Beautiful Pain [a.b]

1.

Elle

I don't think there has ever been a time where it was easy to tell someone that they had cancer. Especially not when your patient was your only daughter. So I could only imagine how Dad felt when the words you have Stage 4 Hodgkin's Lymphoma came out of his mouth. In fact, I'd been so focused on imagining how he felt saying it, that I hadn't even registered the tears streaming down my cheeks until a loud, agonizing cry ripped through my body.

For those that haven't had the pleasure of Googling the crap out of it, one's lymphatic system is the body's disease-fighting network. When I first discovered this part of it, I couldn't have felt like I was anymore screwed.

It includes the lymph nodes, spleen, thymus gland, and bone marrow. We first discovered something was wrong when I visited my father's practice for an annual checkup and he noticed I had enlarged lymph nodes, which is symptom one. Over the next couple of weeks, I started feeling fatigue, which was symptom two. Finally, my dad took notice of the fact I'd lost some weight at our weekly dinner with our neighbors, the Biersack's. Considering that was symptom three, Dad immediately ordered tests to confirm his theory.

The results of those tests are what landed me here, in Dad's office in my childhood home with my mother quietly sobbing beside me. After my rather obnoxious outburst, I'd managed to calm myself down enough to hear about the treatment possibilities.

"Treatment may involve a variety of things, like chemotherapy, radiation therapy, or something as simple as some regular medication. Stem-cell transplants are incredibly rare," Dad says.

"Well which one will get me better faster?" I question.

Dad sighs and folds his hands on top of his desk. "Although this once fatal disease has been transformed into a curable condition due to some breakthrough research, how fast one is cured depends on which method of treatment works best for the patient."

"What does this disease do to the body, Richard?" Mom speaks up.

He sighs again. "Over time, the cancerous cells will impair her immune system."

"How long does she have before it starts to get worse?"

"The one-year survival rate for people with Hodgkin's is about ninety-two percent because it's treatable in the early stages. The five-year survival rate goes down to about eighty-six percent." He spits numbers out without having to think about them, and suddenly I'm wondering how many other people he's probably diagnosed.

"What's the survival rate for Stage 4 Hodgkin's?" I ask.

"Unfortunately, that's undetermined but the survival rate is definitely lower."

At the word unfortunately Mom's water-work show begins again. I sit in my chair, frozen.

For two days, I've been nothing but frozen. The scenery around me has changed from my bedroom in my apartment to a sanitized white room in the Good Samaritan Hospital; Dad worries as I continue to lose weight little by little. The only thing I can think about is how frail I could become if I continue to lose weight. Would I become so frail, it would hardly look like there was any skin and more bone? Would I be able to snap those bones like a little toothpick if I wasn't careful?

The sound of the hospital room door opening allows me to forget about these thoughts momentarily. A nurse that has assigned herself to me enters the room with a comforting smile. She's never entered the room without it drawn across her lips. I think it's her way of saying everything will be alright without having to straight out say it the way so many people have in the last twenty-four hours.