Maybe you can relate?

A strange wailing sound came from the guest room, pulling me out of sleep. 

I pushed away the bed covers and tiptoed across the hall to put my ear to the door.

The wailing now took on an odd sing-song quality. I turned the brass knob to open the door. Clad in white, she paced the floor. Her pale blond head tilted down, and her back was hunched over. She circled round and round.  A human Merry-Go-Round gone berserk.

“Sybil?” I asked.   My mother-in-law turned her waxy face toward me but continued pacing. 

“What's wrong?”

She moaned.

“The pain. The  pain."

“Where is it now?”

“My neck. Call the doctor."

 “It’s two a.m.  Let's go to the E.R.” 

  “I’m not going to the damned hospital.  They almost killed me last time.”  She shuffled to the bedside table and jerked open the top drawer.

“Oxycontin.”

“You stopped taking that when they gave you the Fetanyl patch."

She picked up a plastic bag filled with a dozen brown plastic medicine bottles and dumped  the contents on the bed. Rummaging through her cache, I found the bottle containing white ovals and handed her a chalky tablet.

She popped it in her mouth and swallowed. She had a narrowed esophagus but remarkably never had trouble swallowing pills. She held out her hand like a child at Halloween waiting for more candy. I shook my head. “You need to wait half an hour to let that take effect.  You've already got the morphine in your system.”  She was on the highest dose possible. She responded by pacing again.  

“Why did God do this to me?" she moaned.  She wailed. The racket she made scraped my soul.  How could I shut her up?

By day, non-stop complaining, at night, non-stop moaning and wailing.   I looked down at the bottle. What difference would another pill make? She was a tough old bird, and had, unfortunately, never overdosed.  

I needed my sleep.  I had to go to work the next morning, to leave behind her pain, her drama, for a blessed nine hours.   If I didn’t sleep, I’d do a lousy job at work. I’d be fired. Then I’d be stuck in the house with her all day.

I unscrewed the bottle cap, and eased toward her with the pill on my palm.  She plucked the fat white oval from my palm, stuck it on her tongue, and swallowed hard. She climbed back under the covers. 

“Good night,” she said.  For her, yes.

I gritted my teeth as I walked back across the hall. Lying in bed, I stared at the ceiling.  God, the woman annoyed me.  I heard the whoosh-whoosh of my heart pounding in my ears.  My blood pressure was off the chart.  I inhaled deeply, trying to calm myself.  By now, she was asleep and pain-free. Me?  Wide awake and furious.

I opened my mouth and let it escape from deep in my chest. A loud, strange wailing sound pierced the night.