The Beef Mom

"Grace take pain medicine, question?" 

"No, I don't need it," Grace replies, in dire need of pain medicine. His hip has been flaring, an old injury from being tackled into the ground when he was sent to space, and the pain is relentless. Though it might have started as negligibly, now, it's an intense, deep ache that hurts no matter what he does. Moving hurts. Lying down hurts. Sitting and standing are out of the question. It's definitely disrupting his ability to clean out the engines from the taumoeba breach. 

"Don't lie to me. Grace squirming," Rocky points out. "And making pain noise. Heartbeat and breathing are fast."

"I only have so much medicine. I don't want to waste it."

"Medicine is for severe pain. You are in severe pain. Is not waste to use medicine for intended use."

"The pain could be worse. Theoretically." 

"You can't move. Rocky not see how pain could be worse."

"Humans can withstand, like, a lot of pain. There's a huge gap between 'can't work' and 'intolerable.'" Rocky trills anxiously. "This isn't going to kill me or anything. It's just uncomfortable."

"Not worried that Grace will die. Not more than normal. Rocky worried that you're suffering and not doing anything about it." 

"I'm doing stuff about it," Grace defends. "I've been stretching. That's all you really can do. Besides, you don't like when I take meds. I get stupid." 

"Is preferable to you feeling pain." 

"There's worse pain than this, Rock, and if we're in it for the long haul, I could need it later. The meds won't fix it, anyway. Just take it away for a few hours."

Rocky feels frustrated, but has no choice but to accept Grace's decision. What's he going to do, force it down his digestion tube?

"Fine. Then you stretch again. Sitting long time is making pain worse." 

"I'm working!" he objects. Then, he doubles back. "Or, trying to." 

With a sigh of resignation, he stands from the desk in the lab, wincing as the twisting and rising motion both aggravate his back, and sits on the floor. Rocky encourages him as he stretches--or, as Grace calls it, nagging. He can't help it if Grace needs extra instructions, sometimes. Rocky rolls around in his ball helpfully as Grace lays in different positions. His legs go up and down and side to side, every motion associated with visceral groaning. After 15 minutes or so, Grace decides that's all the stretching he can take for now and resumes his position at his desk. 

The pain gets worse. He can't sleep because he can't find a comfortable position that doesn't push or pull his painful joints. Scraping the engines is agony, one he doesn't even bother to try to hide anymore because it's so obvious. Through all of it, he refuses to take pain medicine for fear of not having it later, when he needs it. He explains that often, starvation causes severe pain, more severe than even this, and he doesn't want to run out and not have it when he needs it most. That hurts to hear. It's hard enough to watch Grace in this amount of pain. Rocky can't imagine more. 

While Grace tries to work through the next several days, Rocky can tell it's not easy. He's slow, and not in the way he is when he doesn't want to do something, or when he goes too long between sleeps and gets clumsy. Every movement is agonizing. He's walking at a strange angle, favoring one leg, which makes the pain even worse in the long run. He keeps reassuring Rocky that the intensity will die down after a few days of stretching and resting as much as he can, but it's doing the opposite. 

When he wakes on the fifth day of pain, after tossing and turning all night trying to find a tolerable position, he's exhausted, sore, and grumpy. Well, maybe grumpy isn't the right word for it. It's more like... frustrated. Sad, even. It's wearing him down. HHuman pain i a persistence predator, stalking slowly behind him until he's too worn down to fight back. Every night, he goes to bed dreading both sleeping and waking up the next day. And Rocky has absolutely no idea how to make it better. 

"Good morning, Grace," Rocky greets, just as he does every day. That's not so much a thing on Erid, since a day is only about 5 Earth hours long and most of the time, you sleep through more than one of them, but the fact that humans greet each other like that is cute, he thinks. He likes it. A special greeting based on where the sun is? Adorable. 

"Hey, Rocky," he replies. Grace has several morning tones. There's cranky stayed up too late, and cheery I have a big day ahead of me, and stupid I slept too deeply and barely know who I am. This tone is different. It's strained and forced. 

"Grace sleep okay? Move a lot, wake up a lot." 

"How do you know I woke up a lot?"

"Heartbeat change." 

"Hm." He sits up halfway, then stops with a yelp. Rocky trills in shock, but Grace shakes his head. "Sorry, I'm fine. Just--pain. I think I slept wrong."

"Everything is wrong, lately. You sleep wrong, move wrong, sit wrong. Hurts all the time. Worse every day."

Grace sighs. "It's just stiff. It'll loosen up once I move around a bit."

Rocky would trust Grace with his life. Just... maybe not with Grace's life. Grace is a lot less careful with that. He stands gingerly, one steadying hand never leaving the bed as he eases himself down. 

"See? Fine."

"Grace definition of 'fine' is bad. Either Grace lying, or I need new word."

"I'm... okay. It hurts. But I can't let it stop me from working, Rock. We don't have time. I need to clean out the engines."

"How can you do that if pain is this bad, question?" 

"I was a teacher on Earth. I can push through anything."

Rocky isn't quite sure what he means by that, but he's got no real context to argue with him, so he decides to let it go and follow Grace's lead.

He changes his clothes slowly, and shoves his feet into his slippers rather than donning socks and shoes. Something he will supposedly do after his back is a little more mobile, he promises. It takes him a long time to get ready, and he eats breakfast slowly. It doesn't escape Rocky's notice that he does cave and take painkillers. Not the strong kind that make him stupid--something he calls "over the counter"--but it's something, a silent admission that he's faking holding it together.

"If taumoeba cleaning too much for today..." 

"No," he says too quickly. "I've got it."

He has not, in fact, got it. Not half an hour into scraping the engine walls, he turns his torso slightly to the left to reach a particularly tough spot and gasps, dropping to his knees. 

"Grace!" Rocky shifts his weight between three of his feet while clicking his claws. "Grace injured!" 

"Ow," Grace hisses through clenched teeth. He's lying flat on his back, perfectly still. "That really hurt." 

"Come back inside ship. Engines can wait. You need pain medicine."

"I..." he wants to argue, wants it not to be true, but he can't, because it is. "Okay. Gimme a sec." 

It's many seconds before Grace is able to find the courage to angle himself upright, and even more before he finds it in him to stand, but he drags himself back inside and sits heavily on the first available seat, his desk in the lab. He leans his head back tiredly and breathes. 

"Grace?"

"I'm okay," he replies. "Sorry. I'm fine." 

"You need see Armando. Stretching and resting not enough. You need medicine." 

"I think you're right," he admits. "Problem is, pain meds aren't going to solve anything. If I take them and then clean the engines, I'm just going to hurt myself worse because I can't feel it." 

"How would injury be fixed on Earth?"

"Depends on what the root problem is, but we can't really know that without scans, which we can't do here. It could be physical therapy, could be surgery. The fact that stretching doesn't help isn't reassuring."

"Maybe Armando has answer for Grace. You should have robot check out body."

"Don't... phrase it like that," Grace requests. "But okay. Doesn't hurt to ask."

Grace follows him to the dormitory, where Armando does some strange movements, poking and prodding Grace in ways that elicit anything from zero reaction to grunts of pain. 

"Examination concludes that likely cause of injury is sacroiliac joint instability and related inflammation." 

"Is bad?" Rocky asks. Grace shrugs. 

"Doesn't feel good. Mary, how do we treat it?"

"There are specialized stretches you can perform, along with strengthening exercises," she replies. 

"That'll take weeks. I need to be functional, like, yesterday."

"Oral corticosteroids may decrease the swelling and relieve the pain."

"That," he agrees. "Yes, let's do that one."

"Is pain medicine?" 

"No, it's different. They reduce inflammation, which helps the pain longer term. It's not a permanent fix, but it'll last longer than the pain med band-aid." 

Rocky doesn't know what a band-aid is, but this sounds like good news, and Grace seems excited, so he celebrates, too. Grace swallows several pills that Armando dispenses and lies back against the bed. 

"It's going to take a few days, but this should help." 

"Is good!" Rocky cheers. "Grace rest now." 

"Sounds like a plan. Movie time?"

Rocky chirps. "Movie time."