I Needed Saving

Chapter 1: Losing

I never really liked hospitals. The smell of disinfectant never seemed like it wanted to give away any room for you to walk through the space of the hallways. Instead, not only having it being forced up your nostrils because there was no other way for it to go, it made you feel its presence around you.

As I walked down the hallway on the way to see Jake, I was embarrassed to even admit that I felt relief; relief that disinfectant wasn't the only thing triggering my nerve senses on my skin – as well as in my nose of course.

I felt something I had felt so many times before.

Sweat.

I loved the feeling of a cold bead of sweat travelling down my temple and along my jawline before it fell down to the ground, leaving moisture along its tracks on my face. A face covered in sweat was my sign that I had done just enough action for the day. I did hard-core training every day. I simply couldn't go a day without sports.

However, a feeling I hated was being nervous. Nerves are simply signs of wimps. If I ever was nervous, I knew I hadn't prepared well enough and I could simply just skip the test, tournament, match or whatever event. Many people say nerves are healthy and all that, but in my opinion, you could call that a myth. Having no nerves means confidence, having confidence means being doubtless about yourself. And never have I doubted myself; I would hate myself if I did.

Yet, the smell of disinfectant was making me nervous. I wish that was a lie. I had been in the hospital for what you could consider countless of times and the scent of the environment meant nothing to me except for on my first visit when I fractured my knee when I was nine. Ever since I learned what to expect and it just became what I could nearly consider a lifestyle. Most of my injuries were minor, in a sense that they simply needed a cast and time to recover, not necessarily an operation. But I never let anything get in my way, because that is another sign of being a wimp. I never let these injuries prevent me from taking part in sports because that was where my heart and soul rested. And if I turned it down, I would practically be nothing, because a body is nothing without its heart and soul.

One reason I loved sports, was to do it with my best friend, Jake. He was also the reason why I was walking through the hospital doors to the intensive care unit.

It had only been a day since Jake was diagnosed with cancer: leukaemia, to be specific. It came totally unexpectedly. We noticed he was tired very often and complained about his back regularly. However we thought his back aches were just due to the fact he would usually have a heavier bag than us, carrying a laptop and a bloated encyclopaedia on astronomy, his favourite subject. Two days after visiting the doctor the first time because of his back-aches, he returned complaining about severe headaches. They did a CT scan for tumours in his brain and two days later on a Thursday was when they found the killer and he was admitted to hospital. That was yesterday.

"Hello," followed by a break, is what woke me up from dosing away in deep thought. "How is he doing?" It was my dad who had been walking next to me.

"I'm afraid," Jake's dad said, not fully completing his sentence. Jake's father, mother and sister were standing opposite my dad who had turned his back slightly to me.

"They won't let us see him," Jake's mom said, making her husband's point.

I joined the conversation standing next to my dad, facing three quarters of the Rickards family. "How do you mean we can't see him?" I asked, barely believing what I heard was right.

"They say they need to take some important blood tests and take a sample of his bone marrow to test the seriousness of his cancer," Jake's mom replied.