Page 17 of That Birthday in Barbados
What is it they say about health? You don’t appreciate it until you don’t have it. It couldn’t be any more true.
Even after I’d been told I have leukemia, the words wouldn’t sink in. I didn’t feel sick. Maybe I had been a little more tired than usual, but I worked all the time. Everyone in my office was tired.
The doctor recommended I come in the following day to map out a treatment plan. I couldn’t imagine what that would be. Pills? Shots? It never occurred to me that I would become a patient who spent his days in a room with other patients just like him. That I would lose my hair, my eyebrows, my eyelashes. That I would drop forty pounds and that people would fail to recognize me in places I frequented and was known, like the grocery store and a bookstore on my street.
It was as if once I was told I was sick, I was.
In the chair closest to me, I hear a woman sigh, a long, pain-filled sigh that ties my heart in a knot. I don’t want to look at her, but I do, and tears spring to my eyes, blurring my vision. I blink them away and ask her if she is all right. She lets her gaze meet mine, and I see in her eyes what she already knows. She will not survive this. If I look like I’m losing the battle, she looks as if the other side has already won.
Our gazes lock, and there is nothing but truth between us. I let her see I know what she knows. I want to cry for her, but she does not want me to. All around us are other patients in various stages of fight and defeat. I want to cry for us all, for the fact that the only hope that can be given to us is something that does its best to destroy us.
The woman closes her eyes, leans her head back and I force my gaze to the window where the cyclist is now gone, riding off to spend a couple of hours challenging his body, his healthy body, as I once had.
A nurse walks into the room, asks if she can do anything for anyone. I feel the response rising up out of me, like a tsunami wave cresting from the ocean floor. There is nothing I can do to stop it. “Yes,” I say, the word emerging loud and adamant. “Take this out, please.”
She walks over with a look on her face that says she has heard this before. “Now, Mr. Walker. You’re not finished yet. It won’t be too much longer.”
“I am finished,” I say.
She smiles an indulgent smile, turns and walks away. “It’ll be over soon.”
Rage flows over me in a red wave. I stareat the needle in my arm, and I know I’m done. I lift the tape that secures it above my vein, ignoring the instant pinch and yank it from my arm. I stand and leave the flowing tube of poison dripping onto the chair seat.
The woman next to me opens her eyes then, looks at me with approval, and I leave the room with a roar of anger choking in my throat.
Chapter Seven
“I’m not 40, I’m 18 with 22 years of experience.”
?Unknown
Catherine
THE ENGLISH BREAKFAST buffet is everything it has been billed to be. It’s set up in the beachfront Bajan Blue restaurant. As the hostess leads me to my table, I let my gaze take in the incredible scene before me. Blue, blue sky serves as a canopy to the blue-green ocean water, white sand beach and dozens of pink umbrellas and beach chairs. It is the dead of winter in New York. The colors here are a visual feast, and I can only imagine that people who seethis every day must have much higher serotonin levels than the average person. I honestly could look at it forever.
“Will this be okay for you?” the hostess asks with a smile, waving a hand at the table facing the beach.
“It’s perfect,” I tell her, pulling out my chair.
“Would you like coffee this morning?”
“Yes, please.”
She asks for my room number, and I give it to her after which she tells me to help myself to the breakfast buffet.
Hungry from the kick-butt spin class, I head for the food. There’s a bar with pitchers of fresh green juice. I reach for one and snag a glass of carrot as well. I take them back to the table and then fill a plate with two boiled eggs, sliced tomatoes, blueberries and mango.
I eat as if I haven’t eaten in days. I can’t remember the last time food tasted this good, and I sit back, sipping my green juice and letting my gaze take in the beauty of the surroundings all over again.
The birds here have to be the happiest I’ve ever seen. But then if I were a bird, this is where I would want to live. A small wren tiptoes across the marble floor, spotting a blueberry beneath a chair. He snaps it up and flies over to sit on a rail in wait for the next morsel.
So I’m forty today.
The reality of thathits me all over again. It’s something I’ve dreaded, a number that looms on the horizon once thirty is in the taillights. I think about the class I just finished, and I’mpleased I kept up with the instructor’s admittedly demanding goals.
Anders.
The name matches the man. Strong. Memorable.
