An in-class for my writing elective, in which we were instructed to write about a patient as if he were the protagonist in a story:

He paused, but only for a moment, as he stacked five cans of Coca-Cola on the table next to his dinner.  There was a time when he would have come home from the gym, covered with sweat and blazing from the glow of a personal weightlifting record broken, and eaten carefully: lean protein, vegetables.  He would have driven home in the beat-up but powerful car he was no longer allowed to drive after the seizure.  He would have come home to pour a bowl of water for his dog, an enormous mutt with a bite missing from its left ear.  He no longer did that when he came home; the dog was long gone, and he had no home to come to.

Before he moved out, one month too many of rent unpaid, he had cast a last look at himself in the mirror previously overgrown by boxes and cast-off clothes.  His once full hair was long, thin, and greasy–he stuffed it under a faded Red Sox cap.  His proud barrel chest that once gleamed as he ran shirtless now sloped down into a sagging belly barely contained by an oversized gray t-shirt.  His legs buckled slightly from the pain in his spine, always there since the accident, but sometimes worse.

He left the house behind, and did not go to work, because that too was over.  He was still waiting for the disability payments that might have kept him a little longer from being homeless.  A grown man, a strong man, a working man–he thought that for the first time in his life he would sit down on the ground and just cry.  Or he could drink.  Or maybe he could find some quiet place, under a sheltering tree on a grassy hill.  He could take all the pain pills left in the prescription bottles in his backpack, and hope that they would be enough to end the life he still could not believe was now his.