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I float a little. All the Dilaudid. I try to stay, though. To stay near her. I
But I keep my eyes closed. I don’t want to look at her. To see... her look at me.
“Can you look at me, baby? I just want to see your eyes.” Her voice cracks. “If I can help you over to the bed... I want to lie down with you. You seem sort of uncomfortable in the chair.”
My eyes drift open, but a moment I see her, close, but blurry—then they sink back shut... because the Dilaudid. I would like to have her touch me, but... I’m dirty. Sweaty. Messed up. Just the last few days... have gotten bad. With pain.
She strokes my cheek, and my throat aches.
“I can help you get to the bed, or even call a nurse if you want. If you don’t want to snuggle, I’ll just leave you alone. Your shoulder, the left one... is it hurting? You keep moving it.”
I do?
She kisses my hair. It feels good.
I sit up, gritting my teeth against the pain of my ribs. I forget to hold the IV lines. They pull from where they’re threaded into my chest. Did she see that?
I curl over my lap, holding my head. My heart races. Cleo should go.
“You... need to go.” My eyes roll toward her, the words slurring.
I reach back for the IV pole, and brace against it as I push the chair down with my legs and stand. I shuffle as quickly as I can to the bed, but the rail is up. I have to move a lot to lay down. Moaning...
I feel the cold linen under my fever-warm body and curl up, shivering. I put my hand up to my face. I tell myself that anyone would go.
And then I feel the mattress indent. My eyes lift slowly open. Cleo’s right in front of me. She melds herself around me, so my face is near her neck.
“It’s okay,” she murmurs, one arm wrapping lightly around my back. Her hand curves around my head. “Just go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
IF YOU’VE NEVER BEEN HERE, you can’t understand. How much it hurts to watch someone you care for suffer so much.
That first day, we don’t ever really talk. I hold Kellan, my arms encircling his shoulders, as the transplant team bustles around us, coming up with plans, adding and subtracting to and from his bloodstream via the three IV lumens that dangle from his chest. Arethea works around me when she checks his vitals and changes IV bags.
And Kellan sleeps.
I’m told they’re giving him a strong painkiller called Dilaudid. It makes his breathing weird and unsteady. Sometimes his eyelids flutter and he blinks at me with glassy eyes.
Sometime later in the day, Arethea brings a wheelchair and I’m inducted to this hell as we take Kellan—and his IV bags—to a “procedure room” where he has to lie on his sore chest, his face in a pillow, his hands in mine, while a doctor does a bone marrow biopsy, digging into his back with this awful little metal rod until Kellan’s body tightens and he grips my hands. The doctor murmurs “almost there,” and Kellan starts to tremble and he moans into the pillow. When they help him off the awful little cot, his face is bone white, his hair is sweaty, and I think he almost cries moving back into the wheelchair.
Back up in his room, it takes both Arethea and me to help him up onto the bed. Right after I crawl up beside him and start tucking the blankets around him, a whole team of new faces comes into the room. One of them, a tall, wide-shouldered man with salt and pepper hair and a blunt-featured face, is Dr. Willard, the leader of the transplant team, a native Texan who managed the pediatric ward when Kellan had his first bone marrow transplant here in 2011.
He prods Kellan’s sore hips, eliciting a single, punchy sob from writhing Kellan.
“What the fuck?” I gape, then glare at him.
“Move over a little,” Dr. Willard tells me in his slow, low, Texan drawl. I scoot down by Kellan’s feet, sweating with rage.
But then I watch the doctor crouch beside the bed and talk softly to Kellan. Dr. Willard clasps his forehead with a gentle hand and urges him to try another transplant—and another chemo trial.
Kellan reaches for the doctor, and the doctor clasps his hand, and as they talk in murmurs, I realize how much I don’t know. It’s difficult to believe that the guy curled up in the bed is Kellan who disarmed me, strung me up from ropes, made me spiked hot chocolate.
How the hell did he do all that with cancer running rampant, and the awful weight of not planning to treat it?
I’m wondering what made him agree to fly to New York this time—if he even had a choice—when I hear the doctor talking about the different chemo drugs. Kellan asks something I can’t hear, despite being right by him, and the doctor murmurs, “Two are different. One’s Bleisic.”
“Will... it be... like last time?” Kellan’s words are hoarse and slightly slurred, just barely loud enough for me to hear.
“I don’t know, but I’ll put you in a Dil coma and this sweet girl—” the doctor nods at me—“will rub your back.”
