The room was warm, almost uncomfortably warm, but not enough so that I would complain to management or anything. In one corner, a television advertised Sesame Street’s word of the day, “friend.” The rest of the gray-blue room was filled with pink, plastic coated, uncomfortable chairs. I waited, in silence, between my mother and father, begging for the second hand of the clock above Cookie Monster’s head to tick at a quieter level. None of us made a move to speak, as though sound could affect the accuracy of the tests. I tried not to stare at the boy sitting across from me. His blue eyes seemed huge in his colorless, bald head. He was no older than twelve.
“Sharon?” the nurse practitioner called from the entrance to the forbidden examining rooms. There, I imagined, they kept metallic medieval devices, capable of prodding into my body and inducing pain as I had never before known in my sixteen years of existence. My parents and I followed her to a consultation room. It was white with a round white table surrounded by four wooden chairs. In an attempt to lessen the shock of the white walls and lights, there was a Pinocchio themed border dividing the wall from the ceiling.
The nurse took my blood pressure and asked me a few simple questions—Did I smoke? Could I be pregnant? When was my last menstrual cycle? Did I do drugs and have I ever done drugs? After deciding that I was more or less innocent of crimes that would make my parents ground me for a mere eternity, she called in the doctor. He introduced himself as Dr. Pete. He gave his card to my mother and began a spiel about not jumping to conclusions and possible cures. I stared at his face, trying to imagine what he looked like without the thick, brown plastic glasses that traced the top of his eyebrows and carried down to the top of his beard. His hair was a sandy-brown, graying and thinning, but blending nicely into his skin tone, also a sandy-brown. His hands were thick and nearly all the fingers were the same size, as though he had been a cartoon character in a past life. I could not concentrate on what he was trying to explain to me.
We moved into an examining room. I was asked to undress and to put on a hospital-issued too-big-in-all-the-wrong-places dress that made the air seem suddenly cold, despite my earlier warmth. My father and the doctor left the room to give me privacy, but I pulled my mother’s arm in protest, asking her to stay with me. I was sixteen, but at that moment, I was no more than six. I started shaking and couldn’t tie the strings at the back of my hospital garment. Then, the tears rushed down my cheeks. “I’m scared,” I whispered.
It was the first time since all of this had begun that I cried. About a year earlier, I began noticing bruises on my body in places I hadn’t remembered banging. Writing them off as my infamous klutziness, I ignored them. Then, in September, I woke up with a black eye. The bruise covered an area from my forehead to my mid-cheek, brown and swollen. I begged my mom not to make me go to school. Instead, she took me to the doctor’s office.
My pediatrician sat, dividing his attention between a medical book and my body, now on display like a piece of art that the public couldn’t decide was ingenious or horribly morbid. Then, he spat out the only phrase I’ve ever known to make my mother sick to her stomach: leukemia.
From there, my life became a blur of doctor’s appointments and blood tests. I missed nearly three weeks of school in the first marking period alone. When I was in school, I was sent to the guidance office because a concerned teacher or friend anonymously put in a word of concerned and I was questioned over and over about my home life. My grades were slipping and the bruising, which seemed to be just an annoyance before, was suddenly dangerous, not only to my health, but to my family’s reputation. I never left myself alone with only myself for fear of slipping deep into over-imaginative thought. I took to sleeping with my little sister so I wouldn’t feel lonely.
Then, after nearly three weeks of being carted from one random doctor to the next, I found myself on the examining room table in the Tomorrow’s Children Institute in Hackensack, New Jersey with Dr. Pete. He specialized in the treatment of pediatric blood disorders and cancers. I was now a potential cancer patient.
Dr. Pete gave my parents and me a rundown of the next month. They would first rule-out the big diseases he was “fairly certain” I didn’t have, then test me for all kinds of rare diseases he was “fairly confident” I didn’t have, and finally test me for simple disorders he was “fairly positive” I didn’t have. He told me that they would take some brief tests and let me know the next day if I had any diseases that needed immediate attention. What he meant was that he wanted to make sure I didn’t have cancer. Before I left, they took nearly a pint of blood, a small skin sample from my right butt cheek, and a stool sample, which was probably the most invasive and embarrassing test I have ever endured.
That night, I went to sleep alone, too tired from a long and stressful day to sneak into my sister’s room. My head went to work: What if I die? What would happen to me if I die at sixteen? Sixteen year-olds don’t die like this. They die because someone is stupid and overdoses at a party or drives drunk. They die because they have accidents and fall from high places or hit their heads funny when riding a bike. They don’t die from diseases. I can’t die. I haven’t done what I want with my life. What about my parents? Would they be able to take it if something like this happened? I don’t want to die. I don’t want to give up. I don’t want to die. Dear God, I don’t want to die. You hear that, God? I’m not ready yet! I’m not leaving! Don’t make me go. I can’t die. I can’t be alone forever, without my family, without my friends, without my teddy bear. I can’t. Please. Not yet.
I crawled into bed with my parents that night for the first time in twelve years. I slept between them, both of them hugging me from either side. As tired as I was, I couldn’t bring myself to really sleep that night; I was afraid I would never wake up, as though my potential cancer would eat away at my organs in a single night while I slept.
I kept dozing in and out of sleep, never really sleeping. My mom cried in her sleep, making it harder for me to relax. My father squeezed me tighter, as though keeping me close would stop it all from happening.
Then, at nine-oh-two the next morning, the phone rang. My father leapt out of bed and attacked the phone. My heart stopped. I could only shut my eyes and let my mother hold my shaking body. The world went quiet, until my father finally hung up the phone. “It’s not cancer,” he whispered, shaking himself, “it’s not cancer.”
