SHORT STORY – SORE THROAT AND ULTRASOUND: WHEN THREE DAYS FEEL LIKE A SENTENCE
SORE THROAT AND ULTRASOUND: WHEN THREE DAYS FEEL LIKE A SENTENCE
Automatic traslation from the original story in Spanish. Not checked manually
Julián woke up on a Monday morning with a severe sore throat. It wasn’t just some minor discomfort—the kind that can be fixed with a herbal tea, a lozenge, and the hope that your body will quietly take care of itself. No, this was something else entirely. It hurt to swallow, to speak, and—quite possibly—even to think.
After an uncomfortable night, deciding that the situation had crossed the line from tolerable to unbearable, he made an appointment with his doctor.
During the consultation, the doctor listened calmly, examined his throat, felt his neck, and then fell silent for a few seconds. That brief pause was enough to set Julián’s imagination into overdrive—an imagination that, in situations like this, always functioned with a dangerous level of productivity.
Then came the words:
“I’m going to order an ultrasound to see what’s going on.”
Julián froze.
An ultrasound. For his throat. It sounded serious—very serious—or, at the very best, a sophisticated way of saying absolutely nothing for the time being.
The doctor added that the appointment would be in three days.
Three days.
Julián wanted to ask what that meant—whether he should be worried, if the test was merely a precaution, or if the doctor had seen something he preferred not to name. But he didn’t. There are moments when fear makes you polite, almost submissive. A doctor’s office—with its stark white light and heavy silence—was one such place.
He stepped out onto the street, appointment slip in hand, a single thought lodged in his mind: if the doctor hadn’t said anything, it was surely because he didn’t want to cause alarm. And if he didn’t want to cause alarm, it was because there was something there that *could* be alarming.
That was the beginning of his obsession.
The Three-Day Wait
He slept poorly the first night. The second, even worse. By the third, he didn’t sleep at all—he simply survived it.
Every time he swallowed, he imagined the swelling growing worse. Every time he felt a twinge in his throat, his mind jumped to lumps, masses, and words that sounded like tragedy—even if he didn’t know exactly what they meant. The original pain was still there, but now it was overshadowed by something far greater: fear.
And once fear takes root, it needs no evidence. It feeds on itself.
Julián began searching for symptoms online—a place where, if you look with enough anxiety, anything can be framed as a rare disease. He typed in “severe sore throat,” “throat ultrasound,” “pain when swallowing,” and “what could swelling in the neck mean?” The results were a parade of possibilities—some reasonable, others catastrophic—all of them destructive to his peace of mind.
Every page seemed to say the same thing, just in different words: it might be nothing, but then again, it could be something serious.
And that combination is lethal for anyone who is already afraid.
The Fear of Illness
The worst part wasn’t the sore throat; it was the interpretation.
Julián began to scrutinize his own body, much like an inspector with a bad reputation. He would touch his neck several times a day. Also he would look at himself in the mirror with the expression of an exhausted detective. He drank water slowly, just in case swallowing too quickly was a bad idea. He spoke less, as if using his voice might make the situation worse.
Marta, his wife, tried to reassure him.
“I’m sure it’s nothing serious,” she said.
“That’s exactly what someone would say if they were hiding something serious from me,” he replied.
She looked at him with the patience of someone who already knows that arguing with an anxious person rarely achieves much.
The throat ultrasound
In reality, the problem hadn’t begun with the pain. It had begun with the word “ultrasound.”
For Julián, that word carried a disproportionate weight. It sounded like a grave diagnosis—the kind of medical test ordered when someone suspects something they aren’t ready to talk about yet. And It wasn’t a prescription, a pill, or a reassuring piece of advice. It was one of those words that forces you to imagine the worst.
And on top of that, he had to wait three days.
Three days is a short time for almost anything—except when it comes to medical anxiety, which turns any delay into an ordeal. During that time, Julián went from thinking he had a simple irritation to imagining increasingly dark scenarios. Laryngitis. A problem with his vocal cords. Something strange. Probably serious. Something that would start off small and end up ruining his week, his month, and his social life.
The human mind has a special talent for building ruins before the earthquake has even struck.
The result of the ultrasound
When the appointment finally arrived, Julián entered the room with the tension of someone expecting their life to be changed. The technician was kind, professional, and alarmingly normal. She applied cold gel to his neck, moved the transducer over the area, and watched the screen with an unbearable calmness.
He didn’t look concerned.
And he didn’t frown.
He didn’t call for backup.
And that, far from putting Julián at ease, almost frightened him even more.
Finally, the results were explained to him: the ultrasound was simply to check for inflammation of the vocal cords. Nothing serious. Neither nothing monstrous. Nothing that justified the catastrophic scenarios he had conjured up during his three-day wait.
In short: an annoying problem, yes, but a common one.
Julián felt such a profound sense of relief that he almost felt embarrassed. He had spent seventy-two hours convinced he was on the brink of something terrible, all because of some inflammation in his vocal cords. In hindsight, it was almost comical.
Almost.
Because if he had learned anything during that wait, it was that fear doesn’t need facts to grow. All it takes is a single word, a pause, and three days of free time.
Conclusion
As he left the clinic, Julián breathed with a newfound lightness. He was still in some pain, but it was no longer a threatening kind of pain. It was just a symptom—a bodily warning. Nothing more.
He had discovered—with a touch of dark humor and a fair amount of humiliation—that the real problem is often not the sore throat itself, but the story the mind invents around it. And when a throat ultrasound enters the picture, the imagination does the rest. Because, yes: sometimes the diagnosis is simple. But the waiting, the doubt, and the medical anxiety can turn anything into a three-day tragedy. And Julián, who had gone to his appointment with an inflamed throat, left with a rather unrefined but quite useful lesson: never underestimate the power of fear when left alone with Google.
Sore Throat And Ultrasound: When Three Days Feel Like A Sentence – Short stories series – Copyright ©Montserrat Valls and Juan Genovés
#sore throat #ultrasound #dark humour #medical anxiety #fear of illness #short story #health #waiting for results
vocal cords
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