones. That did not stop a few rare ones from scaring Lily too, though.