It was when I was eight that the cancer sprang up the first time.

I was just an innocent little third grader, who was best friends with a girl named Valerie. I loved playing jump rope at recess and I was starting to love my little brother, Gabe, who was old enough at this point to start doing things like walk and talk. My older brother PJ was in the fourth grade and he was starting to like me a little bit more, too. I played with my dolls all the time and Valerie and I often had tea parties with our toys. Everything was perfect.

But one day, Valerie and I were jumping rope at recess and it was getting harder and harder for me to breathe right. I was in the middle of my favorite jump rope rhyme (Cinderella, dressed in yellow...) when I suddenly got very winded and Valerie stopped jumping, too. "Teddy?" she asked. "Are you okay?"

I tried to nod my head 'yes', but I was too winded to say anything, and the shortness of breath turned to coughing. After a while, the coughing subsided and I said, "I'm fine, Valerie. I just had a cold and I think I'm still sick."

I told my mom about it and I stayed home from school again the next few days. After a week or two of medicine, though, the coughing did not go away. If anything, it got worse, and I was constantly begging for medicine to make it go away. Mom didn't know what to do anymore. Should she give me the medicine, or let the coughing continue and just hope it was something simple, like allergies? Maybe I was allergic to something and we didn't know. She hoped that there was an explanation for it.

When I was remotely better, Mom shipped me off to spend the weekend at Valerie's house. Everything about the house just screamed prim and proper. I felt so out of place there, but Valerie was my best friend. I let it slide. We were in the middle of playing with Barbie dolls (Valerie's was named Veronica and mine was Liz, and they were sisters who were going to a ball) when I got very tired. I tried to shake it off, but then, the coughing started again.

"Gross!" Valerie said when it started. "Mom! Teddy's sick!" she called down the hall, as I continued to cough and wheeze.

Mrs. Azevedo rushed in, watching me hack and struggle for my breath. "I thought you were feeling better, Teddy?" she implored rather disdainfully, but all I could do was shake my head, I was coughing so bad.

I managed to squeeze out, "Need...mom..." before it became so difficult to breathe that I couldn't even cough. The last thing I remembered happening was Mrs. Azevedo screaming and Valerie staring.

I woke up in an ambulance, with Mom holding me and PJ in the front seat. Mom didn't have a sitter for him, and Gabe was with my father, so he needed to come in the ambulance. Mom wrapped one of my blonde curls around her finger, allowing her hand to run through my long hair. She kissed me and said that everything was going to be okay. I was just going to the hospital. She assumed that I had asthma.

It was during that time that I let out a very loud scream, as a sudden pain crept into my shoulder. It hurt so horribly that I wanted to just rip my arm off, anything to stop the pain. Mom was asking the EMTs what was going on, but no one had an answer. Instead, they were teaching me how to focus on breathing and not think about the pain. It hardly helped.

When we arrived, the first thing they did was put me in a wheelchair and had me put on a children's gown, then a doctor came in and listened to the sounds of my breathing. He said the results were 'troubling', then asked Mom if she would allow me to go through an MRI and an X-ray. This set her on edge, but she agreed, and since I was so young and afraid of being away from my mother, they gave me a mild sedative before the MRI. They also did some blood work, and I didn't hold back on a scream as they stuck the needle in my arm. While we waited for results, Mom held me on her lap and read me a book, while PJ fidgeted endlessly. They brought me back again to do a PET scan. I couldn't hardly handle any more.

As soon as the results were back, the doctor sat Mom down and said that they wanted Dad there. He arrived with Gabe, and he and PJ were given to nurses to watch. They put me between my parents in a tidy, barren room and said, "Based on the combined results of the MRI, X-ray, and blood sample, we believe that Teddy has lung cancer. Unfortunately, the PET scan revealed that it may have progressed as far as stage III."

There was a heavy silence until Mom said in dismay, "Stage III?"

"Yes, Mrs. Duncan. Cancers in children are much harder to catch early, and lung cancer in general is extremely hard to find. You are very lucky indeed that she is not at stage IV."

"Are you sure that this is right?" Dad asked, turning white. I didn't understand what was going on, except that I knew that cancer was very, very bad.

"Yes, Mr. Duncan. We are preparing a room for Teddy now. We want to put her on oxygen and then we will discuss treatment options with you."

And from then on, I was in and out of the hospital. Gabe didn't know what was going on, but PJ sure did: his sister was dying.

Miraculously, even though the five year survival rate with stage III lung cancer was only around thirty percent, I went into remission. I was back at school regularly with Valerie and her friends by the fourth grade. It was the radiation therapy, they thought. The tumors seemed to shrink, and everything was normal.

But in the eighth grade, it started again.

A cough.

Somehow, after the run in with cancer, I never seemed to get sick, ever. I never had a cold, a flu, anything, even though Mom grew worried about giving me a flu shot and putting me at risk of catching the flu from the strain of the virus they put in the vaccinations. When I told Mom about it being back, she gave me more allergy medications, and that was that. And when that didn't work, cough syrup. And when that didn't work, she took me again to see the doctor.

After doing a few tests, he said that everything was fine and sent me back on my way. Mom supposed that she believed him because she wanted to believe him, not that she felt that he was telling the truth. I think she was right; the coughing never seemed to let up, though my appetite did. I was probably eating a third of what I did before and had lost a significant amount of weight. But the thing that troubled Mom most was when I started to hack up blood.

She took me to a different doctor, since the first didn't do any good. He said I was fine, too; I probably just had pneumonia or bronchitis. Mom didn't agree. "Is there another specialist that we can see?"

He was angry, but he sent us back to an urgent care clinic. The doctor there reminded me of my second grade teacher, in that he loved children and spoke to them like grown ups, but with words that they would understand. After running some tests, though, he lost this attitude and became serious, and then he asked for the phone number of the first doctor. When Mom asked why, he said, "He should have realized it sooner..." He walked out of the room, shaking his head. He was gone for some twenty minutes, then he stepped back in and said, "Mrs. Duncan, Teddy's cancer is back. It has progressed. She now has stage IV lung cancer."

I started to cry so hard that I was afraid of losing what was left of my lungs. Mom pulled me out of school; I knew I was done for. I called Valerie all the time, but she never answered. She had moved on. She had new friends. She didn't need what was left of Teddy Duncan as a friend anymore. This time around, Gabe understood exactly what was happening.

Before, doctors said that if the radiation therapy didn't do anything to help my cancer, they would operate on my tumors. They were still at the operable point. But when I took up permanent residence in the hospital the second time around, radiation therapy proved useless. They set me on chemotherapy, and all of my hair fell out. What was worse was that it didn't seem to help either, and the tumors were no longer operable. That was when I started to cry. My doctor set me up with the Make A Wish Foundation, and that was when I knew I was dying.

I ended up wishing to go to Disneyland, the run of the mill wish. Sometimes, I wished I hadn't wasted my wish on such a trivial thing. But we actually had a pretty decent time there, even though Gabe was too young to really go on any of the rides I wanted to see. Thus, we took advantage of using an option called 'child swap', where PJ and I could go on the rides with one of our parents while the other waited with Gabe, and then the other parent would go with us when we were done.

One day, we were eating lunch at the Blue Bayou (the restaurant inside of the Pirates of the Caribbean, which was paid for by Make A Wish), when Mom got a phone call. When I got back from the vacation, I was to go back to the hospital. They found a new drug that they thought could spare me. It was risky to use and might not work the way it was intended to, but Mom and Dad thought it was worth a shot.

The drug sedated my tumors, and though it didn't permanently stop their existence, it did keep them at bay. I was finally taken off chemotherapy, and slowly but surely, my blonde hair grew back in, falling around down my chin. During this time, I found out Mom and Dad were going to have another baby. All I could think about at the time was that my parents were trying to replace me. I was going to die, and they knew it, so they needed another baby to fill the void. To this day, I still don't know how true the statement is.

A few months later, my little sister Charlie was born. I was checked into the hospital when she came, and I got to be the first one out of Gabe, PJ, and myself to hold her. Immediately after, they gave me another round of the drug. It wasn't enough, though. I was always short of breath and no matter what, doctors just didn't know what to do. They gave me an oxygen tank and a cannula and told Mom, "This has worked with other patients. We'll try this for a little while."

I suppose that they meant a little while in referring to how long they thought I was going to live, as 'a little while' folded over into a few years, and I started to lug around an oxygen tank everywhere I went. It wasn't the same as having functioning lungs, of course. Nothing ever would have been.

With me not being at school, I was not very social. Mom was desperate to get me out of the house so I could "have fun", as she said. Anything would have been more fun than dying, I'll admit, but there was nothing I could have done to make me feel totally normal.

That was when PJ came home one day and told us about his friend, Spencer. Spencer was in AP Psychology and wanted to be an actual psychologist when he was out of high school. His cousin had been diagnosed with leukemia and he wanted to do something to make a difference. That was when he decided to hold the support group at a local church. PJ had said this casually to Mom, but she decided it was a good idea and forced me to go.

Sadly, shortly after the meetings started, Spencer's cousin, Lola, lost her battle with cancer and passed away. That was when I figured it was only a matter of time before it was my turn, and started to distance myself from all of my earthly possessions, just so that I wouldn't be leaving much behind when it was the end of my road. I asked my mom, once my hair started to grow back out, to take me back to the salon. I left with my hair cropped short—it was a bit longer than a pixie cut, but still so short that I couldn't do anything with it at all. That was the way that I looked when I met Emmett for the first time. Sure, if I was feeling fancy I could put in clips and headbands, but that was about it.

And that was when Emmett entered my life.

I know it's been FOREVER since I updated, but I've been thinking a lot about this story (and others). This chapter is kind of meaningless, but it was important to highlight what Good Luck Charlie canon I would be adhering to and the fanon that I created for this story. Um...yeah. Please review! There's a link on my profile to what Teddy's hair looks like (if you can't find it, just search 'Teddy's hair' using Ctrl + F).

- Hatter of Madness