Twelve days, that’s when my expiration date is. I feel as if I’m a jug of milk and about to be thrown out because I started to spoil. The doctors said my mind would outlive my body. They also suggested I be medicated at all times on Day 4 down to Day 1. Doctor Uniberry said that very rarely do they see a patient whose body hasn’t already start to decompose from the inside out.
My family, God bless them, has went through over eight months of watching my chemotherapy go down the drain. My hair, once a beautiful dark brown; the color you see on hair commercials, fell out piece by piece every day until eventually I was bald. Nevertheless, no, they kept on going. After the radiation treatment was also a failed attempt, my hopes plummeted. My family however, kept me going through different treatments one after the other with the high hopes that one would eventually shrink my tumor.
I knew that my decisions would cost me, but it seemed like a whole other lifetime away. The rest of life seems to be a whole other world when your sixteen and naïve to the world and its horrors. I knew the moment I picked up the cigarette that things would only go downhill from there. I pride myself though, that I tried to quit. I tried and I tried for years but I always ended back where I started. Something would frustrate me so much that I just had to have a cigarette. Yet, after ten years of being a slave to the nicotine, what else can you expect?
Somberly, I remember the one day that should have made my husband and me the happiest we ever would have been. Instead, however, it was the worst day of my life. I remember the ugly and dim lighted hallways of the hospital as I was rushed from the gynecologists’ room to a room full of x-ray machines. Instead of what we hoped to have found, a large benign tumor was found in my stomach and three larger malignant ones were found in my chest area.
Everything from then on has seemed more like a fight rather than a gift.
Eight Days Later
“Ok Mrs. Mitchell we can either help your body along in the process making it less painful, or you can let your body do its thing and you die naturally. The choice is yours. Please let me know before the day is out what your choice is,” Dr. Uniberry said with sympathy. He squeezed my hand in a comforting way before exiting the room.
My head dropped into my hands. Neither option was even close to ideal. Either way I ended up cold and still bodied. Looking around the room and the familiarly somber looking faces, I made my decision. I didn’t need to drag this out any longer and hurt the ones I love more than myself anymore then I have already and what inevitably has to come sooner or later.
The fight was a long and hard one, and one where I learned many things, but it didn’t matter what I did or what I said, it just wasn’t written in the stars for me to live much longer. At 58 I lived longer then some and I lived better than most. I regret nothing, not even my first cigarette because it shaped me to who I became today.
Honestly, I will welcome death when it knocks on my front door. Two days from now in the form of a doctor carrying a suitcase enclosing an IV and the medicine-needed, death will knock, and I will answer with a smile on my face.
