Title: Live Like You're Dying
Rating: PG
Summary: Just a short drabble I wrote after watching the episode containing Izzie's wedding. I cried so much and got so emotional that this was the only way to stop myself 'overfeeling'. Haha.
Disclaimer: I own nothing apart from the writing. That's mine biatches. Oh and the title from this fic is the song Live Like You're Dying – Lenka. It's good :)
It becomes very easy to pick a best day of your life, when you realise that you won't have much opportunity to make yourself a lot of choices. I can't believe the dress fitted. I can't believe she gave her day to me. I can't believe I managed to convince myself for weeks on end that I was planning the day for her.
I can't believe I'm dying.
I can't believe he's stood by me. He apologises, often, when he cries. He thinks I don't hear him, but sleep doesn't come that easily when you're hooked up to a thousand wires and tubes, and even when it does, it's easily punctuated by a shaking sob or a heaving breath. I love him, and he knows that. But this isn't how we're supposed to love. We're supposed to show how much we mean to each other in our own home, over breakfast that I've prepared, with our children reflecting our best and worst character traits and history repeating itself as they grow into troubled young adults.
Instead, he tells me he loves me over my daily cocktail of pills, the sting of a new intravenous drip and the perpetual bleeping of the machines that fill my hospital room. We don't say it much, because we don't need to. Also, I think that it sounds too much like a goodbye lately. Or like we're frantically grasping at "I love yous" to keep us going. Because that's all we have together anymore; love. I make that sound like a bad thing. It's not. I just wish we had something other than the fear that grows in his eyes whenever my stats drop, or I lose more hair. He makes me feel beautiful and fragile all at once. He makes me want to be strong, because I can't bare to see that I'm making him fall apart. He's supposed to be my knight in crinkly blue scrubs, and Derek wields his scalpel bravely in the face of my tumour.
But he can't get this one out. I am resigned to my fate. Which is sitting in a hospital bed and waiting for Denny to come and take me to wherever it is we go after we die. I've never asked Denny that, in all my hallucinations. Mostly because I never thought I'd be going there until I was older and wiser, so much so that I had my own ideals of life-after-death. There has to be something, right? I've saved lives. I'm a good person. I deserve more than this. This undignified silence when I'm too weak to say anything. When I'm too weak to squeeze my own husband's hand and tell him it'll be alright. That I'll spontaneously get better and we can quit our jobs at sixty-five and move to the coast, seeing our grandchildren once a week.
I'm just so tired, so tired and weak. I don't complain about the ache because I can't, but it grows a little everyday. It knocks at my organs and asks to be let in, and foolishly, so foolishly, they let it in. Their like me; always giving, always helping. It's a stranglehold around my heart. I can't feel anymore, can't show emotion, because schooling my features into anything other than a pained mask uses up my energy. And I want to use that energy on something worthwhile, like foolishly babbling to Alex when the morphine is just kicking in that someday we'll get out of here. I know I shouldn't do it. Know I shouldn't fill his head with pretty little thoughts of what our babies would look like, that we could get a dog, and a big house with land. That he could be the up and coming new surgeon in the hospital, the "one to watch", just like the chief said, with me scrubbing in right beside of him. But I have to. Even false hope, it's better than no hope at all. And I can't bare to see him so dead. I'm the one that's dying. I'm the one who has to watch everyone else move on. I feel selfish for marrying him, sometimes, when I see Owen Hunt and Christina blatantly trying to deny their attraction, their love. I see Meredith and Derek so content with each other. I see Mark Sloan and Little Grey pretending they don't love their rebellious relationship. I even see Calliope going against everything she's been brought up to believe is right, so she can love the person she wants.
I made the right decision. I picked a winner, a handsome, successful, up-and-coming young man who gave me a second chance. Who loved me for being me, my overly-talkative self. And now he has to sit here and watch me fade away, like an ageing pageant Queen. Like a withering rose. I'm not getting much sunlight you see. They say you're supposed to approach this big white light. This blinding, white light. But you don't. All you feel is thick, suffocating darkness that squeezes all your enthusiasm out of your pores and drags everyone else around you down too. No-one smiles at me genuinely anymore. If they do, it's genuinely sad.That pitiful smile that people would use to talk to me years after I'm gone when they say I was a promising doctor. Goddamn. I modelled my way through medical school (And got plenty of flack from it from my eventual co-workers), degraded myself by using my body for money, and this, this was what I had to show for it. I worked hard for everything in my life, and all I got back for it was this big "fuck you" from God. I'm a good person. My friends are good people. My husband is a good person. And I'm killing them. I'm killing them all. I make them feel guilty for having a good time, for looking at each other and knowing they have a future together. I feel selfish. I let Alex marry me when I'm going to die. I'm going to die.
The words resonate purposefully. And no matter which word I put the intonation on, the meaning is still loud and clear. Just like when I shouted at Alex that I cared about him. It just sucker punches me in the gut every single time it pops into my head. And it does so randomly. I have to say it, when it pops into my infected brain. "I'm going to die". I have to say it, because if I don't keep reminding myself, sometimes, when the morphine kicks in, it's easy to forget. And then I just have to deal with the harsh realisation when I catch a glimpse of myself in a reflection that my skin is still sallow, my eyes are still dull and flat. My head is still balding. I've done it once or twice when Dr Bailey was in the room. During the first couple of weeks, she used to assure me I was not. Now, she can't meet my eye, and she tries to hush me instead. They don't want to listen, because they can't deal with it. They can't accept that I know that I'm weakening. I'm crumbling under the stress, under the physical strain. Under the emotional weight that I am dying. I will never see another Christmas. I will never perform my first solo surgery. I will never feel a life growing inside of me. There are so many things that I will never do.
The things I will do seem pale in comparison. I will die in pain, or unaware I'm even slipping away because of the high dose of morphine. Maybe I'll ask for reduced pain relief so I can remain lucid enough for Alex's goodbyes to be heard properly. I will, eventually, lose all of my hair. I will join Denny in the great unknown. I will hate myself for not grasping his message sooner. I will watch Alex move on, and find someone who'll be a great wife to him and a great mother to his children. I will be remembered, painfully, by friends and family, not as Izzie Stevens, the great doctor, or the happy, bubbly girl who got too attached to her patients. I will be remembered as the doctor-turned-patient. I will be the Dying Doctor. My legacy is nothing more than a hospital lawsuit, a string of tumultuous romance, and a sickly, pallid expression with dead brown eyes.
I cannot believe that I am dying.
But I have to.