Gut feeling

Henry was jerked awake at the crack of dawn by a sharp throb in his stomach. Groaning with pain, he uncovered himself and perched up on his elbows, hoping the upright posture would ease his heartburn. As he waited for the acid in his esophagus to drop, he stared blankly at a green light reflected against the wallpaper.

The light came from a pharmacist's neon sign hung right outside the window. Its concentric crosses flickered intermittently in an infinite loop, forming an ever-larger shape — off, small cross, bigger, the biggest — as if mimicking the waves of a green pond into which the crucified Jesus was thrown over and over again for eternity.

Will this pain ever stop?

Henry groaned louder as his intestines crumpled in another sharp spasm. It felt as if someone’s fist clenched his stomach, squeezing it tight.

“Are you okay?”

The other half of the duvet stirred, and Mary’s concerned expression emerged into the moonlight. Her blonde hair was disheveled from sleep, her green irises the same shade as the pharmacist's light they reflected.

“Mhm,” Henry grunted.

Mary sat up to get a better look at her husband. His face was contorted with pain, his striped pyjama soaked with sweat. The sharp neon light highlighted the wrinkles under his eyes, mercilessly adding ten years to his appearance. She ran her hand gently through his thinning widow's peak.

Henry’s groaning softened.

“Do you want me to give you a tummy massage?”

Instead of answering, he put his hand on the bulk of her belly and ran it across its curve. “It's me who should be giving you tummy massages and comforting you at times of morning sickness.”

Mary smiled. “We are way past the times of morning sickness,” she said, putting her hand on top of his. “She is due in four weeks.”

“God, how the time flew by—”

She placed her palm on his stomach and started gently rubbing it, making concentric circles with her fingers.

“Where does it hurt? Here?”

“Lower.”

“Like this?”

“More to the right.”

“Here?”

“Hmmm”, he let out a sigh of relief. “That’s the spot.”

Neither of them could tell for how long they lay there, massaging each other’s bellies. It felt as though time had stopped. Nothing could be heard but the soft buzz of the neon sign and the occasional churning of Henry’s empty stomach. His hand rested on top of her belly, making lazy circles around her navel with its thumb, while she rubbed his, her fingers dug deep enough into his abdominal cavity to relax his intestinal muscles and mitigate the searing pain at its core. Henry would remember this moment as the epitome of their love later that afternoon, before he decided to take his life to save hers.

Finally, the first sun rays crept into the room through the murky windows, and the crow landed on the neon sign to loudly caw them good morning.

“I can’t wait for this day to be over,” Henry broke the silence between them, his eyes still shut.

“When is your appointment?”

“At nine,” Henry said, then smiled wanly. “I don’t know if I hope they find something or not.”

“You probably have another ulcer, and they will give you some pills or something, just like they gave me.”

“Mhm.”

“You cannot be allergic to all of them. They must have something for you”, she said, then added playfully: “When they fix it, I can finally be the only recipient of tummy massages in this house.”

Henry tickled her belly, and she jumped up laughing.

She slapped his hand. “You’ll wake up Mathilde.”

“Or Mathew.”

“I’m sure it’s a she. I can tell,” she said with a smile. “Besides, don't you want a girl?”

Henry shrugged.

She kissed him on the mouth. “My incurable pessimist.”

Although Henry had had so many digestive exams that he had already lost count of them, he would always remember his first gastroscopy. He was nine at the time and had complained to his mother about the pain for weeks before she was eventually forced to take him to the ER when the pain became so severe that he couldn't get out of bed.

The middle-aged doctor pressed hard on various parts of his belly to locate the pain; concluding the pain was constricted to the thorax, he scheduled Henry for an examination the next week.

And what an examination that was!

Nobody had prepared him for what was coming, and he thrashed around and cried and screamed for his Mum as the doctors showed him the plastic tubes they would shove down his throat. The discomfort was so great that it seemed to shadow all the pain that had brought him here in the first place, and he regretted not pushing on through it before. He surely could have gotten up to go to school that morning, and the pain might have resolved on its own.

He found himself in a nightmare he couldn't wake up from. The rigid mouthguard stopped him from closing his mouth or biting on the pipes he felt on his tongue. He couldn't swallow, and a puddle of saliva formed at the back of his throat, threatening to choke him. His stomach had convulsions as though he was vomiting, but nothing left his mouth.

The experience hadn't changed much for Henry in the thirty years. No matter how many times he had been through it, the gastroscopy remained for him one of the worst, most uncomfortable sensations. Yet he was now much calmer than before, knowing that this nightmare would not only end soon but also give him the answers he needed.

He even sighed in relief — at least as much as he could through the mouthguard — when the grey-haired doctor told him that he had located a bleeding ulcer at the top of his stomach. Henry turned his eyes toward the screen showing live camera footage of his digestive tract and saw an ugly black smudge.

“Wait, what is that?” said the technician operating the camera.

“Where?”

“There, on the left.”

Henry felt the tube move across his tongue as the cameraman changed the angle to show what looked to him like a choppy sea surface. It didn't look remotely as bad as the ulcer.

“God, I almost missed that from all the blood,” the doctor said. “Great catch, Joe. Take a sample of that before you finish.”

For all the endoscopies he survived, Henry had never had a stomach lining sample taken from him, and a weird sensation at the pit of his stomach surprised him. It felt more like a tickle than a pinch.

The look of the bloody tubes the technician pulled out of his mouth worried him much less than this sample. He had had a bleeding ulcer before, and it had healed.

As soon as the mouthguard was removed, Henry said, “What was the last thing all about? That sample.”

The technician shuffled on his feet. “I think it's best that you consult with the doctor.”

The latex cracked loudly as he took off his blood-smeared gloves. There was a metallic clank of the bin lid as he disposed of them, and then a slam of the wooden doors when he left the room. The only sound in the room now came from the mechanical keyboard that the doctor was typing on in the nook behind his desk.

Henry got up from the examination chair and sat on the stool opposite the doctor. He waited in silence for the latter to finish his work. When the printer finished spewing out what seemed like an endless stream of papers, he asked, “Doctor, what is going on? Is everything alright?”

“Well, you have a bleeding ulcer,” the doctor said, without looking up from the paper he was signing.

“And what about that sample you took?”

“Oh, that's probably nothing.”

“Well, if it's nothing, why did you take a sample of it?”

The doctor finally looked up, his pale blue eyes meeting Henry’s brown ones. “Let me rephrase that,” he said with a smile, which only made Henry more uneasy. “It's nothing to worry about. At least not yet. We’ll send it to the lab and phone you the results tomorrow.”

“Doctor, is that… a cancer?”

“Nonsense,” the doctor replied with a wave of his hand. “We don't yet know what it is.” He passed the papers to Henry as if to dismiss him. “You'll be hearing from us tomorrow.”

The doctor got up and offered his hand to Henry, but the latter remained seated, quickly flipping through the documents.

“But it says here it has a diameter of four inches. That's huge.”

“Listen, Mr—”, the doctor consulted his computer screen. “Mr Brown. If this mass is benign, it will only take a routine operation to remove it.”

“And if it isn’t?”

“We will know tomorrow for sure,” the doctor repeated for the third time, his hand outstretched once again.

Henry accepted it numbly.

“The nurse will give you the bill.”

Henry didn't need tomorrow's results to know he had cancer. Now that he thought about it, he had known something was wrong with him for a long time. If the mass had been benign, it wouldn't have pained him. And if the cancer was operable, the doctor would have told him so.

Yes, he knew he was dying, just like Mary knew she was carrying a girl. They had both felt it in their guts. Both literally and figuratively.

When she called him after the examination, he told her he had another ulcer. They’d sworn never to lie to each other, and he wasn't going to break it now. He would tell her the full truth, but only after he was done. There was no point fidgeting about this; he had to seize the moment of despair before he lost it and chickened out. When he got back home, he crumpled the six-hundred-dollar bill into the bin, pocketed one pill from the case on Mary’s nightstand, and headed back out. Changing his mind, he returned to the bedroom and pocketed another pill. Just in case.

As he was on the tube, his mind wandered back to his first gastroscopy. He was too young to understand his diagnosis. He only remembered how much he had savoured the bun they had given him to break his 24-hour fast. It was one of the sweetest meals he’d had in his life.

Only when he got older did his mother tell him he was allergic to antacids, and that he had almost choked to death in his infancy when he took one. That's why he had to heal his ulcers with more traditional medicine, which in his impecunious household amounted to drinking lots of camomile tea.

Henry was jerked back to reality by a metallic voice on the speakerphone declaring “Hyde Park”, and he barely made it out before the train door hissed closed.

He climbed the stairs onto the street, crossed the avenue, and entered the park through the high limestone archway. He walked straight off the gravelly track into the thicket of bushes and continued to trudge through the brush, unencumbered by the thorny undergrowth. His heart thumped rapidly in his chest, and his stomach throbbed worse than ever — desperate signs of a body screaming for self-preservation.

But he persevered. He didn't stop until he reached the lake, where he sat on the wet sand and took out the pills from his pocket. He was on the shore of a tiny bay, overgrown with bushes that kept it hidden from sight.

Henry had no idea how quickly the pills might kick in, so he decided to type the note first. Suddenly, everything seemed simple — he only had two tasks left to do. Ever. And he was capable of both. Everything was so… so certain. Henry's heart rate returned to normal, and a wave of tranquility washed over him.

With each new typed word, he became more aware of his surroundings. The bracing wind was licking his skin, carrying the children’s laughter from the opposite shore. A robin chirped merrily from the bough of an elm tree. A pair of ducks squawked offshore as they elegantly glided along the choppy lake.

But Henry wasn't crying because he was going to miss those things. He cried because he would miss Mary. Their morning tummy massage in bed kept replaying in his mind; his hand stroking the womb which carried their daughter, hers massaging the crib of his undiscovered cancer. Life and death. He would have savoured their morning kiss so much more had he known it would be their last. Wiping the tears from his face, he put the pills onto his tongue.

He waited for the saliva to lubricate the passage.

And then swallowed them.

Now that everything was done, he slowly reread the message before sending it.

Dear Mary, what I'm about to tell you will cause you enormous pain, but I assure you this decision is for the best of us. All three of us. I wasn't completely honest with you when I told you they only found an ulcer this morning. The exam also revealed a large mass at the bottom of my stomach, which is most likely malignant. My father and grandfather both died from stomach cancer, and while I can't be a 100% certain, I feel that this is it for me. Even if the mass is benign, only God knows how costly the operation will be. We can barely afford the treatment in that case, let alone learn if it's cancerous. Chemotherapies drained my family’s meager fortune, and I cannot stand to watch the same fate fall upon you and Mathilde. I know you would have argued strongly against this decision if I had given you the chance, and I know you'll be furious at me for not doing so. But it is my decision, and mine alone. And I have made it because I love you. For both of you.

Yours forever,

Henry

He was just about to press send when his phone started to vibrate. Mary was calling him.

A robin had suddenly gone quiet. A child was crying from the opposite shore. The ducks were fighting over a piece of bread floating between them. The cold wind suddenly made Henry shiver.

When the ringing stopped, he returned to WhatsApp, only to see that Mary was typing a message to him.

Her message arrived shortly.

My water broke. Going to the ER. X

Henry’s tranquility bubble burst in a moment. The world spun wildly around him as he scurried through the thorny underbrush. Breathless, he reached the gravel track and left the park. He stepped in front of the yellow taxi on the roundabout, skidding it to a halt.

Twenty minutes later and twenty pounds lighter, Henry trudged into the ER of St John’s Hospital. He was gasping for air; his lungs were already giving in. Pushing his way past a couple of elderly patients, he reached the counter where the young male nurse was reorganizing papers in the binder.

“I’m in an anaphylactic shock!”

The nurse slowly raised his eyes and gave him a look of irritation, annoyed that someone interrupted his paperwork.

“I’m dying!” Henry yelled and tumbled to the floor.

The nurse rolled his eyes and reluctantly closed the binder. “I need a medic here,” he drawled. He circled the counter and squatted beside Henry, feeling his pulse. “Sir, what are you allergic to?”

“Antacids.”

“What?”

“Controlloc. Those pills against the heartburn.”

“I know what antacids are, sir. But you cannot go into anaphylactic shock from them.”

Henry's vision started to blur. Was this really the way he was going to die? Because he stumbled upon a stupid, careless nurse?

He pulled at the nurse’s coat. “Please, save me. I want to see my baby.”

Then everything went black.

Henry woke up in a hospital bed. His stomach felt like it was on fire. But that was nothing compared to the sensations that flooded him when his memory returned to him. The antacids! The baby!

“He’s come about,” someone said from the doorway. It was the same nurse.

“How long was I out?” Henry asked, sitting up.

The nurse checked his watch. “Around two and a half minutes.”

“So you gave me something? To wake up?”

The nurse shook his head. “You were never in an anaphylactic shock; you were merely in a shock.”

“What? But—”, Henty stammered.

“And it's no surprise that you were,” the nurse continued, smiling politely for the first time. “We looked you up in the database. An unknown mass has been found in your stomach here this morning, and your baby was born here not half an hour ago. You really had one hell of a day.”

Henry felt giddy again. “You don't understand. I took the antacids. Two pills.”

The nurse rolled his eyes. “You can't get an anaphylactic shock from antacids.”

“But I did as a kid. Either that or—”

The thought struck him like a freight train. His mother had been doing the same thing that he had just tried to do. They were both cutting down medical expenses for their families. With his father's chemotherapy, she’d had no heart to tell him she hadn’t had enough money for those pills. So she lied to him.

The nurse approached him and gently laid him down again. “I have some good news and some bad news. Bad news is that you got a boy, and good news is that the mass in your stomach is benign.”

Henry exploded into unbridled sobs. Both his and Mary’s gut feelings had been wrong.

“When can I see Mathew?” he asked the nurse, brushing away the tears.

“Well, the maternity ward is about a five-minute walk,” the nurse said, “but judging by your running speed, I’d say you can make it in two.”