Barakah

- Cursed The Tree (II)

5/02/2023

Doubled the dosage for you guys.

Jalal

She took in right after their union and like all people in love, they were deliriously overjoyed. Times were good. Too good. She should've felt something was amiss. One night, they rushed Jalal to the hospital. He became sick to the point of concern. The doctor had said it was a mild case of anemia.

He was getting to that age of self-awareness. That came with resistance to food. He was becoming a picky eater and Maimuna's pregnancy had her in the worsts of conditions normally. Coupled with her school, she fed him whatever he wanted. She felt terrible in that hospital. Inadequate. He needed a transfusion. Usman had tested, they matched. Everything was fairly okay again. Until approximately three days later, when he developed new symptoms. She noticed a rash first. Diarrhea and a fever that wouldn't go down.

They took him in again. This time, it was different. It wasn't just concern she felt. Fear suffocated her and sure to how she felt, she watched the entire team in the hospital around her become possessed with the same fear she haboured. The panic was infectious, heated. Professionals screaming orders. People moving out of the way.

She herself was screaming for answers. The fear was now a suffering she felt over her entire existence and all she could do was sit and wait and watch. Usman paced around the waiting area while she quietly cried.

"When you came in two days ago, why did you lie about your son's parentage?" The doctor that was seeing them was salvaging whatever professionalism he had left. Enraged. He sounded enraged.

"We didn't tell a single lie," Her voice was hoarded with desperation, "Can you elaborate?"

"You said and wrote that your son wasn't biologically your husband's. That is a lie. Or else he wouldn't be battling for his life at the moment."

She swayed in her seat. Feeling the entire world collide with her full force.

Her six year old battling?

She heard Usman beg her to breathe.

"He isn't biologically my son. I met my wife two years ago."

The doctor persecuted her with a look, "You have no idea?" There was a meaning he was trying to get across.

Maimuna did not catch it. She couldn't anything.

"The reason he fell so ill so suddenly is because of a clinical syndrome. Transfusion-Associated Graft Versus Host Disease. Sometimes, when blood is transfused between close relatives, the recipient's T-cells that are suppose to eliminate the foreign T-cells of the donor doesn't recognize the donor's T-cells as foreign. Because of the blood relation. But the donor's T-cells are well aware that recipient's tissues are foreign. It causes them to proliferate and attack the recipient.

This situation is extremely severe. The mortality rates of this syndrome is outrageously high. It doesn't even matter if the immune system of the patient is healthy. If you had informed us that he was your son's father we would have eliminated the factor of the syndrome by irradiating the donor's cells before transfusion. That would have hindered T-cell activation and proliferation on the donor's side."