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Are you crazy?
and something very close to care.
Mostly
Are you crazy?
though.
“Don’t even
think
about it, Will.”
I glance down at the file sitting in front of her, the name jumping out at me
from the upper left-hand corner.
Stella Grant.
“Okay,” I say like it’s no big deal. “Night.”
I stroll back to 315, coughing when I get there, the mucus thick in my lungs
and throat, my chest aching from my excursion. If I had known I was going to be
running a half marathon all around the hospital, I might’ve bothered to bring
my portable oxygen.
Eh, who am I kidding?
I check my watch to make sure it’s been an hour before pushing open the
door. I flick on the light, noticing a folded note from Hope and Jason on the
bleach-white standard-issue hospital sheets.
How romantic of them.
I try not to be disappointed they’re already gone. My mom pulled me out of
school and switched me to homeschooling with a side of international hospital
tourism when I got diagnosed with B. cepacia eight months ago. As if my life
span wasn’t already going to be ridiculously short, B. cepacia will cut off another
huge chunk of it by making my shitty lung function deplete even faster than it
already has. And they don’t give you new lungs when you have an antibiotic-
resistant bacteria running rampant inside of you.
But “incurable” is only a suggestion to my mother, and she’s determined to
find the needle-in-a-haystack treatment. Even if it means cutting me off from
everyone.
At least this hospital is half an hour away from Hope and Jason, so they can
come visit me on a regular basis and fill me in on everything I’m missing at
school. Since I got B. cepacia, I feel like they’re the only ones in my life who
don’t treat me like a lab rat. They’ve always been that way; maybe that’s why
they’re so perfect for each other.
I unfold the note to see a heart and, in Hope’s neat cursive, “See you soon!
Two weeks till your Big 18! Hope and Jason.” And that makes me smile.
“Big 18.” Two more weeks until I’m in charge. I’ll be off this latest clinical
drug trial and out of this hospital and can do something with my life, instead of
letting my mom waste it.
No more hospitals. No more being stuck inside whitewashed buildings all
over the world as doctors try drug after drug, treatment after treatment, none of
them working.
If I’m going to die, I’d like to actually
live
first.
And
then
I’ll die.
I squint at the heart, thinking about that fateful last day. Somewhere poetic.
A beach, maybe. Or a rowboat somewhere in Mississippi. Just no walls. I could
sketch the landscape, draw a final cartoon of me giving the middle finger to the
universe, then bite the big one.
I toss the note back onto the bed, eyeing the sheets before giving them a
quick whiff to be safe. Starch and bleach. Just the regular hospital eau de
cologne. Good.
I slide into the squeaky leather hospital recliner by the window and push
aside a heap of colored pencils and sketchbooks, grabbing my laptop from under
a bunch of photocopied 1940s political cartoons I was looking at earlier for
reference. I open my browser and type
Stella Grant
into Google, not expecting
much. She seems like the type to have only the most private of Facebook pages.
Or a lame Twitter account where she retweets memes about the importance of
hand washing.
The first result, though, is a YouTube page called
Stella Grant’s Not-So-Secret
CF Diary
, filled with at least a hundred videos dating back six years or so. I
squint, because the page name looks weirdly familiar. Oh my god, this is that
lame channel my mom sent me a link to a few months ago in an attempt to rally
me into taking my treatments seriously.
Maybe if I’d known she looked like that . . .
I scroll down to the first entry, clicking on a video with a thumbnail of a
young Stella wearing a mouthful of metal and a high ponytail. I try not to laugh.
I wonder what her teeth look like now, considering I’ve never seen her smile.
Probably pretty nice. She seems like the type who would actually wear her
retainer at night instead of letting it collect dust on some bathroom shelf.
I don’t think mine even made it home from the orthodontist.
I hit the volume button and her voice comes pouring out of my speakers.
“Like all CFers, I was born terminal. Our bodies make too much mucus, and
that mucus likes to get into our lungs and cause infections, making our lung
function de-teri-orate.” The young girl stumbles over the big word before
flashing the camera a big smile. “Right now, I’m at fifty percent lung function.”
There’s a crappy cut, and she turns around on a set of stairs that I recognize
from the main entrance of the hospital. No wonder she knows her way around
here so well. She’s been coming here forever.
I smile back at the little girl even though that cut was the cheesiest thing I’ve
ever seen. She sits down on the steps, taking a deep breath. “Dr. Hamid says, at
this rate, I’m gonna need a transplant by the time I’m in high school. A
transplant’s not a cure, but it will give me more time! I’d love a few more years if
I’m lucky enough to get one!”
Tell me about it, Stella.
At least she’s got a shot.
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