It's further than it looks, and time is short.
These were the only words that ran through her head as the white walls around her blurred at this unexpected news.
Silence filled the room for an excruciating moment as the doctor spewed words that had become familiar over the past few weeks.
Words like: Malignant.
This word is derived from the Latin term for 'bad'. A malignant tumor.
Inoperable was another word she'd decided not to like. Sarah had always been under the illusion that cancer could kill anyone else but her. Her stepmother had endured chemotherapy for breast cancer, but she merely surgically removed the tumors and had perky implants put in her natural breasts' place.
For Sarah, it was a whole new ball game. There was no pretty way out of this peach of a diagnosis.
"Sarah, I know you're scared, but there's no nice way to say these kinds of things. Should we proceed with the surgery?"
He was hopeful, determined and self-sacrificing; this made him a good doctor. Not only that but he was also a good looking doctor; a dark-haired, tall man, with a defined jaw and cleft who was obviously the dream boy of every girl during his school days. He was still young, maybe in his thirties?
Including her doctor's hotness, everything but the painful subject before her could come to mind. Trapped and thoughtless, Sarah sat in silence. Staring at the wall behind her neurologist.
"…Would you like a referral to another hospital? A second and third opinion is never discouraged when such…. " His pen moved up to his face and he stuck the end into his cleft thoughtfully, searching for the right words. "…'Delicate' organs are to be operated on."
She let strands of her dark bangs fall into her face, to hide the embarrassment in her green eyes. Not one concept he had stated made it into her brain. The only thing she heard was that lovely word. Malignant. But now her silence was making him think she didn't like him as her doctor.
"N-no, I trust you." Her dad would kill her for not getting other opinions. Something in Dr. Fellman's eyes made her feel safe, like he wouldn't let anything happen to her.
"Well then, would you like to schedule surgery and chemo? We can set up both schedules right now. I'm not going to let you go through this alone." Blue eyes seared into her, she could melt into a puddle on the floor right then. He knew that she did not willingly come to her weekly visits alone.
It took a split second to pull her puddle-brain together and form words, "Could you let me think it over and talk to my parents? I'll call to make the appointments when I figure this all out in my head…"
Dr. Fellman gave her a knowing look, as if he had done this a thousand times. A look that told her that she was doomed. No matter how hopeful he was, he knew this was not the kind of thing people could recover from. She was not going to last too much longer. Her tumor was about the size of an egg with flanges that interwove themselves throughout her medulla and cerebellum. Two more, smaller, tumors were lying within her Sylvain fissure and deep within the frontal lobe. Chemotherapy was going to be miserable, and so was surgery. She was going to become sicker and sicker each day until the cancer was eradicated. If it ever did leave her body. Surgery was to relieve some of the pressure on her brain and to remove one of the smaller tumors. If she survived it, she only had a slow drip of poison to wake up to for unendurably painful radiation therapy.
Sarah thought a lot about her own demise lately, ever since the headaches started.
She was watching Toby when the first blackout happened. He was a cute kid, eight years old. Big blue eyes, a tousled mess of blonde curls on top of his head. Karen liked to keep his hair long, but both Sarah and Toby liked it short. It brought out his perfectly blue eyes. They had been at the park with her friends, a weekly outing for some kind of adventure. That day it had been a trip for ice cream. They were enjoying the last of a lingering few beautiful, sunny days of autumn. She looked up through the few green leaves left, most of them were reds or browns and on the ground decaying. The sunlight hit her eyes forcefully, pushing her eyeballs into their sockets. Into her skull. Or so it felt like.
Her head bounced off of the surprisingly hard clay-like ground.
Toby dropped his ice cream cone and ran to her, the others followed. Vibrating footsteps climaxed a crescendo of throbbing pain she felt through the ground.
"Sar, are you okay?" Voices echoed through her head until they faded into the overwhelming darkness.
When she came around, Sarah endured a long series of migraines. Looking up from the hard, and slightly moist, ground she saw beyond her friends' faces that a storm front was coming. Maybe she had a sinus infection and the pain was brought on by the pressure change. This thought was a weak flutter in the back of her delicate mind, there was an ominous feeling within. There was more to this dizzy spell than she ever wanted to think.
The nauseating dizzy spells had been coming more and more frequently over the past two months. Lightning flashes throughout her body began a few weeks after. She would lose her senses. She would be unable to see clearly. Finally, her father made her go to the emergency room.
Mount Sinai Hospital is where she ended up in the end. Her journey, starting at Saint Barnabas in New Jersey, made a fine tour of the hospitals of New England. Sinai had the best neurosurgeons in the area. It was there where she learned how dire her situation truly was.
She had stage-four brain cancer.
Of this she was sure. After over a month of brain imaging, she came to that understanding. Those big blue plastic sheets with pictures of her mutilated brain on them caused a sweeping, cold feeling throughout her arms and legs. She did not want to admit the diagnosis to her heart. It burned, the truth. The pain swept through and her world crumbled down. But no one was here for her like she had always imagined these kinds of moments.
After the first few doctor visits her family stopped going with her. As if her pain was too much. Too much for them to bear with her.
She drove home with tears threatening to spill over, listening to whatever was on the radio. Not bothering to change it when a bad song came blaring over her broken, tinny sounding speakers. She opened the windows and popped a Percocet, chasing with one of the endless bottles of water she had in the car.
'I'm not addicted, my head just hurts.' At least that's what she told herself. Three full bottles of the addictive pain-killer in one month was a little excessive. Not to mention, this was a long drive to go alone with nothing but your thoughts. The drugs were probably a bad idea for such a long, lonesome drive.
About a four-hour commute from the hospital to her home. Her friends used to come with her, visit her when she needed to stay over night. Then the school year started and she was shut out. A phone call every once in a while to ask her well-being. Sarah hated answering those banal calls. Were her so-called friends honest people, they would just shoot her a text asking if she was dead yet. Morbid curiosity, that was their only true reason for contacting her.
Her college was giving her a leave of absence so she could potentially get better. Rutgers University had given her a partial scholarship for performing arts. She was at the top of her class which didn't give her much time to do anything else. She wrote in her journal and tried to write stories of her own. She didn't like any of them after she writing a few chapters, they didn't precisely capture what she wanted to say.
She had an idea in her head about a rag tag group of friends who work together and defeat an evil king.
Her old friends, Hoggle, Ludo, and Sir Didymus were whom she wished to personify. At least they were her friends until she was a junior in high school. Then they stopped coming to have sleepovers and talk about the lives of goblins and gossip about their omnipotent ruler. She knew, she had met their king, but she could barely remember him. It was like he was erased from her mind. She blamed the tumors.
She remembers their last visit clearly. Hoggle was all put out because his jewels had been stolen from him. There was an underlying mania in his eyes, he was a little too happy to see her. As were the others. After that, she never saw them again.
The red streetlight lit up the tiny droplets of water on her car. They looked like dip-n-dots all over the windshield. When she arrived home, all of the lights were out. She knew Toby would be sleeping; he didn't care for bedtime stories anymore. He was much bigger than he had been during their trials in the labyrinth. As was Sarah. She was a fully formed woman now. Long, dark hair and bright green eyes were the same. But she now adorned long side bangs and a pair of cartilage piercings on her left ear that she had to take out for MRI's.
Her teenaged years had been kind to her. She never had pimples like other people her age and went through the hormone-fueled days gracefully. Boys had always liked her and she had friends. She only had a few boyfriends over the years. But she stopped dating when she was seventeen.
Vomit rose, burning her throat. She blamed the tumors. But she knew what caused her stomach to roil. She didn't think about her high school days anymore and everyone knew not to ask. Dark hair flitted against her cheek from under her knit cap as she fingered through her keys for the one to her front door. A long night was ahead of her. A long night of loss. It was hardly fair. She lost her childhood, and now her future was being ripped from her.