The crippled old veteran sits in a chair at the VA hospital, still broken, not only on the outside, but on the inside.  It's been a year already, and nothing's really changed.

The man deals with ongoing pain that courses through his mangled leg; it eats at his mind like a cancerous tumor.  He tries to relieve the pain with medication, but it doesn't even touch it.  He's still hurting as much as he was before he even took the drugs.

The VA continues to give him the runaround.  They send him to doctor to doctor, without really giving regard to checking his medical history; they barely give it a second glance.  He is used to long delays, sitting around for hours in a waiting room, wondering what bovine fodder they are going to feed him next.

One year already since the last Veteran's Day, and nobody's even bothered to pay the old man a visit.  Not even his own children, his grandchildren.  He wonders if they even think of him; they surely don't act like it:  they never call him, never pay him a visit.  He sees other veterans getting people to come see them; inside, his feelings are torn because he knows that nobody seems to care for him. 

It makes him cry.

Cry.  That's all the old man seems to do.  Life has kicked him to the curb in the worst way.  His wife is dead, his children, grown, don't even seem to acknowledge the fact that he's still alive, he has never met his grandchildren (nor does he know what they look like), he lives in a veteran's hospital, he is disabled, nearly homeless.  What little money he does get goes to bills; what's leftover isn't even enough to feed a family of rats, he grumbles to himself.

He keeps up with the news by way of a battered old television set.  He doesn't like what he sees, hears.  Veterans benefits still getting slashed, a new president, new worries for a beleagured nation, other atrocities going on in the world, one disaster after another.  At the thought of it all, he lowers his head, cries yet again.

The man sits there, gripping his crutches tightly, wondering what he should do.  He feels he isn't worthy enough to keep on living.  He's tried to pray to God, has given that up, because it's like even God doesn't care for him.  He has no hope, no future.  Suicide still seems like a viable option; life has gotta be better than this, he thinks glumly to himself.

He sits back in his chair, tries to contemplate a way to relieve the gnawing pain, the lonliness, the uncertainty of what may lie ahead for him. 

~To be continued.~