Falling in Deep Collection Box Set by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-20T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7: Cooper

I got home just before the nausea smacked me hard. I should have known from that first wave at The Glass Mermaid that I was in for a rough day, but the events that unfolded thereafter had caught me so off guard that I’d forgotten, for a moment, about my illness.

Once back in Gran’s house, however, there was no forgetting. I rushed to the bathroom and unceremoniously threw up my paltry breakfast. But that was just the start of it. I dragged myself to the living room, lay down on Gran’s old flower print couch, and barfed up air and stomach acid for the next two hours.

Using every bit of willpower I had, I forced myself into the kitchen to grab a ginger ale and some meds. The doc told me that the nausea would only be bad like this after the chemo, but it wasn’t true. It had been more than two months since my last treatment, and the nausea still hadn’t gone away.

I sat at the kitchen table sipping the drink and staring at the magnets covering Gran’s fridge. As I did so, I was taken back to my childhood, and I suddenly remembered sitting in the exact same spot, looking at the exact same magnets, drinking the same soda, while I listened to my mother retching in the bathroom. Gran had spoken softly, trying to soothe and comfort her. They didn’t know it was cancer until my mother was but skin and bones. She was gone just three months after they realized cancer was shredding her pancreas and ripping through her whole body. When I first got sick, I’d thought it was the flu. I’d hoped it was the flu. But it lasted too long, and I knew before the doctor had even told me.

“You’re young and strong,” had been the words that followed the first prognosis. “You’ll beat it.”

But the words changed as the months passed. “Pancreatic cancer is one of the most aggressive forms of cancer. It’ll be a hard fight. You said your mother died from it?”

And then the conversation dissolved into “we can continue the chemo but there isn’t much point in torturing your body. It will be a more peaceful end without it…plan on six months.”

My mother died when she was thirty. I’d turn thirty-one in June.

I took another sip then headed to bed. Even though my gran was gone, I still couldn’t bring myself to sleep in her room. The master bedroom was much larger than the small spare room with its twin bed, but each time I looked into Gran’s room, her crocheted coverlet on the bed, her perfume bottles sitting on a dresser filled with her clothes, I didn’t have the heart to touch it. I’d leave it like that to remember her. And when I was gone, her friends could sort her things more easily.

Flopping down on the stiff twin bed, I closed my eyes. With a little luck, the medicine would bring me some relief, and I could sleep through the worst of it.

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