We're going to the doctors today.
Quite frankly, I don't want to go. It's the furthest thing from what I want to be doing today. Today, all I'd like to do is stay in my room. Huddled up in a duvet, eating sugar off a spoon and numbing my mind with The Simpsons or Family Guy or some stupid sitcom that you find on the television these days. Anything at all to keep me from thinking of what's actually going on in my life.
My girlfriend told me she's going to die. How can a man cope with that? How am I supposed to function normally when I've been given that information? Am I expected to brush it off, plaster a smile on my face and pretend like the world is bright and cheerful? Is that really what people expect of me? Because if it is, they can fuck right off.
I'm not coping. Of course I'm not. My girlfriend has fucking cancer. Leukaemia, to be exact. I'm not really sure what that means, but I know it's something to do with the blood. I should really do some research into this, find out what it is we're dealing with. But can you really blame me for wanting nothing to do with it? I don't want to have to look it up. I don't want to look at all the happy survivors that got through it and know that she won't be one of the lucky ones. And I especially don't want to read all the horror stories of those that weren't so lucky.
No, thank you. I'm quite comfortable with not knowing. I'd rather be right here, in this room, and survive in this little bubble of junk food and awful programmes. If I had my own way, this is how I would live the rest of my life. Isolate myself to get used to the pain of loneliness that is inevitable in my future. Best way to do it, I've come to believe.
But no. I don't get to do that. I have to go with her to see this doctor. This new doctor.
That was my idea, at least. Before my brain shut down, I demanded that she get a second opinion. No woman of mine is going to be told outright by her doctor that she is going to die. How is that 'patient care'? How is that in the patients 'best interest'? A person as positive as Clara can't be told that. You can't drag her down to the level of the shitbags walking this earth. She needs hope. She needs just the smallest of straws to grasp to get on with life. That's honestly all she'll need. Just give her a glimmer of hope and she'll take it.
Who am I kidding? That's a lie. She won't take it. She's positive, yes. But not that positive. It's me that wants the second opinion. I want that straw. I want something to keep myself from killing myself before she dies in front of me. I want a light in the darkness to tell myself that she isn't going to die. That she will be the lucky one. That we'll have our life that we talked about.
I want my girlfriend to live.
“Are you ready?”
No. Of course I'm not. As much as that shred of optimism is desperately required, I can't bring myself to remove this quilt cocoon from around my shoulders. My mind is telling me to leave the house and get the answer that I need to drag my sorry arse out of this cesspit of misery and hopelessness, but my body has just shut down. I'm currently staring at some kind of children's programme because I can't even muster the energy to push a button. And even though everything in my brain is screaming at me to make this effort, I simply can't do it.
You'd think it was me with the cancer, wouldn't you?
“Danny.”
My line of sight is obscured as she sits in front of me. Blocking the colourful pixels on my screen with her excellence. And suddenly I feel like a child. Hidden away in his little fort of plush, trying to keep all the monsters in the dark away from him. But my monsters aren't in the dark. My monsters aren't even mine. The monster that scares me the most is the silent one inside of her. The one that will ultimately take her from me forever.
