...
❝He was the poison I was dying to taste on my lips.❞
...
I was a coward.
The coward who wanted to leave behind the wreckage of her life for the man who had tormented her for as long as she could remember. The boy who had spit venom at me gro...
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february 2008 — age thirteen
"MEERA JALAL?"
At the doctor's call, my mother and I stood, following him back to his office. Her results from the blood test last week had come back and the doctor had called us in for an appointment.
When we sat down, the doctor twisted his chair around to face us and stared at us blankly, folding his hands on his lap. "I should have asked this last week but can I begin by asking why you've waited this long to get a test done?"
"I thought it was just fatigue and my immune system not agreeing to all the cleaning I do," my mother muttered.
"Well, it's not just fatigue, Mrs Jalal. Drastic weight loss, bone pain and the mucus and blood in your coughs are not normal. You should have consulted a doctor the second your cough didn't disappear," he chided. "I'm extremely sorry to say this, but it's lung cancer, Mrs Jalal."
My heart stopped. No. He had to be lying. He had to.
"The x-ray scan showed a white-grey mass which was the first sign of you having a lung tumour. But that could have also just been lung abscess, which is pus collecting in your lungs," he explained. "I didn't want to worry you if there was a chance that the nodule was just an abscess so I took the blood rest as you wanted. The results that came in showed a decrease in the number of red blood cells, which was the cause of your shortness of breath.
"We'll need to take a CT scan and a bronchoscopy today which will give us more of an insight about the stage of your cancer and how it's advancing to affect your cells and body."
"Will it hurt her?" I asked, clutching onto my mother's hand with a grasp so deathly it had to hurt her.
He smiled reassuringly. "The CT scan is completely painless but the bronchoscopy may be a little uncomfortable. But don't worry, sweetheart, I can assure you that your mother will be perfectly fine."
I nodded, following after them and watching as they took a CT scan first where her entire body went past the radiation and it sent detailed images of her lungs to the computer.
The doctor stared at the scan for a few minutes, grim-faced before he led us into another room to take the other test. He gave my mother an anaesthetic which he said would numb her throat and I watched, wincing to myself, as he inserted a thin tube with a camera through her mouth and down her throat.
I sat there for thirty minutes, waiting patiently until the doctor finally withdrew the tube and went to get a physical copy of the scans.
