Chapter 52: A Million Miles from Yesterday, A Million More to Go

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

SAM

Before the past week or so, I used to have this notion that I had some kind of complete blueprint of Tree Hill Memorial Hospital mapped perfectly out across the entirety of the perimeter of my brain; that I knew every nook and cranny of this entire place; that I could walk around and get to any given spot with my damn eyes closed… But that, like many other notions that I thought I'd once known for absolute certain in my life, was quickly changing…

I guess I never truly realized how little of my knowledge of the architecture of this place extended beyond the main building, particularly the infamous sixth floor, until now as I found myself being dragged from building to building and doctor to doctor in a single effort to try and control the multitude of problems that seemed to be consistently plaguing my ever-weakening body.

This realization struck me suddenly like they usually do in time with Brooke literally dragging me by the arm down the crowded building just a few blocks down the street from my normal home that had been designed specifically for people looking for outpatient renal replacement therapy… people who, as of yesterday, I suddenly became one of.

In these new and unfamiliar surroundings, I found myself becoming very self conscious, very aware of the fact that my problems were obvious, and the intentions of my visit were clear… I haven't felt this responsive to my physical appearance since that time I'd left the hospital after my very first round of chemotherapy…

I kept just behind Brooke, close to her hip in an effort to sandwich myself protectively between her and Julian right behind me, being sure to avert my eyes constantly downwards the entire time just to avoid all of the gazes of strangers that I knew were pointed right at me.

I suddenly couldn't help but wish very much so that I had thought to wear a paper bag over my head or something… it probably would have attracted less attention towards me anyway… at the very least I wished I'd been smart enough to wear a damn hat or something in a more well-thought effort to try and conceal the more obvious afflictions left by my illness…

But it had been an unusually hot February day this morning when we'd left the house, and I already positively despised wearing hats to begin with… so, obviously not thinking ahead well enough to predict a moment such as this one, I had stupidly decided to just free-ball it, leading me into this situation not so much to be desired… becoming the elephant in the room, the single outcast amongst the group of conformists…

Okay, so that was being dramatic, but you get the point.

"Hi, my daughter Samantha Davis has an appointment with Dr. Nguyen at 10 to start her on dialysis today…" Brooke stopped her rapid motions abruptly in front of the receptionist desk so that I didn't have time to process the sudden cease in movement and crashed right into her… But I don't think she even noticed, at least, she didn't make any move to indicate she did as she spewed her frantic words tainted with nerves over towards the poor, unsuspecting secretary behind the desk and pulled me closer into her side by the shoulder just so that she could prove my existence or something towards the lady…

"Oh… right, Dr. Nguyen is expecting you Samantha. If you want to follow me, I'll get you into a room right away." She uprooted herself from her chair behind her computer and walked behind the desk instantly, indicating for us to follow her lead as she began down the hallway… Oh the benefits of being a cancer patient… you never have to wait for anything.

The three of us followed her down the length of the hallway, passing along rows and rows of chairs, some occupied with individuals young and old tied down to their seats by machines continuously sweeping their very own blood into and out of their body, others empty just leaving me wondering which of these chairs were destined for me.

Ultimately as it turned out though, none of them were, because after a brief walk, we eventually bypassed all of the other patients of this fine ward and rounded into a large room at the isolated far corner of the hallway.

"Okay Samantha, this is where you will be today. Just have a seat and Dr. Nguyen will be with you in just a moment." She motioned towards a large cushioned chair that looked more like a dentist chair than a hospital bed in the corner of the room and I complied to her instructions willingly although I couldn't help but wonder what the hell made me so special to have my own private room while meanwhile everybody else had to suffer through the process of not only having to go through dialysis, but also having to watch the other poor souls, some even more unfortunate than yourself going through the very same thing.

It wasn't ten minutes that the not-as-familiar-as-it-probably-should-be face of Dr. Nguyen knocked awkwardly against the half-open door to make his presence known before sneaking into the room just as I was truly beginning to get myself settled down.

"Good morning Samantha, how are you feeling today?" He asked the question with a forced tone of concern that made me distinctly aware of the fact that he must have learned the concept of bedside manner from a rock or something…

"Just great,"

"Good, good…" He passed over my response airily as he continued to flip through the various pages of my chart, indicating to me that he clearly hadn't even been paying attention to my answer well enough to notice the blatant sarcasm prominent behind my voice.

"Okay," He established the structure of his all work and no play style of business instantly, sitting himself down on top of the empty swivel chair that had been besides my bed/chair thingy. "So I'm not sure exactly how much Dr. Miller actually told you about what we'll be doing here today when you went to see her yesterday, but what we're going to be doing today is get you started on what is called haemodialysis… Basically we'll insert a catheter into your forearm at two different sites, one of which will deliver your blood directly into the dialysis machine and the other which will bring it back into your body… Basically when it's in that big machine behind you there, your blood will be processed and cleaned of any additional fluids and toxins, and then it will be brought back inside of your body."

I felt myself glancing subconsciously to my right towards the giant machine that was easily the rough equivalent of my height and probably about twice my weight… I couldn't help but think that if this stupid thing was supposed to be acting as my makeshift kidney for the next couple of months then why the hell was it so big… I mean maybe it was just me, but aren't kidneys small? Shouldn't artificial kidneys be too then?

"So I know that this all seems like a lot right now, but what will happen is you'll come down here to do all of this four times a week, and each time it will probably last somewhere between three to four hours… but the good news is that in the meantime, you'll still be able to carry on with any other treatments that you may be receiving in terms of your chemotherapy."

I looked up at him with a blank, and genuinely confused expression prominent across my face… I'd barely latched onto a single damn word that he said, but of course, per usual, he continued to carry on as if he hadn't noticed that the expression on my face was the rough equivalent to one I would wear had I just been beaten over the head with a blunt object… Actually, I was starting to get the impression that he was so un-observant that he actually hadn't noticed…

"Okay, so we want to get you started here basically right away, so the first thing that we're gonna be doing is to insert the catheter into your arm. Now usually with patients of your general age group what we do is insert a permanent catheter throughout the jugular vein within the patient's neck or chest directly into the superior vena cava, but because…"

"Because I already have one there…" I finished his sentence for him without particularly meaning to speak out loud, and I quickly acknowledged this brief lapse of self control by opening my eyes wide and flashing a sheepish, apologetic look towards Brooke who was glaring at me warningly as to let me know that unlike myself, she was actually desperately trying to latch onto every word that this doctor had to say without me sneaking my own commentary in between…

"Right, because you already have one there…" He paused, and for the briefest of seconds, I could have sworn that I heard his voice dip in an expression of sympathy so that I was suddenly so shocked with the idea that he might have actually had an emotional capacity beyond that of a blank sheet of paper that I was temporarily left speechless, "We'll be putting a temporary line into your forearm."

He raised his own arm up towards me, motioning quickly with a flick of his fingers for me to extend my appendage in his general direction, so I obliged, offering him my gift in the form of my skeletal left arm as he pulled a black permanent marker out of the left breast pocket of his lab coat and uncapped it.

"The first tube that goes in will be the one taking your blood out of your body and that will go in somewhere around here," He drew a small black X in the center of the underside of my arm, directly over a slightly protruding vein, "And then the second tube, the one that brings your blood back into you after it's all filtered out will go here." He drew a second x just an inch or two below the first… "The lines will come out at the end of each session and then we'll just have to do it again at the beginning of each new one… I know that it seems like a lot of needle pricks and invasive procedures, but considering the hopes are that this whole situation will merely be temporary, Dr. Miller and I are hesitant to put a more permanent line in place just yet… How does all of this sound to you Samantha?"

If he wanted the God's honest truth the whole thing sounded crazy to me… I felt like some sort of obscure science experiment gone wrong, the guinea pig destined for some horrid, under the radar case study or something, but I put my brave face on, because like most of the things that I'd been objected to these past few months, this was just another one of those things that I just had to do…

"It sounds fine."

"Okay, so I'm gonna go get ready to get you all set up over here and after that you'll be all set to go… so I'll be right back, okay?"

"Take your time…" I muttered, watching as he stood and brushed quickly past Brooke and Julian without so much as another word before disappearing completely out the door.

"Are you okay Sam?" Brooke asked me the second that she was positive that Dr. Nguyen was completely out of ear shot, just about the same time that I had taken too distracting my wandering attention by playing with my hands below me…

"I don't like that guy," I sighed, feeling selfish for releasing such a strong complaint but at the same time relieved to have finally just voiced my opinion on the matter.

"Sam… I know that Dr. Nguyen is kind of… well… monotone…" She searched for an appropriate word to use that would be more polite than the one that I was currently thinking of, ultimately settling on an adjective that was the understatement of the century if you asked me.

"I'd get further talking to the freaking wall!" I hadn't meant to yell at her but my pent up frustrations managed to come right out in my tone of voice, a characteristic that was all too common for me, so I knew Brooke wouldn't get offended even though I also knew she wasn't going to take my words lying down.

"Okay, first of all Sam, watch your language, second of all, I know your frustrated, and I know that this situation sucks, but we need to get through this together, as a family okay? And for the record, I know that talking to him is like talking to a wall, but Sam he really does want to see you get better and he's good at what he does and I need you to be in the best care humanly possible so that means we're both just gonna have to suck it up and stick around with him… just think of it as a little extra motivation to get better faster, right?"

I rolled my eyes towards her attempted humor, not particularly because I didn't appreciate her trying to make me feel better about all of these things going around me, but because I knew that nothing she did or said could ever make me feel any better about this…

"Hey," Brooke called my attention back onto her when I simply responded to her previous words with a huff and a cross of my arms as I turned my head determinedly away from her, "This isn't permanent Sam, you won't be doing this forever you know…"

I knew that she was right… somewhere deep down in the back of my mind I knew that she was right when she told me that I wasn't going to be doing this for the rest of eternity… but forever and the rest of my life were two completely different things, and if things didn't start going my way soon… well let's just say that some days, it really did feel like maybe, just maybe I was actually going to be doing this forever… and who knows, maybe even beyond that.

"I know…" I sighed, choosing to agree with Brooke's words strictly for simplicities sake, "It just feels that way sometimes, you know?"

"Yeah… yeah, I know," Brooke nodded her head back to me without a single word otherwise on the matter, and honestly, she was probably the single only other person in the entire world that I would actually believe that answer from because Brooke was the only one around who I knew was trapped inside of this too… Brooke was the only one who was locked inside of this hospital with me, she was the only one who was just as sick as I was, the only one who got better when I got better and got worse when I got worse…

"Okay Sam…" The doctor's re-entry alongside a tray containing a plethora of weird looking items that I knew he was looking to insert into my arm at the current moment wasn't even enough to break the deadlock eye contact I had with Brooke at the moment… In fact, the only thing that ultimately got me to turn away was her short nod of the head; the slightest of indications that it was going to be okay, that she was right here… "Are you ready?"

"I'm ready as I'll ever be I guess…" I sighted out my forced response as the doctor sat himself down in the chair he seemed to have just abandoned…

"Perfect, then let's get you started shall we?" I couldn't help but wonder if I could have stalled this whole process any longer if I simply told him the truth and said that I was nowhere near ready… "What arm do you write with Sam?"

"Right,"

"Alright… then we'll use your left arm for this okay?" I nodded as he indicated silently for me to hand over the aforementioned limb which conveniently was already graffitied with the permanent marker indicated insertion sites he'd drawn down the length of it mere minutes ago.

I complied willingly despite the fact that everything inside of me was just screaming at me to get up and run… I could feel my pulse increase rapidly within each one of my pressure points, my blood pressure sky rocket as he handled my arm with the gentlest of touches and positioned it to his liking against the arm rest.

Besides me I managed to catch through my peripherals the image of Brooke subconsciously scooching her chair closer towards my side and reach down to grab onto my hand without even fully realizing what it was that she was doing.

I couldn't help but smile despite myself; after all, Brooke was intolerably squeamish in these types of situations, and even though I personally had long since gotten used to the needle pricks and invasive procedures that were par to the course of dying, I didn't think that Brooke ever quite did… In times like these, sometimes I thought that Julian and I comforted Brooke more than she comforted me, the thing was, I think that that actually made me feel even better.

"Okay Sam, the first thing I'm gonna do here is inject a local anesthetic into your arm okay… It's only 2% Lidocaine so you know the drill, the numbness should go away on its own within the next half hour or so…" He lowered the tiny syringe consisting of the numbing solution that had saved my life on more than one occasion already and slid it underneath the skin of my arm, pressing at the plunger so that I felt a sudden rush or warmth and then I just felt nothing at all… I didn't even feel the prick, but somewhere to my right, Brooke clutched at my hand even tighter than she already was…

"Sam can you feel any of this at all?" I turned away from Brooke and back towards the doctor, watching closely as he poked gently at my arm with the point of a needle roughly the size of a small tree branch that I knew he intended on putting inside of me… I was suddenly even more grateful for the Lidocaine than I had been even before this…

"No," I shook my head, staring mesmerized at the doctor's motions as the feeling in my arm filtered to one of sudden weightlessness so that it gave me the bizarre notion that my arm wasn't even attached to my body anymore even though I clearly knew that it was.

"Okay Sam, I'm gonna put the first needle in now… you might feel a little bit of pressure in your arm but it shouldn't hurt okay, so if it does I want you to tell me and I'll stop."

"Okay…" I nodded my head confidently but at the same time, released a shaky breath that counteracted all of my movements… but if anybody heard it, they didn't mention anything, because we all just sat there; lingering in a tense silence as we held our collective breaths and watched with wide eyes as the doctor slowly lowered the needle.

The buildup to it all had been so intense that when the actual event proved to be nothing more than uneventful, I was actually sort of disappointed… In fact, the only thing that did happen was that I got to watch as my own blood instantly flew up the length of the clear tubing upon needle piercing vein, so that for a second, it so starkly resembled a mere blood draw that I'd almost forgotten the true intentions of my trip altogether…

"Did you feel that at all Sam?"

"No," I responded airily, my eyes firmly affixed on the fascinating site of the pathway of my own blood as it stopped flowing only upon reaching the clamp Dr. Nguyen had placed in the line only a few inches away from its entrance point against my skin.

"Okay Sam, the next one's going in now…" It was the same thing, the same story all over again, but at this phase of the game, I'd gotten so used to repetition that I barely even noticed.

"Alright Sam, you're all set up over here…" He taped the tubing securely against my forearm, insisting that it wasn't going to be going anywhere anytime soon although a part of me wished that it would somehow magically just kind of… fall out.

"Now what we're gonna do here is to simply just let the lines run…" He spoke as he worked, releasing the firm clamp from around the first line that he'd inserted inside of my arm so that the blood shot rapidly down the length of the free tubing, directly into the awaiting machine…

I watched the trail of red without so much as blinking as it reached the circular pump and filtered around it waiting… always waiting for it to return through to the other side, straight back into my awaiting vein.

"Ah, there it is; it's coming back now…" He pointed out the obvious, because we had all been staring so intently at the tubing just waiting for this exact moment that it would have been impossible to miss it… There was a collective gasp as our breaths hitched inside of our throats, just watching as the stream of blood made its return back out of the machine, running closer and closer to that return port in my lower arm…

I was so convinced that there would have been at least some type of dramatic response towards the official beginning of me starting this supposedly elaborate process… that maybe the sky would fall down, the power would go out, or at the very least, the world would just end completely, that when the only thing that happened upon my body completing this first of many of these kinds of cycles was a strong whooshing sensation that originated from the base of my arm and travelled up my very spine itself, I was more surprised than I probably would have been had the world actually ended or something like that…

"Okay Sam, I'm going to get you all turned on over here and then you will be all set…" He muttered mainly to himself as he began poking firmly at a few buttons over on the touch screen displayed prominently across the top of the dialysis machine before finally turning back towards me… "You'll be all done in four hours okay? I'll be coming back around to check up on you in a few minutes so until then, if you need anything at all I want you to press the nurse call button."

"Will do," I sighed steeply, leaning my body backwards against the surprisingly comfortable headrest behind me, relaxing against the chair figuring that if I was gonna have to be sitting here attached to the wall for the next four hours, I might as well do everything that I could do to enjoy it…

I followed his form as it moved slowly back into the hallway, shutting the door behind him so that suddenly, it was only me, Brooke, and Julian…

"You did great Sam…" Brooke muttered to me, only finding the confidence to release her death grip against my now sore right hand when she knew that the doctor was safely gone…

"You too Brooke," I muttered, giving her the smallest of smirks before matching Julian's gaze, identical to my own in his expression of mutual humor in poking fun of Brooke without her even knowing… but of course, I couldn't help but think that the expression on my face couldn't have been any further from what I had actually been feeling at this point.


It took me less than a single hour into my very first dialysis session to learn that my previous notion that I would be simply sitting here waiting patiently for all of this to be just done and over with was going to be a feat that would be much easier said than it would actually be done.

There had been a dull migraine formulating against the back of my head for hours now; since way before Dr. Nguyen so much as inserted a single needle into my system… but now as time gradually progressed, despite a constant flow of fluids continuously being added directly into my blood line due to the nurse's fear that my headache was actually a symptom of dehydration, it persisted, and in fact, it had only gotten worse, hitting its peak at the approximate one hour mark of my session…

"Sam are you okay?"

I'd been doing pretty well in hiding my growing discomfort thus far, and don't get me wrong, my threshold for pain tolerance was quite high, especially at this stage of the game, but suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, there was a flash of white-hot pain that flashed across my skull as my senses slowly began to shut off and nothing but blackness swarmed in front of my eyes even though they both remained firmly open.

I had turned off all my connections with the outside world in an instant of time that had passed by so quickly, I almost missed it… and even though I wasn't exactly sure what had just happened to me, or for how long it lasted, I knew that judging by the looks on Brooke and Julian's faces when I started coming to again, I was starting to get the notion that it must have been pretty severe…

"Sam?" My eyes first started focusing on basic blurry shapes and a few indistinct colors as my ears started recognizing only the dimmest of sounds once again… The first cognitive observation that I'd actually been able to piece inside of my mind was the fact that Brooke was screaming out my name, begging my eyes to focus on her own as Julian jabbed repetitively at the nurse call button, begging her to move faster….

"Sam look at me… can you hear me? Sam!" Her voice sounded terribly panicked; shaking and rising in volume and inclination as she attempted to force me back into a state of attention by grasping onto my shoulders and shaking my body harshly so that I could literally feel my head rattling around inside of my skull.

"Brooke… Brooke stop, I'm okay, I'm okay." I pushed my body forcefully out of her grasp because I was terrified that if she kept shaking me at the rate she was, I would physically pass out from a combination of the extent of dizziness that I was currently feeling alongside the brutal pain in my head.

"Sam are you okay in here?" Brooke's response was intercepted by the nurse as she came scrambling into my room in response to Julian's persistence in calling out to her.

"There's something wrong," Brooke broke her own analysis of the situation between the nurse's question and my own response before I could so much as open my damn mouth, "She just… I don't know… she kind of passed out… no, that's not right… she went sort of catatonic or something for a minute or so and then she was just… fine."

The nurse turned towards me quickly, stepping away from Brooke in order to approach me as I continued to cradle my aching head between my two hands, still in too much pain to argue that I was just fine.

"Alright Sam… here, just try and relax for me… can you lay down here for a second?" She helped guide me gently backwards against my bed, lowering it downwards until I was flat on my back and free to curl automatically up into a protective fetal position that nurtured the pain suddenly radiating throughout the entirety of my body.

"Okay Sam… what's going on honey?" Her words pierced my skull, magnified tenfold as she shone a light directly into my eyes trying to check the reactions of my pupils… but she might as well have been stabbing daggers directly through me head or something the amount of pain it caused me…

"I don't know," I muttered, tears of pain stinging harshly across the back of my voice, "I've had this headache… all day long and it just suddenly got… it got really bad…"

"Alright Sam… I know you're in a lot of pain right now honey, but I want you to try and relax as much as you can okay? I'm going to take a few vital readings to try and see what's going on here and after that, we'll be able to do something about all of this…"

I didn't respond, sparing her the need to continue speaking as to not waste any precious time as she worked with rapid diligence, moving across my body with a certain amount of grace as she compiled a collection of the physical description of my ever faulty bodily function as it appeared on the computer screen in front of her, emerging in a series of numbers and symbols that I could only pray would tell her exactly what was wrong with me just so that she would be able to actually fix it.

"Alright Sam so what this is looking like to me is that you're just a little bit dehydrated… so this is what I'm gonna do here, I'm gonna lower the amount of fluids being removed just a little bit more okay? Now I know that your head is hurting you pretty bad right now but just give it 15 to 20 minutes to kick in okay? If nothing changes within a half an hour or so just give me a call, alright and we'll try and do something else for you."

With my eyes till firmly closed, the only noise that I could bring myself to actually release in response to her words of wisdom was the briefest of grunts that poised no distinguishable characteristics as to let her know whether or not I'd fully understood everything that she'd just said to me… But thankfully Brooke was there to translate for me, emitting her own words of thanks and understanding, guiding the nurse from the room before returning instantly to my side as if the two seconds that she'd stepped a foot or so away from me was two seconds too long, one foot too far…

"Do you need anything Sam?" She asked me, scrambling just to find something to do with her hands, a characteristic nervous habit that lead her to feel compelled to perform any sort of endless motion.

I squinted open a single eye, trying to let as little light into my senses as humanly possible, relieved for what was probably the first time ever, to find Brooke hovering over me to the point that she was blocking out most of the rays anyway.

"Are you okay Brooke?" I responded to her question with a question of my own, my words eliciting a confused reaction from Brooke, causing her to raise a single eyebrow up at me as she pretended as if she didn't know what I was getting at.

"Shouldn't I be asking you that?" I wasn't sure whether or not that was Brooke's own effort to retort the exact same question I'd just asked her right back at me, but I didn't take it as such because there was something blazoning deep in the back of Brooke's eyes that made me know that there was something else on her mind.

"You've been asking me that all day long," She had tried to change the topic, but I pushed her backwards so that I suddenly felt as if the two of us had switched places or something considering this conversation as usually going the other way around… "What about you?"

We entered into a battle of words, each looking for something else that could ultimately defeat the other.

"I'm okay…"

"You don't look okay." I was only pushy because I had learned how to do so from the very best, but Brooke only looked downwards at me, putting the fakest of smiles on her face that I could tell she hoped I wouldn't see just because my eyes were merely half open.

"Sam… you've been spending way too much time with me lately, you're even starting to sound like me."

"And you're starting to sound like me," I mumbled mainly to myself, not really sure whether or not I'd wanted her to actually hear me. "I don't know, Brooke… you just seem really… flustered today, that's all."

"Sam…" She sighed heavily, fully recognizing the fact that she had caught herself in a trap but simultaneously unsure exactly how she should go about expressing herself, "It's just… it's frustrating sometimes to see you like this… so sick I mean… especially when I can only sit here without being able to do anything about it."

She tried to laugh off the seriousness of her revelation but her words still struck me with a pang of guilt that originated so deeply down inside of my stomach that I had the strangest feeling that I would never be able to get rid of it.

"I'm sorry…" I sighed out my apology and she shook her head at me instantly, reaching down to place a firm, supportive hand between the space between my neck and shoulder, squeezing gently, yet still tightly just so that I would know that whatever she had to say next, she meant it.

"Don't be sorry Sam; it's not your fault… I never want you to think that it's your fault, okay?"

She was determined to get her point across but a part of me still felt as if it was, after all, if it wasn't for me getting sick, none of us would have ever been in this mess to begin with.

"I see that look Sam," Brooke called me back to attention with a small smile, "I'm serious, stop blaming yourself okay… sick or not, I'll always be worried about you… I'm your mom that's what I'm supposed to do."

I smiled briefly upwards towards her, but the second our eyes met, I was forced to look away awkwardly as I thought about what Brooke had just told me… I thought about what her words meant, I thought about what she meant…

It's not exactly a secret that growing up I never really had anybody around to ever tell me something like that before… I'd lived the majority of my life surrounded by nothing but pessimists, people who used to always tell me that if I ever truly found somebody who I loved with all of my heart, then I would just let them go because people like me… people who have more pain in their lives than most others could even keep track of always just ended up transferring all of that pain onto the people that they love…

It was the only lesson that I had ever taken away from living with any one of my foster parents, and ironically, now that I was finally with that one person that I truly loved, that I truly cared about, watching as she grabbed spare blankets and wrapped them comfortably around my body, it was the only thing that I could think of…

Everything inside of me was screaming at me to let her go before I hurt her even more… I don't know, maybe I was being selfish, maybe I was being unfair, but I'd never had anybody like Brooke before, and now that I did, I couldn't help but push that voice aside and never let her go.. I guess all I could think of now was how much I hoped that that held true the other way around too.


BROOKE

There was something strangely hypnotic about sitting in a chair besides your daughter's hospital bed watching as a machine filtered her blood continuously into and out of her body.

Wow… I never thought that I would ever say that before… hell, I never thought that I would ever find myself in a situation where I would actually have to say that, but here I am, and as nervous as I had been this morning, I was actually surprised by how melodically soothing all of this actually was… I mean, now that Sam was peacefully asleep and not practically crying from the amount of pain that she had been in like she was before…

It had literally cleaved my heart into two distinct pieces, seeing Sam like that had, after all, I felt like the last time I had seen Sam that sick and in that much pain was when I'd been sitting at her bedside watching her barely cling to her life as she fought the pneumonia infection ravaging her exhausted, battered body… and I'm not sure about everybody else, but I personally knew for a hard fact that I wasn't ready to go back to that quite yet…

These past few days, seeing Sam start to fall into a pattern of being that sick all over again has kind of thrown me out of the loop by bringing me into this strange sense of a déjà-vu-like experience that I didn't enjoy in the slightest… It made me feel nuts, it made me feel like I was slowly falling into a bottomless pit of insanity and worst of all it made me feel helpless,

Because if there was one thing that I absolutely hated feeling when it came down to Sam, it was helpless.

But she was asleep now; her face contorted into a calming sense of a painless bliss that I knew had a lot more to do with the painkillers they'd given her over an hour ago now than it did her actually feeling better… But still, the point was that it was one of those rare moments that that I actually felt as if I could spare taking some time to actually relax… for at least a little while anyway…

"Hey, are you okay?"

Julian had been sitting next to me embracing the silence that has plagued us with our hands unconsciously clasped around each other's for comfort for the past several minutes now, but I think that finally, he just couldn't take it anymore or something, and had to ask me the question before he could watch me plunge off the deep end anymore than I already was or something…

"Huh?" I snapped my head up into a look of attentive focus, ripping my eyes off of the rotating wheel circulating Sam's blood for her for the first time in what seemed like forever.

"You're just looking a little pale that's all."

"Oh…" I muttered… I'd spent this entire morning so wrapped up in worrying about Sam that I'd actually almost forgotten that I'd woken up this morning feeling slightly sickly, a feeling that had been getting progressively worse and worse all morning…

When I got up in the morning, it was with this unsettling feeling of nausea deep within the pit of my stomach, one that had gotten so intense at one point it nearly sent me straight to my knees… But ultimately I had prevailed against the power of the vomit at just about the same time that my head began to twinge with one of those tension migraines that I had become so prone to lately…

I'd passed it off as nerves instantly, playing it off as my own worry for Sam as I prepped her to begin this first day of dialysis… and still, as the familiar feeling slowly began to run through my bloodstream once again and my tired body slid down the length of my chair more and more with each passing second, I still didn't quite think that that didn't have something to do with it…

"I'm fine," I sighed, raising myself upwards in my chair in a subconscious effort to at least look the part that I was trying to play here, "It's just all this stress… this stuff going on with Sam… It's all starting to get to me a little bit I think."

I could tell instantly by the look in his eyes that he didn't believe me… I couldn't blame him really, the three of us have been spending way too much time with each other lately… we could read a lie on each other's faces from a mile away.

Hell, you'd have to be trained as a damn CIA agent to get away with anything between the three of us.

"You know Brooke, if you're sick around Sam and she picks up whatever it is that you have, it could make her really sick again… and you know as much as I do that something as simple as a cold would be enough to kill her at this point…"

He tried to guilt trip me into starting to consider my own health instead of just thinking primarily of Sam's, reminding me that when you truly thought about it, the two of those things really did go hand-in-hand…

But I didn't like to think about it that way because I never wanted to think that my persistence in fighting alongside Sam in the battle for her own life would actually be what ultimately killed her…

Julian's words struck me with a strong pang of guilt, the idea ripping through the back of my mind that I knew, and that Julian knew that I would never do anything to ever intentionally hurt Sam… but still, something was screaming at me from inside of my skull that no matter the risk, no matter what could maybe happen, to leave Sam now when she needed me the most would just be impossible, irresponsible even… even more irresponsible than not leaving her would be.

"I… I…"

"Hi guys, sorry to interrupt…" I was spared the need to come up with a viable, believable excuse as to why I should stay firmly attached to the seat I'd been sitting in for the past two hours by Sam's nurse, Sue, who had been filtering in and out of Sam's room to check on her all day long, "But I was just talking to Dr. Nguyen and he wanted to keep Sam here at least over night just so that we can keep an eye on her vitals tonight because she took to the dialysis so hard today."

I released an audible sigh; Sam wasn't gonna like that one bit when she found out, but still, I couldn't lie and pretend as if after what I'd just seen her go through today, that I didn't think that the idea wasn't for the very best.

"Ms. Davis are you feeling okay, you're looking a little bit pale?" She echoed the exact same words that Julian had just said to me not five minutes ago now and I couldn't help but flash Julian a subconscious glance to see what his response to her words would be…

As expected, he was giving me that characteristic "I told you so" type glare, but it wasn't one of those cocky expressions of him simply trying to bust my balls in order to prove his point, no, it was more like a look of concern, him begging me to consider the statement now that it seemed to be the popular observation.

"I'm fine, I'm fine…" But now that I was outnumbered in the vote on my own health, it was beginning to get harder and harder for me to convince not only everybody around me of that fact, but myself as well.

"You know Ms. Davis, we have a lot of parents in here who are all determined to be there for every single minute of their child's care and I know the feeling, trust me I do, but we always tell them all the exact same thing… you have to take care of yourself too… don't worry, we'll take good care of Sam for you."

I smiled appreciatively up at the nurse; you see, it didn't take me very long into Sam's very first hospitalization here to learn that it might have been the doctor's carrying Sam's pathway to health for her, but it was the nursing staff that carried not only that, but everything else as well… They were all godsends, really they were…

"Yeah… Brooke you should head home and get some rest. Listen, I'll stay here and watch Sam for the night… You go home, get some sleep, and when you feel better in the morning you can come back, and we'll all still be right here." Julian jumped quickly onto the 'let's get Brooke the hell out of here' bandwagon, pushing for my departure so that it was starting to get harder and harder to deny the fact that I knew that he was right.

"Yeah… yeah you're right…" I caved easily after only a couple of incredibly tense seconds, standing from my seat with a stretch so that I could attempt and relax my muscles, cramped stiff from sitting down for so long.

"Will you call me when she gets done?"

"Of course I will." Julian nodded his head assuring, his voice sounding as if he'd thought me stupid to even think I had to ask the question at all.

"But if she wakes up before then, make sure that she calls me okay?" I spewed a multitude of orders for Julian to consider out of my mouth even though I knew that Julian would take good care of her no matter what.

"I will…" He probably thought that I was crazy, but he also knew that I was in a fragile state of mind at the moment, so he played along with my game, and I truly did love him even more for it.

"Okay…" I paused briefly, struggling in my effort to come up with things to say because now that my jacket was on, my bag was around my shoulder, and I'd given Julian a simple set of ground rules, I was out of things to do that could possible stall my departure any longer, "So I guess I'll just… talk to you later then."

"Yup… and I promise, I will call you the second that she's finished with her dialysis… or the second she wakes up, whichever comes first." He repeated my former instructions just to prove to me that he'd gotten them down pat.

I took a step backwards, ready to leave but at the very last minute, went back on my own motion, retreating forward where I fell into Julian's awaiting arms and buried my head into his chest in order to allow the comfort of his touch to fully charge me considering I'd have to go an entire night alone without it.

"I love you." I mumbled into his shirt, seemingly unable to pull my face up from it.

"I love you too." He told me, forcing my body away from his because he knew that if he didn't do at least that for me, I would have just stayed here all day long, "No go; get yourself to CVS or something, pick up some medicine, feel better, and then I'll see you tomorrow okay?"

He gave me distinct instructions before lowering his head in order to offer me a quick kiss goodbye although it was nothing as elaborate as I would have liked…

"Okay I'll see you later." I took a couple of seconds in order to build up the motivation that I knew I needed to leave both him and Sam, and I must admit it took a lot, but eventually, I'd managed it.

I followed his direction carefully, driving myself home but not before making a pit stop to the local pharmacy first… but while I was there it wasn't Tylenol or Nyquil or any sort of other ridiculous over the counter drug that I went to go pick up, no… instead, I bought something else… because as much as I was trying to convince myself that what I thought was making me sick wasn't actually what was making me sick, I was quickly running out of excuses, and as terrifying as it was to me, it was time to actually stop and face facts.

When I opened the door and walked back into my own home, I was a little bit surprised to see Victoria on the couch watching TV… although I did have a theory that Victoria secretly did like my house much more than she actually liked her own…

"Brooke," She sounded just as shocked to see me as I was to see her as she stood up and walked over to meet me halfway, "Where's Sam and Julian… I wasn't expecting you guys to be home so soon."

Her voice presented as nervous, afraid that just because I had come home not only by myself, but ridiculously earlier than expected, that something must have gone terribly wrong…

"Sam and Julian are still at the hospital, Sam wasn't done with her dialysis yet and besides, they're keeping her overnight because they said she was a little dehydrated… Julian sent me home because I was feeling sick."

"Are you okay?" Her attention shifted onto me instantaneously because with everything going on right now with Sam, our fears when it came down to illness with any of us were exponentially heightened to the point of a panic… None of us were very soon to forget the fact that what had began with us thinking that Sam had nothing more than a bad viral infection had actually turned out to be something much, much worse…

"Yeah I'm fine, I'm fine." I waved off Victoria's concern because I knew that it was unwarranted, "I'm just gonna get some sleep okay?"

"Yeah," Victoria replied to me, a note of uncertainty still prominent in her voice, "Yeah that's fine… but I'll be here if you need anything okay?"

She called the last of her words after me as I was already well on my way to my bedroom and I didn't even bother to turn around; instead, I offered her the simplest of waves that I hoped she would be able to translate as an affirmative response as I turned into my bedroom and shut the door softly behind me.

For a while I just stood there, back against the door and breathing heavily as I willed myself forward to do what I knew I had to do.

It took me nearly five whole minutes to finally gain the strength in my muscles to will my body forward, but even after I'd done that, it had taken me equally as long to force myself to sit down against my bed, equally as long to finally pull the CVS bag hidden away in my purse out, and double the total time of all of that combined to regain control of my breathing long enough to find the strength inside of me to will my hand into the plastic bag and pull out its contents…

And still, after all of that, I couldn't even bring myself to so much as glance down at the pregnancy test that I was currently clutching onto in a solid death grip between my two shaking hands.