Chapter 1 of The Summer Remains

On a sunny Tuesday morning towards the end of March, a white-haired man walked into a cold room and told me I might die soon.

I fidgeted on the hospital bed as Dr. Steinberg entered, the late-spring sunlight mocking me as it smiled onto the industrial tile floors. I'd known Steinberg since I was four. He'd handled almost all of my throat problems, and I trusted him. He was like a second father to me, and I knew he would always tell me the truth.

That's why the look on his face scared the living shit out of me.

I listened for the next ten minutes as he gave me the gist of the story. It was all so surreal that my mind could only catch certain phrases before the sentence would run away from me again:

Your esophagus has ruptured again, for good this time...

Your stomach is leaking more and more...

Toxicity levels are through the roof...

Your body just isn't getting the nutrients it needs from your feeding tube any longer...

And finally, terminal.

"Terminal?" I heard myself squeak, my throat filling up with that weird, shivery feeling you get when you know your life has just changed. Steinberg suddenly became very interested in a fraying string on the sleeve of his jacket.

"T-terminal," he stuttered. "Summer, the thing is...I'm afraid this is a...well, nobody has ever..."

He finally cleared his throat and met my gaze, tears pooling in the corners of his cerulean eyes. "Sweetheart, I am so sorry to tell you this, but this mountain may be unclimbable for you."

My mother let out a small, sharp sob in the corner and then clapped her hands over her mouth.

"Okay, unclimbable," I swallowed, staring down at the floor as I tried to grasp just what that word now meant to me, and my family, and this weird little life I had created for myself. "Okay. Unclimbable. Okay."

But Steinberg wasn't done yet.

"Hold on. I said it may be unclimbable, not that it definitely will be. I want to prepare you, and I don't want to give you any false hope, but there may be something we can do, Summer. It's a small chance, but still, it's a chance. A Hail Mary, if you will."

I reached up to rub my temples. "Okay, well, survival sounds good. Better than death, I suppose. What is this Hail Mary?"

Steinberg crossed his arms, studied me for a moment, and then took out a chart and launched into a spiel about something called the Porter-Collins Procedure, an extremely major surgery that would perhaps be saving my life in three months' time.

"Nobody has ever survived this particular operation," he concluded a few minutes later, skipping all the medical jargon to keep from boring you to death, pardon my pun. "Nobody. It's been attempted three times, but none of those were ultimately successful. One person survived for three months in intensive care, but she was fifty-one, and in frail health in general. We think you're a much more viable candidate, but then again, there is no way to be sure. We can do it in two, maybe three months, after I've assembled the proper specialists and created a game plan - considering your health doesn't take another nosedive before then, that is. If we're going to try this, we need you in tip-top shape - or as close to that as we can get you, anyway."

"Okay," I said again, sitting a little taller. "And what are the chances that this Hail Mary will even work, and that I won't just die a few days after the surgery, anyway?"