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The (Second) Crisis

January 2015

Out of all of the places Nora Priestley has been in her twenty-three years of life, the inside of a hospital has ultimately been her least favorite.

The walls are too white, the flooring is too sterile, the people are too sympathetic, and the questions that remain unanswered are far too foreboding to make Nora feel any semblance of calm when she's forced to spend more than eight hours a day in the tiny room on the fourth floor.

When she first arrived at Newport Hospital at the end of November, Nora never imagined that she wouldn't be returning back to her tiny, six floor walk-up in the middle of Harlem. She never imagined that she'd spend Christmas inside the suffocating walls of the ICU. She never imagined she'd still be here, weeks later, staring at her mother and researching every article she can find about invasive lobular carcinoma until the foreign words suddenly make sense in her clouded brain.

Nora has heard the phrases "complications" and "rare" and "we're doing everything that we can" far too many times for it to even resonate inside of her head. She's never been a woman of faith before, but after seeing her mother lie in a hospital bed day after day and noticing the blue of her eyes fade away into a dull shade of pewter, Nora's left wondering what there is to believe in anymore.

She's been sitting in this same stiff, uncomfortable chair for almost ten weeks now, heaving a plastic binder filled with medical research article clippings, notes from various doctors, and timelines of her mother's declining health.

It started in November with an impromptu visit to the emergency room. Nora's mother began feeling pain in her chest, but thought nothing of it. She didn't want to worry her daughter or The Clemonte's of a severe case of heartburn, or something as silly as feeling shortness of breath.

But on the day of Nora's twenty-third birthday, her mother collapsed in the back garden of The Breakers.

She only called Nora once she was out of surgery, after her doctor had removed a mass near her left lung underneath her breast. It was supposed to be a smooth surgery—something routine, a procedure that has been performed multiple times with high success rates.

But in the days that followed, her mother didn't get better. The mass turned out to be malignant, and after discovering that they'll need to schedule multiple procedures to continue eradicating the disease from inside her mother's chest, the light at the end of the tunnel was looking more dim than ever before.

Nora's never felt so helpless before. A Communications degree and an affinity for Film did not prepare her for all this talk of metastasis and infection and mortality rates. Being questioned by doctors thrice her age about a history of family illnesses has never left Nora feeling more out of touch, because she has no idea who her family is without her mother.

It's always been just the two of them. A dynamic duo. A tag team of epic proportions.

Nora's first instinct after hearing her mother's diagnosis was to lock herself in her childhood bedroom and scream until her lungs shred to pieces. But with one look at her unconscious mother hooked up to a multitude of machines keeping her heart beating, Nora knew that could not be practical.

So she shoved it all down into the depths of her being and started taking on responsibilities that she never knew existed. She spoke to a financial advisor about developing a plan to pay for all of her mother's procedures, she spent every moment she wasn't with her mother at the library researching clinical trials, and she used up all of her sick days at her shitty office job to make sure she could stay by her mother's side.

Nora's not even sure how December came and went, but now, in the middle of January, she can't even remember that last time she spoke to Ebony. Or Piper. Or Niall, for that matter.