My normal life consisted of constantly fighting against demons and other things that give you nightmares. On a normal day I was exhausted and bruised, so I didn't realize right away that there might be something wrong. Stress was high in my life because I was constantly working with Inuyasha and the others to save other people's lives. It never occurred to me that my own life might be in danger and I might not even know it. My life was always in danger. I had to worry about demons every day and then there was Naraku to think about, who was in a category all on his own. I kept telling myself that I had every reason to feel like shit every day.
The problem with this was that after awhile I realized that it might not be so normal to feel like I was coming down with the flu. It was easy to say that I was tired and bruised because we were fighting demons all day, but then there were the weeks were we wouldn't fight anything because we were taking a much needed rest. Then there were the times when I was home and studying. I shouldn't have felt like I was up all night after a good night's rest. When I did realize that something might be wrong I really didn't do anything about it. I figured that it would pass and then it would actually look like I had been sick when I went back to school.
It never occurred to me that I might actually be really sick, because I figured if anything was going to kill me it would be something that would eat me first. When you worked with demons as much as I did after awhile you figured that was the only thing that was going to get you. Then I passed out on my way to class and I was rushed to the emergency room and they figured out that I had chronic myelogenous leukemia. I just called it cancer and something that would kill me. I didn't understand how this could happen to me. I made my whole life about saving others and all the while something was killing me.
Doctors talked about chemotherapy and bone marrow transplants, but I tuned them all out. I had been sick for a long time and never noticed. I knew what my chanced were and I was not going to waste what time I had left in a hospital, losing my hair, being sicker then I had ever been. I wanted to live my life to the fullest. While that might mean actually trying to save myself by doing something about my sickness, why bother? I had a life to live and I was going to live it to the fullest. I knew that I wasn't going to live through treatments. I didn't know how I knew, but it was a feeling that I had come to trust over the last couple of years. I had waited too long and now it was too late for me.
Mom didn't like it and fought it and so was grandpa and Souta, but they couldn't do anything because I was 18 and it was my choice. I was glad that I had that choice because it made my life easier. For awhile I acted like nothing was wrong. I stopped going to school and I stayed in the feudal area. I wanted my life to be lived to the fullest and I felt most at home in the past. I made a difference and I had friends that I could really talk to and confide in. I found that amusing when I thought about it because I didn't tell any of them I was sick. I worked very hard to hide the fact that there was something wrong and it worked for awhile.
There were changes that couldn't be missed though. I was more distant. I held back. I worked harder in battle, because now that mattered more than ever. I was colder and I knew that, but it was the only way to survive. I shut myself off from everyone else and gave myself time to accept what was happening. I thought about what I should do, and eventually I figured it out. One day I woke up and I felt like I had been hit with a semi. I was running a fever and I had bruises that I couldn't explain to anyone. The day I wore long sleeves and told everyone that I wasn't feeling well and I needed to go home for some rest. I could tell just from looking at Inuyasha that he could sense something was really wrong, but like everything else I shut him out and got to my family as fast as I could.
I had been shielding myself from Inuyasha from weeks now. It was something I had learned a long time ago, but had never really used. He could sense me but that was about it. I was a presence but he couldn't tell if I was sick. In the beginning I had used it so Inuyasha couldn't tell when I was going into heat, or in my terms, couldn't tell that it was "my time of the month". I could always tell when he sensed it and it had always bothered me. When I was getting a cold he had gotten over protective so I had made it so he couldn't smell the sickness surrounding me. Everyone could tell that I was sick, but never really could tell how much.
The only problem with this now was that I didn't have the energy to make it seem like it was fine. I couldn't stay awake long enough to make it seem like I was fine either. I knew that the time for me to tell the others had come and I didn't want to do it, because when I really thought about it I realized that they wouldn't understand. I couldn't explain leukemia to them because I could barley explain it to myself. I also didn't want them to see me dying like this. It wasn't going to be pretty. It was going to be slow and I was going to have my good days and my really bad days. There would be hope on my good days and defeat on my bad days.
Everyone needed to focus on getting the jewel shards and killing Naraku. I didn't know what I would do if Miroku ended up dying because of me. How would anyone be able to focus if I was as sick as I was? Who would want to leave my side? I knew how loyal they were and I knew that they didn't need to be burdened with me. I had to tell them.
And yet I found myself questioning why I should? Why couldn't I just leave?