Twenty-three
Peter
The middle-aged nurse, Kay, pulled the blue rubber tourniquet tight around my bicep. “Okay, hun, now make a fist but don’t squeeze.”
I did, and she tapped around the inside of my elbow, looking for the perfect vein.
With ease only provided by years of experience, Kay effortlessly inserted the needle and within seconds my blood gushed into colorfully capped vials. She pulled the loop on the tourniquet, releasing my arm. Funny, before my bone marrow transplant, I had A type blood. Now, I had O.
Once a year, I had routine lab draws to make sure my counts were good and no blasts had reappeared.
They were absolutely essential to my ongoing health and I never missed an appointment.
When I was nineteen, these routine check-ups were the reason we found out I’d relapsed.
Had I not gone when I did, the leukemia would’ve progressed.
And who knows how the story would’ve ended.
Everyone in my oncologist’s office knew me by name.
At twenty-four years old, I’d been Dr. Gilbert’s patient for almost a decade.
When I walked in, there were usually hugs and staff members eager to catch up on the latest and greatest in the Thompson world.
Everyone wanted to know how accounting was treating me and if I missed being a college student. And if I’d married Sarah yet.
But watching the dark liquid spew out of my veins, I asked what if.
Man, that question was always a day-ruiner.
But it had tapped at the corner of my awareness for hours. For weeks, actually.
What if the results weren’t good this time?
I tried to remind myself how careful I was, how healthy I’d become.
But the what ifs choked me anyway. I was healthy at nineteen and fifteen, wasn’t I?
Playing basketball, working out, eating healthy, getting sunshine.
But that didn’t matter. Leukemia didn’t make sense.
It just struck, out of the blue, no warning.
I wanted to move on with my life and not be sick forever.
But what did a few years of remission mean anyway?
Nothing. It could all be ripped away with one “off” number in my lab results.
If I got sick again, would Sarah stay?
Would my parents be okay?
Would I survive a third time?
Even if the leukemia didn’t kill me, the endless stream of doctors and nurses, IVs, masks, wheeled-in food, bed pans, night-time wake ups, my worried-sick loved ones, and the overwhelming fear definitely would kill me.
I swallowed and my throat scratched like sandpaper, my mouth suddenly dry as cotton.
As Kay turned around to drop the vials in the cart behind her, I realized I was hardly breathing.
I tried to force a deep breath, but it felt like I was sucking through a straw, my lungs strangely tight, my body tense.
Black pressed into the corners of my vision.
When Kay whirled back on her rolling stool, she glanced at my face.
“Oh!” Her mouth dropped open. “You okay, Peter? You’re white.”
I rubbed my lips together, noting they tingled. “I…I feel a little funny.”
“You want the fan?”
I nodded.
Kay hit the button on a fan to the right of my chair. Cool air blasted into the roots of my hair, skimming over the perspiration beading around my neck.
“Have you had anything to eat today, sweetheart?”
I nodded.
My hand lifted to rub my pec because my heart was trying to come out of my chest. It thumped fast, desperate. Something was wrong with me. Maybe chemo damaged my heart because it shouldn’t have hurt like this.
“You nervous?” Her voice rose in pitch, like having to ask the question confused her.
I nodded, or at least I thought I did. I sipped air. “I…I think I’m having…a heart attack.”
“Hey, Steph! Get Tristan back here!” Kay called over her shoulder. I detected movement across the room, but I couldn’t turn my head. Kay moved to my side of the table and placed her hands on me. The world was titling, but maybe that was just me, slumping out of the chair.
Her fingers dug into my arms. “Stephanie! Tristan!”
A dull ringing hurt my ears.
Black seeped in, a stain moving across my vision as a man’s strong arms lowered me to the floor and voices chattered over my head. Cool tile pressed into my back, air blew at my face, and my fingers squeezed a fistful of shirt over my heart, pulling against the way it quivered in my chest.
Someone over me said, “I think he’s having a panic attack.”