#iGotCancer Bites

F i v e

Lights

My name is Luna. I used to be the bright side of the moon, the light in the night, or at least that's what my mother told me. But these days I was no longer the light in the dark for I had been sucked into the nothingness myself.

No visions of sugar plums are dancing in my head instead I'm going through another round of chemo and fighting against cancer.

My dream ends abruptly and my brain kicks on.

It's Christmas Eve.

My eyelids fluttered open giving me a lovely view of reality. My reality consists of a white room, with linoleum flooring that's suspiciously sticky. While the room smells pungently of Lysol with a hint of vanilla. All topped off with one bed, three of those good posture chairs and one wide window.

That window is the only entertainment I have. The result? I usually stare out of it for hours at a time. Today, the curtains were slightly parted allowing moonlight to leak into my room. It crawled across the floor, casted an eerie shadow over my mother, who is curled up in one of the chairs, before finally caressing my bed post.

I threw a glance at my mother her mesmerizing green eyes hidden under tired eyelids. I don't blame her for sleeping; I can't imagine how hard it must be to have a daughter with cancer. I've pretty much drained her dry, financially and mentally.

But having her laying here looking so vulnerable it's the perfect time to go outside and see the moon. Right now is my time. I throw the covers off of my legs and quickly pull the IVs out of my arm. My legs and arms shake with the excitement of what I'm about to do. I carefully stretch out my legs and place my bare feet onto the linoleum floor.

The cold seeps through my legs and into my starving muscles, giving them the kick they've been waiting for. I take a small, shaky step towards the door. The kick is obviously not enough because I stumble into the dresser that stands right next to my bed. Frustration clouds my thoughts in a smoky fog, but it's not enough to propel me to quit just yet.

I'm gripping the side of the dresser as my legs wobble beneath the weight of my body. After months of sitting the muscles in my legs, built up from years of track, have slowly deteriorated making it harder than I thought to move about. I slowly try to steady myself, pushing my knee against the mahogany drawers, but I'm shaking now more than ever. I look up from my sickly thin fingers only to meet striking steel eyes staring back at me.

I almost scream out in fright, before I realize I'm staring into a mirror. But it's not my face looking back at me. It's a corpse. Once beautiful rosy cheeks are now hollow and stuck to protruding cheekbones. A full lively face has had pain and shadows cast over it, and only fractured sunlight from the windows, has turned the skin an unhealthy shade of grey....

And the head. An ugly lumpy thing it is now compared to the lush black hair that used to dangle around chin level. Bright and shining when I walked into this hospital, now I am a shell of who I used to be. All my happiness has been sucked out through IVs full of chemo and other drugs.

The time I had spent in here turned me into a common figure from some child's nightmares. A feeble twig of a girl, limbs that are not capable of holding up the little body weight I had left, a fixed thin line as a mouth instead of a smile. I shut my eyes quickly the pain of noticing how much I have changed shocking me down to the core.

I was no longer the Luna that I came into this room as.

No longer the light, happy, care-free girl I used to be. My mother used to say I always reigned over the bright side of the moon. But after my first treatment, I accepted the fact that death was a looming possibility. Slowly over time I had rotated like the planets, and before I could stop it I was the dark side of the moon facing away from the sun. Defeat washed unto me as if it was a tidal wave and I was the shore. The demeanor my ridiculous doctor referred to as 'the bad place' came rushing back to me and suddenly I no longer believed I could make it outside on my own.