I'm searching for a way forward while holding onto the ideas that I've had. This is truly a discovery draft but meets my daily requirement. Note that I never write straight through a story incrementally so the very first post for this story was, "I hate this place." But to read it somewhat in order: the first section here, When did it begin, I hate this place, the second section here. Confusing, huh? And if the idea continues to appear to have merit, each small segment would probably be expanded into a chapter. Its a rather strange veiw into the creative mind, perhaps.
*****
Driving home on a sunny day in early fall--one of those perfectly glorious days when the weather is exceedingly perfect--Grace felt her physical misery and wondered again, as she had so many times, what could be causing it. She ran her bitter-tasting tongue over her dry, rubbery lips and questioned how it could happen that her lips were chapped when the heater hadn't even been turned on yet. The symptoms mystified her--and her doctor.
For one, when she had these spells, her urine would take on a hue not unlike ethanol--red-orange and heavy. Culturing it turned up nothing, no infection, no bacteria. And yet, mysteriously, the antibiotic did seem to work. Logic said that it couldn't. Grace remembered the conversation with the nurse:
"Your culture was negative, but doctor says to go ahead and take the antibiotic. That's all you need."
Grace paused as questions raced through her mind, confused, she asked again, "What do you mean, it was negative?"
"You don't have an infection."
It seemed as though the nurse's words stopped dead before reaching her understanding. Was it possible? The pain and the blood had stopped the day she began the antibiotics. It was the same old story, test after test came out negative. She'd gone through the barium radiological proceedure [find out name of test]. She'd suffered one blood workup and all came back good--not counting a slightly high cholesterol ratio [?].
All through the fall and into winter the symptoms increased. The other set of symptoms took center stage for a while. For a woman who hated salt, salt seemed to be oozing out of her pores. Her lips tasted salty and the microhairs around her lips seemed to become caked with salt crystals. With the salt came cold sweats that started at the roots of her hair and flowed down through her body. She couldn't even figure out where all that salt could come from. The most frightening thing about this set of symptoms was that when she rested sometimes her nerves would jerk spasmodically and the jerks could be so hard that twice she suffered back injuries from them. At night, she would drool and sometimes it felt as though spittle was gathering at the corners of her mouth and she would have to wipe it away--whereas she'd never been a drooler. Terrified, she never spoke to the doctor about these symptoms in hopes that they would just go away. Her greatest fear was the possible onset of multiple schlerosis. If that was the case, the diagnosis would come too soon, she thought.
*****
(flash forward to another chapter)
Hurrying to get her teeth brushed before leaving for church, Grace took a swig of mouthwash. It burned. She spit it out and rushed to rinse her mouth. Several handfuls of water didn't seem to stop the burning sensation. She grabbed a toothbrush and applied a squirt of toothpaste and began brushing her teeth vigorously. Half way through her bottom teeth, she suddenly saw she'd grabbed her son's toothbrush. As though she could undo the mistake, she stopped brushing and rinsed it thouroughly, placing it back in the toothbrush holder. Her own toothbrush was in the other bathroom. She'd forgotten. But really, she thought, what good would brushing do, anyway. She rinsed again.
After drying her mouth she saw the bottle of blue mouthwash on the vanity. Her first thought was of her son--what if he used it? She held it up to the light and noted, with a grimmace, that it was only half as blue as it ought to have been. Instinctively she dumped it. The blue liquid raced down the drain. It all happened so quickly that Grace hadn't ever thought of saving it. She needed evidence--just in case.
On her way out the door, as she donned her green jacket, she cooly said to her husband, "That's it. I warned you. I said just one more time and I would leave. Thanks for the mouthwash!" And she grabbed the doornob and hurried out without giving him a chance to respond--or not.
Later, while sitting in the church, she felt the burning creep up into her left nostril--on the side she had not brushed. The creep went up, buring her eye. The burning felt as though it would cause her nose to bleed. Just in case, she wiped the bottom of her nose when she felt a hint of dampness gathering there. 'I'm such a fool!' she thought. 'To think I let him get me again.'
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