Breathless -Lurlene McDaniel

Travis

Travis

“Liars.” That’s what I say when the doctors tell me. Mom is teary eyed and Dad’s face is stone. Dr. Madison has come with another doctor, and oncologist, Dr. Wolfsen.

“I know this is a shock—“

“You´re wrong,” I say. “I can’t have cancer. I feel fine.”

“Your leg is fine,” Dr. Madison says. “There’s a tumor in the bone. That’s why it broke.”

Mom reaches out to touch me, but I jerk away.

“We’ll start treatment at one,” Wolfsen says.

“I don’t want you to cut of my leg.” I feel like I’m going to puke. If I do, I want it to get all over him.

“Chemo first,” Wolfsen says, as if I haven’t spoken. “Then the surgery. Then more chemo. Radiation probably. We’ll run more tests. Sometimes, if the cancer is localized, we can do a bone draft and save the limb. I don’t expect that to be the case for you, though. I’m being honest with you, Travis. I’m always honest with my patients. I won’t give you false hope.”

“You can’t cut off my leg!” I say it louder to make sure he hears me this time.

“And we don’t want you to lose your leg, but if we don’t amputate, and if the cancer spreads—“

“And it will spread unless we amputate,” Dr. Madison says.

Wolfsen keeps looking at me. “—you will die.”

Blunt. To the point. A leg for my life. They consider it a good trade-off. I’m not sure I do.

“There are prosthetics—“ Mom starts.

I squash her words with a look. Fake legs. I’ve seen video clips of wounded soldiers with artificial limbs valiantly jogging while a reporter shoves a microphone in their faces and applauds their courage. I’ve watched the Wheelchair Olympics on TV. That’s not who I want to be. No diver ever won medals with a missing body part.

“Go away,” I say.

Before Mom can protest, Dad takes her arm. “Give him space.”

All the space in the world won’t make me feel better about what they want to do to me. Wolfsen says, “I’m starting a chemo infusion immediately. The first protocol will be short and intense. You’ll be an outpatient. You’ll have physical therapy and a physiologist who’ll help you learn to use your prosthesis when the time comes. And you’ll see a psychologist too. You’ll get through this, Travis. You’re young and strong, and if the cancer hasn’t spread beyond the tumor, survival rates are sixty to eighty percent.”

“And if it has?” He’s trying not to scare me, but I stare him down.

“One thing at a time,” he says.

“We’ll fight it,” Mom says.

“It’s not your leg,” I tell her.

“We’ll get through this,” Dad says quietly.

I hear their use of “we,” but this is happening to me. To my body. To my life. To my future.

Cooper knows because Emily’s told him. He looks ready to explode when he comes to visit.

“I keep looking at my leg, trying to imagine it gone,” I tell him.

“How did you get cancer?”

“Don’t know. I just did.” I close my eyes. “I don’t want them to cut off my leg.”

Cooper shoves his fist into the mattress of my hospital bed. The blow is strong enough for me to feel vibrations. “It sucks.”

I can’t get my mind around never walking on my own two legs again. “You should have let me drown.”

“Don’t talk that way.”

I take a deep breath. “Guess it’ll be Lenny Feldman’s time to shine.” Feldman has been my main competition, chasing after the same medals as me. He’s a good diver, but I’ve beaten him out for top honors at every meet. I tell Coop, “I’d been looking forward to kicking his butt at state. Guess he’ll laugh his head off over this turn of events.”

“No one will be laughing,” Cooper says. “You made him a better diver by competing against him. Now he’ll just be ordinary.”

My throat clogs up when I think about not looking down on pool water again with judges and teammates watching. I want to feel the cool water on my skin so bad I can taste it. I want to plunge beneath shimmering water into the quiet world of blue silence. I feel my eyes get wet. I turn my head so Cooper won’t see my weakness.

“You can still dive,” he says. “You’ll figure it out. I know you. You don’t give up.”

I search for a sparks of determination inside me. I come up empty.

Seeing Darla, telling her, is hardest of all. My beautiful girlfriend. Blue eyes crying. I put my arms around her, knowing what o have to do. “It’s okay, babe.”

“But cancer,” she says. “That’s so awful. My grandma had cancer.”

“That’s what this is for.” I hold up my arm with the IV line leading to the bag of chemicals on the stand next to the bed. I’m already feeling a little sick—they said I might—but the cancer diagnosis doesn’t affect me like the leg amputation does.

Darla pulls away, fumbles for a tissue. “My nose is dripping.”

“You’re dripping.”

“You’re still pretty.”

She laughs a little. “I love you.”

“Yes. About that.”

“What about it?”

“I’ll understand if you… if you…” I can’t get the word out.

“If I what?” She squints. “Are you dumping me?”

My arm burns where the chemo is going into my vein. “I’m telling you that you can move on. I’ll understand.”

She perched on the bed and jumps off. “Is that what you want?”

“No. I—I just think you need to review your options.”

“My options? Do you think I have a Plan B because you’re sick?”

Nothing’s coming out the way I thought it would. “A lot of guys will be interested in you if I’m not in the picture. If you want to—“

“Want to what?” she interrupts me. “Get a new boyfriend? One who doesn’t have cancer?” She’s looking angry.

“It’s the leg too, Darla. No more of a lot of thing we used to do together. You should have a choice.”

She’s glaring at me now. “I’m making my choice. The leg thing doesn’t bother me. So you’ll have one leg. Big deal.”

I get angry. “Well, it’s big deal to me! No more diving. I’ll have a piece of equipment strapped to my stump.” I say the word with all the hatred for it that I feel. “I’m losing part of my body, Darla. They’re cutting off my leg. Don’t you know what that means?”

She drills me with her pretty eyes, leans forwards, so close to my face I can see her pores. “Yes. I know what it means. It means you’ll weigh less.”

Her answer is swift, and it strikes me as funny. Not just funny, but hysterically funny. I laugh. I laugh until I ache, and she laughs with me. We laugh until we’re crying. I pull her against me, and that moment, I’ve never lover her more.