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Chapter 19: I'm Not Going Anywhere

Chapter 19: I'm Not Going Anywhere 

It wasn’t a dream. It was actually a really real and awfully horrible reality.

Walker has cancer. Walker has Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia and he’s convinced he’s going to die.

The fact that my best friend has cancer really hit me hard only a few hours ago when I woke up beside him. I haven’t left the hospital since he was admitted and I’m not leaving until he’s discharged and I don’t care what anyone has to say about it. I’m pretty sure that his doctors and nurses and stuff probably think that I’m his girlfriend since I’m refusing to move out of the bed with him. I mean, I do move out of the bed because like I said, it’s small and I don’t want him to be all smushed, so I sometimes sleep or just sit in the recliner that’s next to his flat hospital bed. I think I’ve just been spending these past few days too far into shock and too deep in denial to accept it but I think that the reality really set in this morning.

When I woke up, Walker was still sleeping next to me and like the creep I am, I was just like, staring at him. Not just because I like to stare at him or anything, but because I was trying to see if there were any noticeable differences. And if I’m being honest, there are some. Walker has obviously lost weight, that was the first thing I noticed. Not like, an insanely scary amount but definitely some. I’m no expert or anything but if I had to guess, I’d say about twenty, maybe twenty-five pounds. That is a lot though, when you think about it.

Also he can’t really keep up with his breathing anymore. He breathes way faster than any normal and healthy human being does. You know like, when you run really fast for a long time and you have to catch your breath once you’re done and your chest is like, heaving? Walker’s does that now but it’s constant. Like he can never seem to completely catch his breath. That scares the shit out of me, for obvious reasons. The doctors categorize it as breathlessness, which is a symptom of the stupid cancer he now lives with.

I also noticed that he’s got these tiny little red spots on his neck and arms now. I mean, you have to be really close to notice them because Walker’s relatively tan from all the times we’ve gone to the beach and just been walking around in the Italian sun this summer. Last night when the doctors though that we were both asleep, I heard them in his room talking about them. The red spots, I mean. It’s called Petechiae and he has them because the cancer is lowering the platelet levels in his body. I don’t know what a platelet does or what it is even but that’s why he’s got them now. They sort of look like really, really small chicken pox’s except he doesn’t scratch them. If I wasn’t so close to him though, I wouldn’t notice them because like I said, they’re miniscule.

Today is Saturday, August 3rd. Walker has been in here since Wednesday, July 31st. I really want them to release him. I really just want him to come back to Francesca’s house with me and let me come into his room and lie in his bed with him and watch movies with him on Netflix (be Netflix pigs, as he deemed it at the beginning of the summer) at ungodly hours. I just want everything to go back to how it was just a few days ago because everything was so perfect. Bradley and I had gotten back together, of course and my friendship with Drew was on the road to recovery and everyone else was happy and content with life and everything and then this happens. I’m not the only one taking it hard either. The boys are all taking it really, really hard too, but I’m thinking I’m taking it the worst of all.

On Wednesday after I’d been here with Drew for a few hours, Bradley called me and told me that he, Drew, Tanner and Mikey were back from their stupid little golfing game and he was wondering where I was. Then, because I’m the biggest baby in the world, I start like, blubbering and Bradley was getting freaked out because he thought I was hurt and I finally choked out that he and the guys needed to just get to the Alberti Ospedale as fast as they possibly could and they were here within about ten minutes.