Spiraled ⚪⭐⚪⭐ (A Brollins Novel)✔

EPISODE TWENTY-FOUR

Institute Of Medical Specialists. Los Angeles, California.

If there's anything Rebecca despises more than vanilla along with its painful allergic effects, it's the scent of hospitals. According to her family's persistent claims, events she recalls from the time during her childhood when she'd spent about a year and a half at a hospital, are woefully incorrect. Her mother in particular, insists they’re all borne out of nightmares and delusions; the fears and panic of her last episode playing a huge part in conjuring up dark delusions in her head. Her family wholeheartedly believe since she can't even recall the exact details of how the birth of her cousin came to be when she was eight, she can't possibly be accurate in her recollections when she’d only been five years old.

But every time Rebecca steps inside a hospital, or sees family members in waiting areas, faces ashen and petrified, she has fuzzy but very much detailed memories of her own father and mother, each hunching on either sides of a stretcher she's lying on, telling her over and over again in high pitched voices that she's going to be okay. But all a five year old Rebecca gave them are fearful glances, as if her immature mind could somehow comprehend that the minute she's taken away from her family to the operating room, the chances of her making it back alive are as slim as a needle.

She can recall Fergal, barely six, crying on his aunt's lap in loud wails, the lollipop in his hand meant for appeasement forgotten, as he struggle to get out of his aunt's clutches to his sister. But their aunt Christina, maintains a tight hold around his small waist while her husband and Rebecca's uncle, Dan, muttered something unintelligent under his breath. By the glare his wife had shot up at him, Rebecca can understand now, whatever her uncle must've said hadn't been anything kind.

The echo of wheelers screeching on the tile floor as the nurses drove the stretcher to the operating room still manages to ring loud in her ears, as though it'd only happened yesterday. Rebecca can very much recall the stinging point of a syringe piercing into the skin of her arm, can remember a nurse snatching away her doll from her chest without explanation and how her senses had lost the meaning of reality and dreams before her wide, fearful eyes had finally shut close.

It was only when she was fourteen, when she was old and mature enough to understand her health condition did she come to realize she hadn't exactly fallen asleep as she'd thought at the time. She'd been rendered unconscious to allow the doctors to work on her with practiced ease, to reduce whatever pain that may have been inflicted on her if she were awake and no matter how silly and insignificant, it was comforting to know at the time that each person scheduled for an operation has to be sedated into unconsciousness.

Knowing this had made Rebecca feel less unique, less bitter and resentful about her health. But with everything that had occurred to her four years ago, she believed then, she was not only cursed but that her entire life has been unfair.

The world has truly been unfair to her for a long time, in so many situations in her life that often enough the mere act of breathing becomes pointless. Reliving memories has often been a tedious job for Rebecca, the source of her greatest pain and desperation but she has come to accept that to move on and enjoy this new chapter of her life, she'll have to embrace and accept those memories. The good and the bad. The happy and the sad ones. It's the only way she'll be able to move on and give the best of herself into this new-found relationship with Colby and phase in her life.

So although she feels nauseous right now inhaling in the frigid, sickly scent of the hospital, even though she feels like bolting down the staircase she'd arrived by, she forces her butt to remain planted down on the chair. Grief gradually swarms its way up her chest watching a family of three standing a few feet away from where her and Colby along with his friend Joe, are seated at the waiting area of the Emergency Department, wailing over a beloved a doctor came to announce is dead ten minutes ago.