tdr_backup | Monthly Torment: Week Two

~ The headaches and the occasional sick stomach get uglier as time passes, as things in Hell are want to do. When the first shades begin coughing up blood everyone's mind immediately jumps to a collective oh great.

But that part, the bloody part, it doesn't come on quickly enough to be foreseeable. What comes first is the painful tickle in everyone's throats, the coughing that only serves to aggravate it until throats are left feeling inflamed and anyone with a friend is asking if they might peek in and see if it looks as bad as it feels. Universal disease, it seems, makes everyone a doctor. Mouths and lips and gums become tender and sore and the headaches never quit. It's only later, after people are starting to complain about their sore throats that their bodies give them something real to complain about.

And that's when the blood starts. First it's only in the coughing, flecks of it appearing in cupped hands, but soon the unsettled stomachs join the game. When nausea takes over and people duck to empty their stomachs, that too is tinted red.
A sore throat is a symptom that is nearly universally experienced, by the old and the young and the rich and the poor. No matter what life was like before ending up down here, chances are every single person has spent a few days being in pain when they swallowed. But when hair starts to fall out, coming out in bigger and bigger clumps when they run their fingers through their hair and when blood turns up in vomit, everyone knows that this is much more than anything a cough drop and some tea can sooth. ~