Lost and Found

Support

Jamie's P.O.V.

I follow behind her as she wheels slowly but confidently. She has the wire for the oxygen on her lap and wheels in the correct direction, I'm guessing since the doctor's haven't stopped her.

She stops at two clear doors, and above them are two words engraved in white on a purple background: Physical Therapy.

She looks behind and makes eye contact with me, "Come on now, follow me. But first, can you open that door?" She smiles.

I walk up to the door and am slightly shocked it doesn't have a handicap push button on the side. I notice that it is a pull door, so I'm about to tell my mother to back away but when I turn around she's all ready a good distance away. I am amazed but then realize that she's been here before.

It's weird how I'm here feeling upset that I missed out on my mothers life when in other situations it's flipped, where parents are upset that their children grew up 'so fast' and they missed it.

She wheels through, with the nurses close behind her. As do I.

Inside the room, it looks like an extreme version of a gym. It looks kind of fun actually, but then there's lots of people fidgeting and unable to use the exercise things.

I see patients, twinning with my mom in the same white blue gown. By the time I look down: expecting to see my mom, she is at the other side of the room changing to another chair.

This chair -or weird exercise contraption thing- had the arm grips in bright neon colors. In the lap it had a pole that is fitted around the chair with weight on it in the middle. I watch my mom pull the pole from the left hand side and get it in the middle. She then extends her arms up and down, hands on opposite sides of the weight. Even though the weight is just 10lbs, I can see my mothers fingers flex and try to pull the weight up.

The treatment that has been going on-not chemo- has weakened my mothers fingers, and legs, and whole body.. I overheard Dr. Anderson talking about it on the way over here.

Apparently, my mom had cancer then she didn't have it but now she does. They had her blood samples entered into the wrong machine, it was supposed to go into the one that checked if the cells were dividing regularly now but instead it went into one for something else- god knows what. And when the doctor got the results back it showed - (negative) and out of excitement they told Mrs. Granth. I wonder how she found me.. Oh well. I'm just glad they hadn't told my mom before they found out what happened. She would've been thrilled-then crushed. When the man- Mr. Peter Jackstone found out what happened he immediately called South Shore and told them. He made sure to hurry because he didn't want the hospital to make hasty decisions and release my mom or take her off some wires or something. The news immediately went from top nurse to top nurse and then to Dr. Anderson. He made sure my mom didn't find out about the previous results, just the actual ones. He was disappointed, because he had been through all of this with my mom and it must've been glad to know that these years he'd been doing everything right and it paid off.

It's amazing how much you can listen to while walking to an unknown room.

After I step back into reality after putting the pieces of conversations I heard, I see my mom has beads if sweat on her forehead and has now moved onto a 25lb weight!

She struggles and gets it up. She struggles and doesn't get it up. She struggles and gets it up. This process repeats a while before she finally is exhausted arm-wise. She pushes the pole to the side quickly after a nurse takes the 25lb off.

She holds onto the wall nearby and steps out of her chair.

"Jamie, can you come here?" She asks, not turning her head in my direction but still looking in the direction in her head. I'm not sure if her neck is weak too but I walk over.

She lets go of the wall and grips my hand tightly. I am her support now.