Three Alphas, Three Mates

Chapter 27 - All or Nothing

My first ultrasound wasn't a happy thing. I remember the nurse spreading the cold gel across my chest. She narrowed her eyes at the screen, almost holding her breath. I shivered in my hospital gown, waiting for the bad news. I was twelve years old. She wasn't looking for a growing baby inside me, or the loss of one for that matter. It was an echocardiogram—an ultrasound of the heart.

But I was wrong in a way. It was about the loss of a baby. The baby just wasn't inside me. It was me, because when the nurse's eyes looked back to tell the bad news, it was my mother's eyes she connected with. They reflected the light of the screen, glossily. A part of her cheek did too, for just a moment, and I didn't understand why. I just wanted to wipe the gel off. I had no concept of a lifetime of tests and tubes and pain. I was just twelve years old. What did I know about time?

The nurse smiled at me, tight lipped, and told my mother that I could get dressed while she went to get the doctor.

The conclusion: cardiac arrhythmia caused by a kind of septal defect.

In other words, the theory was that my heart was racing out of control because there was a gaping hole in it, which sounded about right. Fix the hole, fix the problem. They fixed the hole, I fixed the problem by selling the lie that I felt better... Until my lungs gave out.

How'd it happen? Well they put me on a stress test a while after the surgery to see how well my heart was doing.

"Just to be sure," the nurse said with a big ol' smile.

She was onto me. I knew it. I googled nonstop in incognito mode how to fake a stress test with your mother standing right next to you. There was no answer, so I hobbled into the facility ready to do my best and hope it was enough. I knew it wouldn't be, but I thought, "How bad could it be?"

I feel off that treadmill faster than I fall over in Coach Kenet's class. It was a disaster. I thought I was caught immediately, but they wheeled me over to the respiratory department so fast my head spun. That's where I met Greg. Oh Greg and his breathing tests. But that's a story for another day.

The point is, my dormant, childhood asthma was suddenly acting up again, only this time it was ten times worse, as if it had been resurrected from the pits of the inhaler I left it in to die. Lack of oxygen here. Irregular heartbeats there. Ventilators, heart monitors, and even a brain scan at one point.

All tests inconclusive. All tests a waste of money and time.

So what did the doctors do when they couldn't find a medical reason for my symptoms? They slapped me in physical therapy and gave me some steroids. When I got fed up with it, I claimed cured. That was my success story, and for a while I was. For a while.

Blurs start coming into my vision, but I'm the kind of groggy right now that doesn't try to move or make sense of it. I just lie there, and then it dawns on me that I'm lying there, which is somewhere. It doesn't seem important immediately. It seems like a problem for another day. I guess that's why I'm like this in the first place. I'm always putting things off, and lies always catch up with you at the worst times.

Don't get me wrong. If you put something off long enough, there's a chance it might go away. There's a chance it might solve itself. But there's a bigger chance that it could get a whole lot worse. Still, I don't regret my decision.

I used to be a sick hospital girl who got in the way of her family's lives with her problems (even if they never made me feel that way). Now I'm just a sick girl, and I can enjoy life with them, even if it hurts sometimes. It's nice to see my mom getting a chance to follow her dreams. It's nice to see my dad not having to be the sole provider for all my other siblings so that my mom can have time for me. It's nice to feel like I'm not hogging a parent, or time, or the spotlight.