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“Are you okay? What’s wrong?” One of my nurses asks.
Her name is Rosa. She’s about my mom’s age and has been my primary nurse throughout this whole journey. She’s a plump woman with short dark hair and warm eyes that have prominent wrinkles around them from the near-constant smile she wears. She’s easily my favorite person in this hospital.
“I looked at my chart. Is it working–the treatment?”
I have to clear my throat halfway through asking her. I’m trying not to get my hopes up. An energy is buzzing through me that I didn’t have a few minutes ago. My skin is tingling and my heart rate is picking up pace.
The concern that was on Rosa’s face a few moments ago dissolves and her mouth curves into a familiar smile.
“Emmett, hun, did you not listen at all to Doctor Anderson this morning?” she asks.
My eyes fall, and I shake my head sheepishly.
Rosa turns on her heel and suddenly walks out of the room. The other nurse, one I don’t recognize, stands there awkwardly for a moment before trailing after her. I look back and forth between the door and Jesse, wondering what in the world just happened. Jesse shrugs his shoulders, obviously as confused as I am, and goes back to texting someone on his phone.
A few minutes later, Doctor Anderson, a tall man in an expensive suit under his white coat, comes into the room. Doctor Anderson lives in New York, but my parents are paying for him to live here while I get my treatment. It wasn’t hard to convince him to leave the city and come to the middle of nowhere Maryland. He enjoys a good mystery; apparently, I’m a mystery he wants to solve.
Doctor Anderson tells me everything he had evidently already told me this morning.
The trial treatment is working. My numbers are improving. Best of all–I get to go home tomorrow and only have to come in every few days to continue treatment.
Before he leaves the room, he says one last thing to me. I’ve been thinking about it for the past two hours. Even after everyone, including Jesse, has left and I’m alone in my room, what he said is still playing on repeat in my mind.
“Emmett, you are living with cancer, but youareliving. Time to start acting like it.”
I finally dozed off sometime in the afternoon and when I wake Mom is sitting where Jesse was earlier. She looks up from the book she’s reading when she notices me stirring. She joked once that thanks to my cancer, she’s read more books in the past few months than she has in the past ten years. Mom works way too much.
Her eyes are shining and she’s smiling for the first time in what seems like months. I push the button to start the beds slow ascent to a position that has me sitting up as my dad makes his way into my room.
“You’re up!” he says, his smile as bright as my mom’s.
“I finally got some sleep,” I say, rubbing my eyes with my fists.
“We talked to Doctor Anderson,” Mom says. “He told us the good news.”
She pats under her eyes with a finger. I can tell she’s holding back her emotions for my benefit.
When I was first diagnosed, she cried a lot. We had far less hope back then. The local Sheridan doctor who diagnosed me wasn’t a specialist. He knew it was leukemia, and he knew it was bad. That was all he could tell us. We suffered through most of the summer believing there was no hope. I didn’t even tell my friends I was sick until the signs of the chemo and radiation got to be too much to hide.
By then, we’d found and brought in Doctor Anderson. He took an aggressive approach and has always stayed optimistic. Even when I was so depressed and sick from treatment that I thought living the way I was—sick, tired, unable to enjoy anything–wasn’t worth living. Those were dark days that I’m hoping are behind me now.
My friends Ender and Madison convinced me to talk with a therapist. They both regularly talk to therapists themselves and they were right–it helped. A lot. I still get overwhelmed and still have days when I don't know how to process my emotions. The fear and anxiety are the hardest to cope with, but handling emotions isn’t something I’ve ever been good at. I was entirely used to feeling invincible. Between being fearless on the football field and confident–okay, cocky–with girls, fear was a strange new experience. I know that’s why Doctor Anderson said what he did. I haven’t let myself be hopeful or happy much these past few months. Maybe it’s time I start.
“He said I get to be free from this place tomorrow,” I tell my parents, waving my hand around the room.
“You’ll still need to come in for treatments and you have to take it easy, but yes, you can come home,” Dad says, his eyes looking more like Mom’s as he makes the proclamation.
Nothing sounds better than my own bed right now. I’m grateful for the upgrades my parents have made to my hospital room and the privilege I have isn’t lost on me. But no matter how nice the bed is, or how many creature comforts they bring into this place–it’s still a hospital. I’m still trapped, and the claustrophobia that comes along with it is still debilitating.
Mom stands and places her hand on top of mine, her eyes drying up now.
“We have, however, agreed to let your friends throw you asmallwelcome home party at the barn.”
I beam at her. A real, honest, big smile that takes over my entire face. The thought of hanging around in the barn again, playing video games and doing normal eighteen-year-old shit is a small comfort. No doubt it was Ender’s idea. He’s been hinting for weeks that the whole gang needs to get together as soon as we can.
The last time we were all in one place was when we were in Mexico, right after I finished radiation and chemo. A few weeks after my course was done, I was feeling great. I felt like my old self again. I piled Ender, Madison, Taylor and Jesse onto my family's private jet and we spent an entire week laying on warm beaches and eating at lavish restaurants. It was a perfect week of forgetting about all the real-world problems and forgetting about the cancer.
The high of vacation didn’t last long though, because I got the results of my latest scans and blood work two days after we returned home. I was back in this hospital bed within a week.
