Heavenly Body | J. Hale

21| Tears And Chaos

It's been a week. It has been exactly seven days since Orion told his mother about the pain in his stomach. In the span of those days, his entire world had flipped upside down.

He had made his mother aware of the pain that his stomach was in, causing her to urgently take him to the hospital. She was freaking out, rambling to him, saying that he should have let her know sooner. Orion brushed her complaint off, letting her know that the pain wasn't a big deal.

He was wrong-so very wrong. The doctor first felt his stomach, and in that moment, they knew something wasn't right. It was swollen.

They ran test after test. Some were invasive, while others were not so much. He always hated hospitals and doctors, causing him unnecessary anxiety; this just made it all worse. The tests would take up his days; he hadn't even gone to school.

Though that wasn't completely abnormal, he had missed school quite often. Not enough to hurt his grades or stop him from graduating, but still, it was more than any other kid at his school, beside Bella.

Since that night, he knows he's changed, and other people have picked up on it too. His mother noticed it before he did. She noticed the dark cloud that was latched onto him, following him everywhere he went, draining him. She always had the ability to sense things; was it because of her motherly instincts or something more? He'll never know.

It was on the fourth day that the results of the tests came back, and he was able to finally get diagnosed. Though it was not the diagnosis he was expecting, it was cancer, the doctors said. Stomach cancer, to be more specific.

The news broke him and tore him apart, but he wasn't surprised. Stomach cancer was something that ran in his family; he just didn't think it would be his to inherit next. That was the deal with Orion; he would rather live in denial and delusion than acknowledge that his life was slowly turning to shit.

His grandmother had it. Cancer was a cruel and nasty thing. It made her weak; it changed her, and he didn't want that for himself; he didn't want to completely lose himself.

The day was emotional for both him and his mother. It was spent with him sobbing in his mother's arms while she held him, comforting him, her tears dripping onto his hair. They stayed like that for hours.

The doctor had informed them that surgery was completely off the table, with the cancer being too aggressive to extract without causing internal damage. The other option left was chemotherapy.

At their suggestion of chemotherapy, Orion winced. He remembered how painful chemotherapy was for her, and not just physically either. It had stripped her of everything she was, leaving her weak. It wasn't something that Orion wanted to go through.

Orion knew that the chances of his living a longer life were slim even if he were to do the chemotherapy. He knew that the cancer would overtake him and gain control over him; he knew it deep down in his soul.

He talked to his mother before deciding against it. She was hesitant at first; if there was a possibility of this helping her son, she wanted him to take it. But when she thinks back to her mother and the suffering she endured while on chemotherapy, she knows it wouldn't be worth it to see her kid like that.