Survivin' - [B.C.]

Chapter 14: The Great Leak

"Who are the lucky ones?"

She looked at me with now dark and hooded eyes, her jaw falling slack.

"The ones who aren't dying at a horrifyingly fast rate."

========== SURVIVIN' ==========

It was like I was watching everything in my life being flushed away.

The things that had happened, the things that hadn't happened, and the things that never would happen.

And sitting there, lying in my hospital bed for the second week in a row, I felt powerless. There was nothing I could do to stop it. I was too weak to try. It was too late to start. Fragments of myself moved further and further away as the days drew on to the point where I realized that I could never get them back.

My life had sprung a leak, and I was draining quickly.

The doctors weren't going to do surgery on my lungs to fix the scarring. It was almost impossible to do so. I wasn't stable enough yet to go under anesthesia again, and it wasn't looking like I'd get any better. There was no window the doctors could climb through. I was purely made of glass at this point; if they touched me, I'd break.

Sophie wasn't allowed to come visit me. Ben was given an ultimatum; he could either stay here in the hospital with me as long as I lived, or he could go home and not be allowed back. It was 'too risky,' said the doctors. If someone from the outside came in, if anyone unauthorized came in, I could die.

And so there I was. All alone in my own quarantine. The only thing I had was a regularly sanitized keyboard and a few changes of regularly washed clothes.

The quarantine rooms were quite small and restricted. I guess they were, in the long run, about as normal as regular hospital rooms. But trust me when I say they were smaller.

Mine consisted of a single bed in the dead center of the room, the normal equipment surrounding it, and that was it. A mirror was built into the wall on the opposite side of the great big window. Hey, if they couldn't give me a TV, at least I had a good view of London.

Swinging London, swinging just fine without me...

The antechamber was considered part of my room. It really wasn't. It was a small gap room in-between the rest of the hospital and the area I stayed in. It had shelves with hazmat suits, gloves, goggles, and all sorts of other things. The only four people who were allowed in my room would go through that antechamber to get sanitized and suit up/down before entering/leaving. They were two doctors and two nurses. Night and day shifters. Things apparently get a little more systematic once you're being quarantined from hundreds of other people. Like in my new room, the ventilation brings the air out quicker than it puts air in so that it's always filtering out viruses. I've forgotten what it's like to breathe real air...

Ben had to watch me die from the other side of the antechamber walls. It was sickening to see him distorted through the glass. To see him cry and blame himself. He would talk to me through the phone until his battery died. I would constantly reassure him that this wasn't his fault. What I never said, though, was that it was mine.

I could've done something different. I could have sucked it up and pushed on through life without needing to play piano perfectly. I could have chosen something different. I could have rejected Ben's kind offer and went on to live life like a normal person. But no. No, I was greedy, and I was selfish, and nothing was ever good enough for me.

Toby couldn't keep himself together when I told him what my chances were. I gave him the same story one of my doctors gave me; that the pneumonia I had when I was younger scarred my lungs and marked the beginning of this terminal journey, and now that I had acid burns and another case of pneumonia, it was highly likely I'd be dying in this very same room. Toby didn't handle that well. He cried. He professed his love for me, cried some more, and apologized profusely and asked if he could do anything to help me.