They Keep Getting Worse

If Those I Loved Were Lost

[ A/N THERE ARE NO CHAPTERS/ SEPARATE PARTS ]

•I'm walking. And still walking. And breathing. Right? Are they talking to me? Why can't I hear them?•

I'm waking to the Literal Heart of Jesus, just like I'm supposed to. With, of course, a room full of cancer kids. Many of them like me, with a terminal illness in which I'll probably die young. There's Patrick, whom of which used to have cancer in his balls. It wasn't terminal, at least, he had a ninety-eight percent chance of living, when I have about a twenty-five percent chance. My sister, Elissa, she's healthy. She has everything that she could possibly want.

~

I was eight when I was diagnosed with stage III Large Cell lung cancer. We always found it ironic, considering my zodiac was a cancer. At first, though, we couldn't joke. We had to push through it, and I had to quit soccer. We used to think it was asthma. I mean, it was only a little trouble breathing, right? When we went to the doctor's office, to see if I needed an inhaler, and when he heard me breath, there was a little bubbling noise that he didn't seem to like. He arranged an appointment for me at Memorial, so that I could have a PET scan, though I always used to think it was literally meant for pets. Not for me.

The next day, I was running around playing hide-and-go-seek with Elissa. I couldn't breathe, and I didn't know what was going on. I couldn't scream, and I couldn't say anything, just run around with my hands around throat. I eventually couldn't run any more, and I collapsed down onto the grass. I remember how it used to smell, and hearing my sister scream,"Mama! Mama!" Really loudly once she saw me collapse. My eyes just seemed to flutter shut, and I don't remember what happened between the time I passed out to the time I woke up with a pain in my side, right in my ribs. That was the day that I was diagnosed. Earlier than planned, but they said I could have died right there.

First, we tried chemo, to just see if we could get the tumors to shrink any. We tried that for about six months before we determined that it wasn't going to work. I had shaved my head for nothing. The only good part about the entire thing was that I didn't have to go to school while Elissa had. Though, she would tease me for being bald. It wasn't my fault, it was the cancer's. I didn't choose this life, and if I had the choice, I'd choose another. I really would.

~

I've been sitting in a plastic chair for about half an hour, fiddling with my inhaler that I have to use once every hour to clear out my bronchial tube so that I can breathe. So far, a girl with an oxygen tank has shown up, helping a boy with sunglasses on find a seat. He must be blind. She must have small cell lung cancer. There are a group of kids talking in one of the corners, like always. Probably the leukemia kids. Then there were the loners in the room, that sat by themselves and didn't say a word unless required to because Patrick spoke to them. I fall into that group.

Patrick is already sitting where he usually does, in the center of the circle. He's pathetic, really, and I wish that we had somebody that wasn't going to make me feel even worse about y terminal illness by bragging about his remission. He didn't mean it that way, of course, but that's the way it came across for me. The first time I ever came to support group I told him that I would totally trade bodies with him and do something useful with t life if I got the chance to. He smiled warmly, and changed the subject easily, though the boy with the sunglasses smiled a little. He was a regular, but I never paid enough attention to actually catch his name. Ivan maybe?

We started to go around, and I always volunteered to go first, just to get it out of the way. "I'm Elise Carvair, and I have Stage three large cell lung cancer in my bronchial tube, in which I have to inhale a certain form of science I'll never understand to breathe." I always said, trying to at least make the support group worth coming to.