Head Above Water

32. Last Day

18 days. It had been 18 long days since Rick collapsed and I was getting worried I wouldn’t get to see him before the end. My symptoms had been increasing over the past two and a half weeks, and it wasn’t boding well for my longevity, so I was hoping he’d be back soon.

Shortly after Valentine’s Day, my left arm stared to feel a bit numb. Gradually over the following week, I ended up losing most of the sensation from my elbow down. In just the last couple days, my mind was starting to get a bit muddled as well, and it was frustrating me to no end.

I would have trouble solving an equation in math, for instance, and it wasn’t because it was an incredibly difficult problem. No, my issue was that I couldn’t even make sense of basic arithmetic in order to actually start the equation. 8 + 3. That was it. A problem I knew I could’ve solved on my fingers in kindergarten, yet as a senior in high school, I was at a loss. I couldn’t even remember how to add.

The fact that I knew it was such an elementary skill and I knew I’d probably done it in a millisecond thousands of times before was the most unnerving feeling in the world. Consequently, I now had a very deep newfound respect for people struggling with Alzheimer’s.

Due to this new complication, I was perpetually frustrated—a fact which made itself known by frequent outbursts of anger. I’d snapped at poor Jill, Connor and my mom more times that I could remember. Connor astounded me with his unfailing amount of patience, never once taking the way I acted personally and always taking it upon himself to try and coax a laugh from me afterward. Jill, firecracker that she could be, often snapped right back at me, but she was always right in what she’d say—that I was being unfair and childish, or that I was wasting the last bit of time I had.

Least equipped to handle my tempers, was my mom. After a few times of snapping resulting in making her cry, I’d made a sincere effort to rein in my emotions around her. It was incredibly difficult with so many riotous feelings swirling inside me, but I didn’t want her memory of me to be tainted when I was gone. I knew from personal experience that it was all too easy to recall the bad things life, so I needed to make sure I didn’t add more negative memories to the pot.

My last change in symptoms over the last few weeks was that I was finding myself extremely tired most of the time now. Even when I wasn’t sleepy tired, my body felt exhausted, but more often than not, it was both.

Today was one of those days. It had been a huge ordeal just hauling myself out of bed to ready for school that morning. My mom tried to convince me to stay home from school—even going so far as to bribe me with some Hägaen Dazs Coffee ice cream—but I was adamant. I wanted to keep going to school and living normally for as long as I possibly could. Thus, I’d dragged myself through most of the school day, one grueling minute at a time.

Now I’d finally reached my lunch period, and I was eagerly awaiting a nap somewhere. The couch backstage in the theater came to mind as a good place where I probably wouldn’t be disturbed, so I made my way over rather tiredly.

When I fell onto the couch several minutes later, I let out a sigh of relief. Two seconds before I passed out, I recalled that the cushions seemed too firm and the springs were a bit pokey in places previously, but right now this couch was the most comfortable place in the universe.

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            Some time later, the feeling of a cool finger stroking my cheek with a feather-light touch gradually awoke me. I blinked groggily, and as my blurry vision cleared, Rick’s face came into view. He was gazing at me with a tender expression, though his flaxen eyes seemed far away.

“Rick!” The mere sight of him was like a shot of adrenaline, vaporizing all traces of my fatigue. I bolted upright and threw my arms around his neck in a bone-crushing hug. The stage floor was cold and hard against my knees, but I couldn’t have cared less at that moment.