Amniocentesis

My mother's hands are so warm. And holding her hand this far out to the side, with my wrist on her lap, hurts my shoulder blade where I slept wrong last night. Our eyes bore into the man in front of us, devouring his every word. We hang on every sigh and slight glance. His hands are aged and shaky, stiff so that they can hardly grasp a pen and I think "maybe that's why doctors have such terrible handwriting." The nurse brings in a chair for my father, his stretched out sweater a mass of pine green in the beige office. The doctor punctuates his words with his scribbling, and three pairs of eyes anxiously check every motion of his pen, as if he might be saying one thing but writing another.

"The prognosis is good" but my only thoughts are that there should be no prognosis, that nothing should be wrong with my mother again. My hands itch they are so warm, and I know making my legs jump is just a defense mechanism but I really need something to pick me up right now. We speculate on how the doctor who ran the biopsy got it wrong, how he could mutter delightedly that it was benign only to have this other man call day and night. And of course we told everyone with hugs and raised glasses that it was all ok.

I could kill for something cold to put on my hands, for something to drink, for a way out of the next few minutes. But the doctor stretches his letters across the page, and they fall slowly with his shaky fingers drawing out the ink.

Everything takes forever here, especially the next word to form on paper or in the doctor's mouth. We three are moving fast, jittery, jumping. But he is languid, moving slowly like this cancer that they've found and codified in my mother's chest.

~AEW~