When We're Gone

chapter two

Ethan and I were watching television, Family Fued, on January seventeenth, 2019. When Ethan stood up to grab me a glass of water per my request. He stood up and stopped for a second holding onto the couch, "Are you okay?" ,I said trying to hide the worry in my voice. Ethan then let out this God awful cough, and he didnt stop coughing until the blood came out of his mouth and onto the floor. "Ethan." I said quietly. He looked at me with such fear in his eyes, and said,"Lilith..."
That's when it al started Ethan then started to have chest pains, the cough only got worse to were it was more of a hack. He stopped eating all together, explaining how he lost forty pounds. It had been weeks since he first coughed blood up, now it was every hour. I knew something was wrong, but I sure hoped it was just a cold or something. I dont know. We didn't have the money to pay for all this, whatever it was. Ethan is more important than money though, so several weeks of debate, we decided to go to a hospital. That hospital, oh God do I remember those smells and the floor tiling, how it was so cracked. While we were waiting to be called back I saw this tiny little blood stain on the floor. It was faded, almost gone. It was definitely blood though. It was shaped like a cloud sort of. I rubbed my foot over it and just as I was about to pull my foot back off the spot I heard, "Ethan Taylor." Me and Ethan started at eachother before getting up from our seats and nervously walking toward the nurse who just called out my husband's name. While all of this was happening Ethan never stopped coughing, I had to hold him up most the way due to him being so weak and tired all the time. He could barley stand on his own, I had so much regret in that moment. Why didn't I take him sooner? Ethan stopped when we met the nurse at the door, a short, chocolate skinned woman with curly brown hair that stopped just at her hips.
She led us to our room, room number four. Ethan sat on the hospital bed, the ones that have that see through almost, crinkly paper laying on top of them. Yeah, that kind of bed. We both knew how bad the results where going to be. For Ethan had been feeling bad for weeks and it was extreme symptoms, fever, coughing up bood, I mean the man lost forty pounds. He was already a skinny guy, but now he looked almost deathly. The nurse came back in and asked us about Ethan and his symptoms, she ran some blood test and did an X-ray to see if there were any tumors in his body.
We knew he was sick just not how sick. Nothing could prepare us for what would happen next.