Chapter 1: The Sterile Cage
The air in our house didn’t smell like home anymore. It smelled of chlorhexidine, despair, and the sweet, cloying rot of a body shutting down.
I sat in the armchair in the corner of the living room, a medical journal open on my lap, though the words swam before my tired eyes. The hum of the oxygen concentrator was the heartbeat of our existence now—a rhythmic whoosh-click, whoosh-click that measured the shrinking timeline of my mother’s life.
Martha lay in the hospital bed we had rented and shoved into the center of the room. She was a husk. The vibrant woman who had raised me alone on a pharmacist’s salary was gone, replaced by this skeletal figure with translucent skin and breath that rattled like dry leaves in a gutter. The doctors called it Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis, combined with rapid-onset systemic failure. I called it a math problem I couldn’t solve.
I was a man of science. I trusted data, dosages, and double-blind studies. I believed that the universe was a machine, and if you pulled the right levers—if you administered the correct milligrams of prednisone and pirfenidone—you could fix the gears.
But the gears were stripping. And I was helpless.
“David,” a soft voice came from the kitchen doorway.
