“Tessa, the treatment protocol you went through was aggressive—the most aggressive we have for this type of tumor. Unfortunately, it was not successful. Surgery at its current mass would be fatal, and further treatment would most likely be ineffective. In my medical opinion, our best option is to treat the symptoms, address the pain, and make you as comfortable as possible.”
“As comfortable as possible until what?” Don’t say it.
Dr. Page stood a little straighter, maybe steeling himself. “This tumor is terminal, Tessa.”
A strangled, shrill sound shot out of me. My chest ached, and I pushed my palm against it. My lungs tried to fill but weren’t cooperating. I swallowed air greedily until I could form words again. In. Out. In. Out. Breathing. Alive. I’m alive.
“I’m dying?” I breathed out, shuddering each syllable.
“I’m so sorry,” Dr. Page confirmed with a nod of his head.
I shook mine in response. “No.”
“Tessa,” Kyle began to speak, but I put my hand up to silence him.
“No. I am not dying. I am twenty-eight, Dr. Page. I’m twenty-eight-freaking-years old. There has to be something you can do. There has to.”
“Sunshine.” My dad placed his hand on my shoulder, but I brushed him off, keeping my eyes on the doctor.
“How long?” I demanded, anger flooding me.
Dr. Page didn’t falter. “Six months would be my estimate. At most.”
Kyle gasped loudly, as if just hearing the news for the first time.
My dad’s head dropped, his chin to his chest.
Tears stung my eyes and a lump formed in my throat, but I shook my head. I shook it away and told myself this was wrong. This was completely wrong.
“There has to be something you can do. There has to be something that will fix this!” My volume raised with every second. I pushed up off the table warily, my energy zapped from my body.
“I’m happy to recommend doctors for a second opinion. In fact, I’d encourage that,” Dr. Page said, jotting something down on the clipboard in his hands.
“I want a second opinion. I want third and fourth opinions. I want anyone’s opinion, but this one.” I gritted my teeth, glaring at him as if this were his fault. “I cannot die, Dr. Page. Not yet. I’m not ready to die.”
“I’ll arrange for it immediately.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, and then he was gone. One last glance of sadness and he’d left us to cope with the news. It was barely dawn and he’d walked in and ruined my entire day—my entire life.
It sounds harsh, but I don’t give a crap. Life is harsh. Cancer is harsh. I get to be harsh right now.
“I want to go home.” My voice was barely above a whisper, but fury dripped from each word.
“I’ll pull the car up front,” my dad said, rushing for the door as if eager to leave.
Kyle picked my bag up off the floor and placed it on the exam table next to me. “Do you need help getting dressed?”
The room was small and empty except for the two of us, but his stooped shoulders and giant build seemed to take up half of it. Every time his chest rose with a breath, the oxygen seemed to drain from the room.
Everything was closing in on me. There wasn’t enough space.
I needed space.
Clutching the table’s edge, I swallowed hard. “I want to be alone.”
“I’ll wait in the hall. Take your time.” Kyle touched my cheek with the back of his fingers, but I refused to look into his eyes. I refused to let him see me cry. One second of his gaze would break me.
He left me alone in the tiny, collapsing room and it didn’t get any bigger in his absence. It somehow seemed smaller.
I unpinned my gown from behind my neck and back, letting it fall in a puddle at my feet. My chin to my chest, I scanned down the length of my body. My breasts were smaller than before, sagging against jutting ribs. My stomach trembled slightly, curving inward. My hips seemed they were only there to hold up pants. My legs were thin, but not in good way. They barely showed any muscle, the skin tight over my bones. My thighs were bruised from frequent shots. My hands and arms punctured from numerous IVs, replaced recently by the PICC line jutting out near my elbow and taped down against my arm for better access to shrinking veins.
Stepping over to the floor length mirror, I lifted my hands to touch the scar from my biopsy. It had healed weeks ago, but no hair grew there. The skin around it was red, peeling, swollen. I had rubbed a burn balm on it daily that Delores had brought me, but radiation burns heal poorly when the cause was inside eating its way out. I pressed my hands to my skull—hard, squeezing, unrelenting, as if choking the tumor from my brain.
A few centimeters beneath my fingertips was a mass that would end my life.
It was right there below my fingertips, yet untouchable.
I ran my hands down my neck, my sides, and then wrapped them around my waist in a small hug. Breathing deeply, I told myself to hold it together. People were waiting for me, depending on me, needing me. I couldn’t fall apart.
Turning from the mirror, I moved back to the table and zippered open my bag. I pulled my clothes out in one big bundle, and a small white cloth fell to the floor.
It was the onesie Kyle had given me this morning.
The pressure behind my eyes became too much. It had to have its turn. I had to feel this. I had to lose this, lose everything. It was all being taken from me and I had no choice but to watch it slip away…watch everything slip away.
The first tear slid down my cheek, falling upon my naked chest and traveling the length of my body. The rest were seconds behind. I clutched the onesie to my stomach and twisted my hands in the fabric.
I would never be a mother.
There was no more after and no more one day. There was no more. Period.
For the first time since my diagnosis, I realized what it all meant. With barely six months left, my dreams were not going to come true. Cancer wasn’t just killing me—it was killing everything I would have been.
Would have been. I was already talking about myself in the past tense.
Heaving sobs racked me. I hugged the onesie to my stomach tighter, my womb barren and empty beneath. My body tilted forward, my knees bending. I folded into myself in a desperate attempt to keep from falling apart completely.
Seconds. Minutes. Hours passed. I didn’t know. I didn’t care.
My tears slowly dried, but more were coming. I could feel the pain regenerating within me, waiting until my body could physically grieve more. It was mourning whether I wanted to or not.
I was dying. Six months, at best.
Lifting the onesie to my face, I rested it against my cheek. I prayed for the child who would never wear it. I prayed for the mother who would never hold that child. I prayed for the father who wouldn’t have either of them. I prayed for the family we’d never be.
And when the prayers were over, I tore the fabric in half and tossed its pieces in a nearby trashcan.
I turned away, and pulled on my pants. Tightening the drawstring, I secured it around my small waist. My shirt slid over my top half easily, my mother’s scarf on my head. I wet a cloth in the sink, wiping the tear stains from my cheeks, dabbing my puffy eyes.
Finally, I slid on my jacket, but I didn’t feel any less cold. I’d been cold for months.
I’d thought it was the weight loss, or maybe the radiation had made me less able to self-regulate heat. But now, I wasn’t so sure. Maybe the chill had been my fate, the cold my tumor, the bleakness my future.
Death had been embracing me for months, and only today could I see it.
I was dying. Six months, at best.
Chapter Twelve
Saturday, May 17, 2014
* * *
A cool, wet object pressed against my cheek, and I swatted it away with a hand that had tucked under a pillow. Unrelenting, it returned and pushed into my cheek accompanied by a small whimpering. Blinking open my eyes, I stared into Beast’s beady pupil
s.
A slobbering lick was next, Beast’s tongue slapping against my cheek loudly, causing me to grimace and push him away. When I rolled onto my back, Beast took it as an invitation to climb aboard, mounting my chest, and renewing his slimy assault on my face.
“Beast, my God, give me a second to wake up,” I groaned, squeezing him tighter to me which both appeased his need for closeness and kept his stinky tongue off my face.
“Morning, babe. How are you feeling?” I turned my head to see Kyle lying next to me, propped up on one elbow as he stretched out on his side. The way he was leaning looked like he’d been awake for a while, still and pensive, not a single sign of sleep on his face. Part of me wondered if he’d slept at all last night.
“I’m fine, just tired.” I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep either, but the ravaged condition of my body made staving off sleep impossible. Even with the bit I did manage, it had been restless.
“Your sister should be here soon. I heard your father leave earlier to go pick her up at the airport.”
“Not necessarily. Dad’s super anal about airports. He always gets there a minimum of three hours early, even if he is just picking one of us up.” I snorted a giggle, barely audible.
“Oh.” Kyle sounded confused, but even more tired. There was an emptiness in his words, an exhaustion behind his eyes that seemed to go a lot deeper than missing sleep. “Well, at least you’ll see your sister at some point today.”
I stroked Beast’s soft fur, his head on my chest, his breathing slow and calming. I’d spent yesterday in bed after getting home from the hospital, not wanting to talk, not wanting to do anything, or be with anyone. Hiding seemed preferable to the hellhole my life had become.
I wasted the day on a Netflix binge until my laptop overheated and the inevitable buffering sign disrupted one too many episodes of One Tree Hill to be tolerable. Kyle convinced me to eat some soup for dinner, but I barely kept that down. After, I let sleep consume me, and it did for most of the night.
“Do you want to talk?” Kyle asked, sounding as unsure, his eyebrows pinched and his lips pursed.
I know I should try to make this easier for him, but damn it, it wasn’t easy for me. I feel so angry, and I should. I’m allowed this anger—I’ve earned every bit of it. “There’s nothing to talk about.”
“Tessa, come on. I know this is tough for you—it certainly is for me—so, I can’t begin to imagine what’s going on in your head. But that’s why I’m asking, because I want to know. I don’t want you going through this alone, not when I’m right here to help you, to hold you, to carry as much of this for you as I can.”
“That’s the problem, Kyle. You can’t help. The tumor isn’t in your head, it’s in mine. You can’t do anything. I can’t do anything. It just…it just is.”
He bit his lip and was silent a moment before shaking his head.
“Yes and no,” he said. “Yes, I don’t have a tumor, but, no, there is definitely something I can do. I can help. I want to. I want to be here for you for all of it. If I could trade places with you, I would. But I can’t. So, please let me do something. Anything, Tessa. I need to do something.”
“Kyle,” I protested, but he nudged Beast off my chest and pulled me against him, lifting the blankets so I could curl in next to his naked body.
I molded my body to his, seeking the safety of his embrace.
“Let me be there for you, Tessa,” he repeated. “I will do anything.”
I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. I did enough of that yesterday to last me years—as if I even have years left. Shallow breaths, I swallowed the emotion.
“I don’t know what I need.” I sniffed, dropping my forehead into the dip between his neck and shoulder. “There’s no manual for this. There are no instructions. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I have no idea what I need.”
“That’s okay. We’re going back to Dr. Page on Monday to find out what to do. We’ll get pain meds and set up hospi—um, set up the care you need.” His voice faded, stumbling over his last words.
A thick lump formed in my throat at the word he couldn’t say. I swallowed hard, breathing deep in an attempt to keep my distance. Keep that word far away. Keep reality away. Hospice. I’m twenty-eight years old.
This is what dying people do, I reminded myself. I’m dying.
“Babe, it’s okay.” He rubbed my neck, sliding his hand from my hairline down to my shoulder.
“No part of this is okay, Kyle. I have so much left to do, to live…or had. I had so much left to do.”
“You’re right,” he agreed.
I felt something wet hit my cheek and wiped it away, angry at myself for crying. I’d been walking waterworks since yesterday, and it freaked me the hell out. That’s not who I am. I am tough. I can handle anything. Growing up with a father working all the time and a dying mother, there hadn’t been time for breakdowns and tantrums.
A sniffling sound tore me from my self-deprecating thoughts. I lifted my head from Kyle’s chest to see the origin of the escaped moisture. Tears pooled in his eyes, sliding down his nose sideways onto the bed where my cheek had been moments earlier.
If my heart wasn’t already broken into a thousand pieces, it would’ve shattered then. Maneuvering my body higher on the bed, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled his head to my chest. He clung to me, his arms around my torso like a vice while I leaned back on the pillow.
His tears poured freely, trembling, sobbing. I rocked him with the give and take of our soft bed, consoled him with soft murmurs of how it’ll be okay. It didn’t matter that neither of us believed it. Neither of us knew what was going to happen, but the one thing we were sure of is nothing would be okay. Not again.
Never again.
* * *
• ღ • ღ • ღ •
* * *
Saturday, May 17, 2014
* * *
After several hours of pillow talk and encouragement, Kyle and I rose from our bed by mid-afternoon. Slowly moving around the kitchen, I pulled out granola and yogurt for breakfast. Kyle had taken Beast for a walk and the house was quiet for the first time in a while.
Standing at the kitchen counter, I used a mortar and pestle to crush the granola into a fine dust before sprinkling it in my yogurt. I used to love the crunch of granola under my teeth in a spoonful of parfait, but six weeks of unsuccessful treatment stole that luxury from me as well. Small, yet vicious radiation blisters ran down the inside of my throat. Anything I swallowed scraped past them like a blade shredding my esophagus. Even something as soft as yogurt, or a glass of water, made it burn and ache with fury. Smashing the granola into crumbs was the only solution to get food down while minimizing the pain.
“Tessa?” someone called from the front hallway.
“In the kitchen.” I finished preparing my food and brought it to the kitchen table.
“Sweetie, I so wasn’t expecting you to show up on my roster today. They must have discharged you fast after your surgery.” Delores waltzed around the corner in her usual perky manner. Today, she was sporting bright green scrubs decorated with fast food restaurant logos. It was hilariously unique, and completely Delores.
“Yeah, well…here I am.” I spooned yogurt into my mouth, hoping that would get me out of further questions.
Delores dropped her bag onto the kitchen table and scrutinized me. I looked away, feeling naked. Her sigh was audible. She’d figured it out.
“There was no surgery,” she stated, waiting for me to confirm.
I nodded, the lump in my throat silencing me. I was beginning to get used to the restraint, the tears, the pain. I wondered if this was what my next six months would look like.
“How long, Tessa?” she asked, her voice soft. She sat beside me, took my hand, cradled it in both of hers.
“Six months,” I croaked. Turning back to my meal, I forced the yogurt down my throat. I was so anxious in that moment, I barely concentrated on the clawing scrap
es of the food passing my blisters and sinking into my stomach.
Delores didn’t respond; she squeezed my hand tighter, her calloused hands rubbing mine. It was sweet. It was kind. It was comforting, as if she knew I didn’t have the words—because I didn’t. So, I let her hold me, even the smallest part of me. For several minutes, I ate yogurt and she held my hand.
“Hi, Delores.” My dad walked into the kitchen carrying a large suitcase and garment bag draped over his shoulder. He placed them on the floor near the hallway, tired eyes lifting to find me.
Delores nodded curtly. “Afternoon, Mr. Barnes.”
I tried a small smile on for size, but when he moved and revealed who was behind him, my smile fell. Elly stood there in an oversized sweater nearly engulfing her lanky frame, her hair piled high on her head, carelessly messy. Her disheveled appearance wasn’t what made me pause—it was her face.
Elly’s skin was blotchy, bright blue eyes puffy and rimmed red. Shoulders hunched, and her lips were frowning so fiercely, they seemed to point at the ground. Her lashes were sparkling with teardrops and her eyes downcast, avoiding mine.
“Elly?” I pushed to my feet, releasing Delores as I walked over to my sister.
Her shoulders bounced and she shook her head rapidly, but said nothing.
“Elly, please talk to me.” My pulse quickened in my ears. I knew she knew. My dad had to have told her on the way here. I hadn’t seen her since the first week of treatments, but she wouldn’t even look at me now.
“Dad told me.” She lifted her chin slowly, her eyes bleary, teaming with unshed tears.
“Oh.” I dropped my hands to my side, unsure what to say. No one had told me the best way to tell people my prognosis, especially people I loved. I’d spent my entire life protecting Elly from pain, and now I was the one delivering one of the greatest hurts she’d probably ever experience.
The very thought sickened me.
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