Four Painful Years

>Check for the cameras and steal your meds.

No! No no no no NO! It's out of the question!

Your pain meds cost just slightly over $100 a bottle. Do you know what the max sentence for theft exceeding $100 is in your state? A year! And something like 6,000 bucks in fines! That's a fourth of your life and a third of your savings! Relief is worth a lot to you, but not that much!

Pick up a newspaper and check out what's going on with the world.
Maybe pick up some hard candy to befriend that socially awkward old person.

Instead of acting like an insane person, you opt to look for something to occupy your time with. You find a newspaper on the counter and casually meander through the news section.

Pretty much everything you heard on the radio is laid out for you in static black and white, most likely because the guys at the station you listen to get all their news from the paper. There's that headline again. "Bridgeview area Residents continue to Disappear." Wow. Are you guys trying to start a panic? How about something a little more respectful to those that have gone missing instead of this transparent sensationalist horsecrap?

You suppose you have a bias. When you were first diagnosed with a terminal illness, the press wouldn't leave you or your father alone. Relentless interviews and photoshoots and talk show stupidity, sometimes four days a week. You were a little bundle of pity and tears for people to obsess over, and while you did receive plenty of donations in the form of money and toys from sympathetic supporters, all you ever really wanted was time with your family, especially with your life expectancy in constant flux with every new report. One day, when you were a teenager, reporters discovered the amount of time you had left, despite Dad's emphatic insistence that the specifics of your death be kept secret. There was a huge tidal wave of well wishes and tearfully written articles... and then silence. No support for your father, no awareness groups showing up at your door with alternative treatments, nothing. Now that everyone knew when you were going to die, you were no longer needed... The sideshow freak had served her purpose.

One day soon, the mass will grow a size too large, and you will die. Someone will recognize your name, and your picture will be paraded around the internet for all to see. For a whopping forty-eight hours people will know you as "that girl that had a brain tumor that died recently," and will shake their heads in feigned disappointment before humanity moves on and forgets you ever existed. Thanks, tabloid journalism.

You sigh and wipe a stray tear from your cheek. You hate that your depression can just sneak up on you like that. You quickly find and finish the newspaper's crossword to distract yourself, and even resort to reading your dumbass horoscope.

VIRGO - Aug 23rd - Sep 22nd
"True love is on the horizon, you need only wait a little while longer! Of course, while good things come to those who wait, the gift of love is never free. You may suffer unimaginably for your love. But once you do, it is a love that will stand the test of time!"
- Mama Goomer, your humble Starseer

Well that was a gigantic waste of time. Where the hell is the pharmacist? Are his breaks always this long?

You kick something across the floor by accident. A bottle of pills. Where did that come from?

Wait a sec, there's a whole whack of fallen pill bottles! It looks like they fell off of a shelf behind the counter.