Yep, better it was a figment of her imagination, a bit of spoiled gruel.

If the shadow wanted to stay in the kitchen, let it. She had other things to worry about. Like getting her wrist back in place. She grabbed it with her good hand and gave a slight twist. There came a tiny, muted crack, and all the bones were back where they belonged.

“That’s better,” she said to Buttons, her old rescue dog and constant companion. He lay beside the daybed, wheezing doggie snores. She let her hand slip over the daybed, fingertips grazing his head. At least with Buttons, she was never alone. A weak smile curled Kate’s lips. She stared at the ceiling, consciously avoiding the kitchen.

She’d never even known what an autoimmune disease was until she was told she had one. Thinking she’d passed the ability to be shocked, she was both flabbergasted and devastated when she was diagnosed several years later with a second, more damaging disease. The rare Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and more common but terrifying lupus were a hell of a one-two punch. The old Kate who didn’t suffer from unbearable fatigue, swelling, degenerating eyesight, digestive system breakdowns, heart problems, and a host of other horridness was a distant and ever-fading memory. Most days, it felt like she’d always been this way – broken, hurting, and scared.

Nothing in the vast array of pills on Kate’s nightstand would make it all go away. With Ehlers and lupus, there were no cures. At best, the pills dulled the pain, controlled flare-ups, and in some cases made her feel even worse.

Kate checked the pill schedule she’d created on her tablet. It was time for one of her nerve blockers. There was her whole home pharmacy in all its bullet-pointed glory: fentanyl (an uber dangerous patch that she changed every three days and was killing people with alarming frequency), Neurontin, gabapentin, Percocet, Ultram, prednisone, and Tagamet for her stomach, which had been utterly demolished by the pills themselves. Monthly checkups were required to measure the damage the pills were doing to her liver and kidneys, heart and pancreas.

One pill over the line…

Andrew kept trying to get her to migrate her pills into one of those big plastic holders, the ones with a day of the week printed on each slot. But the only one that would be large enough to support her cache of pharmaceuticals could double as an end table if you attached some legs to it. The sheer size of it depressed the hell out of her. And it made her feel like a feeble, old lady.

Instead, she dumped her assortment of pills in a mason jar. She’d even tied a red-and-white checkered bow around the rim to make it pretty. Martha Stewart would have approved.