BREATHE FOR ME

Chapter 1: Seven Years Ago

At first, the act of taking air in through my nostrils and releasing air back through my nostrils was easy. But that was a long time ago, a time before I felt as though air was limited, before the invisible walls around me constantly pushed against my chest. I was young and innocent and breathing was as easy as living, like it should be. I was a happy, normal child with a love of colouring and a bad habit of talking too much, just like any other child.

Until my tenth birthday... The day the switch of my life flipped from normal to disastrous in a matter of seconds.  I remember it perfectly. I woke up early with a buzz of excitement, beating the sun out of bed. Following our annual routine, I ran to wake up Maddie, who was thirteen at the time. She was almost as excited as I was. Maddie and I then went to wake up Mom and Dad, which may have taken a significant amount of time longer, and as a family, we all went downstairs to start the day. In the Fletcher household, birthdays followed a certain routine, tailored to each family member. For me, that entailed cinnamon pancakes for breakfast with chocolate chip buttons and ice cream, followed by the grand opening of presents in a mad rush of excitement, and accompanied by a movie of my choice; always Dirty Dancing, because even ten year old's can appreciate the grace of Patrick Swayze... That morning will always be treasured by me. Because, even though it sounds pretty standard as far as morning antics go, this was my last normal morning as a person. From here on out, my life changed forever. The worst thing about that is that I didn't even know. I never had the chance to be grateful for what I had, and because of that, I will always live with regret.

It was when the clock struck two o'clock that things started to decline. Mom and Dad were cuddled up on the new leather couch dozing in and out of sleep together. Maddie was quietly scrolling on her phone and secretly eyeing up Patrick Swayze as he twisted and turned on the TV. I was waiting for the movie to end so that we could begin to make our late lunch tacos, like we did every year. However, towards the end of Dirty Dancing, just before the big lift, my heart rate started to pick up. It was weirdly unnatural, like my body was responding to an intensive run. I started to panic, everything felt wrong. My hands started to sweat making everything feel too hot and awfully uncomfortable. My tongue was all of a sudden very dry, as if I was running it along sand paper over and over again. I found it too hard to swallow, almost as if my throat muscles had suddenly gone to sleep, drooping into heavy piles of muscle at the back of my throat.

Quietly slipping out of the front room and locking myself in the bathroom, I remember splashing my face and neck with cool water from the tap, trying to calm myself down. My body began to tense, seizing up my muscles and putting pressure on my small chest. Things were becoming worse. At the time, I had heard about panic attacks and even remembered a few facts about them from tedious lectures given by our teachers in awkward puberty talks. I remembered to measure my breathing and close my eyes. I tried doing this, growing increasingly hot by the second. I had to take my shirt off when sweat beads made thin lines down my back, like condensation running down a window, being absorbed into my pyjama bottoms which made them damp and uncomfortable. I closed my eyes trying to calm myself, telling myself that this was just a panic attack or an allergic reaction maybe. Except, I didn't see the black abyss of the back of my eyelids. Instead, I saw lots and lots of different coloured squares and circles bouncing and flitting around in my head. I began to feel nauseous and therefore re-opened my eyes, only to see a blurred version of reality. The lights were too bright in the bathroom, there were two gently swaying toilets in front of me. The door, which was only a few feet from me, kept disappearing and reappearing in front of my face.

And then everything stopped...

Everything was back to normal. The lights were restored, there was only one pale-looking toilet, the door was right next to me like before and for the briefest second, I couldn't feel anything inside or outside of my body. I remember the moment that I smiled and shook my head... a panic attack. I was only being dramatic. I inhaled a massive sigh of relief to signify the recovery of a very traumatic experience, an experience in which I was convinced that I would never forget. My first panic attack. Except, I didn't sigh.

Because I couldn't breathe.

I think that in that second of time, stood there shirtless and wet with sweat in my bathroom, feeling completely senseless and out of control, it really hit me that my life was over. I knew that this wasn't a panic attack, that this wasn't normal. My lungs would not expand. My chest was squeezing against my ribs so hard that I thought I heard a crack. Suddenly I was looking at the glowing tiles on the floor and they were getting closer to me, growing in size. The one thing that I needed most to survive, oxygen, was out of my reach and in that second of time, I knew that it would remain like that until the day I died.  Everything was very quiet and very slow. After that second, that short pause in time where everything became clear, reality became a little blurry and I don't recall, from my point of view, anything that happened afterwards.

......

Mom told me, when I woke up in the hospital, that they had heard me scream from the bathroom, a sound so agonising that she still hears it sometimes when she dreams. I know this because occasionally she wakes everyone up in the middle of the night with her own piercing scream, a scream which probably mirrors the one she let out when she found me in the bathroom, unconscious and not breathing.

I was rushed to hospital, immediately put on a life support machine, and for the next three month of my life, I had to live in a painfully white hospital ward with a constantly humming assistant breathing machine wired up to my body (something which basically ensured that my lungs didn't fill up with bodily fluid, making sure I didn't drown myself without water). Crazy, right? Looking back on it all, it still amazes me how I am alive today, seven years later; and when that amazement hits me, it encourages me to be grateful for everything I have, including the sweet memories from before my tenth birthday and the sweeter moments in which I forget that I have a life-threatening lung defect. Yet, I am happy, or I try to be for my family's sake. You see, when your own body refuses to breathe naturally, by itself, and you spend every minute of every day wondering if it could be your last, you learn pretty quickly to start appreciating what you have. After all, after the 'accident', or my fate as I prefer to call it, all of my family had to make life-altering changes to their daily lives to make my reality easier. Maddie struggled to accept the fact that I was never going to be the same and because of that, she developed a lot of mental health issues, including an obsessive habit of counting calories and refusing to eat. She emotionally changed as well. I haven't seen Maddie smile in so long, it makes my heart ache. She's hardly ever around anymore, even though she still lives with us, simply because she still can't face me or face the truth. She says that she prefers to stay with friends until late and study but no one can be sure about what's actually going on in her life. We give her space because we don't have any other options. She's like a closed book now, hidden deep in the darkest section of an abandoned library, collecting dust.

Mom had to switch jobs, leaving behind an estate agents office, that she loved, so that she could work from home and keep a better eye on Maddie and me. She also had to home-school me because apparently my lungs couldn't possibly cope with the stress of going to school every day. Did I feel angry that I never got a valid experience of high school? Yes! Did it matter? No because that was about to change. You'll see soon enough. Dad also left his job, at the local garage, and became my babysitter for months on end until it became too much for him and Mom. Every second of the day they were together stressing about how different life had become. They stopped missing each other, they didn't have anything to say to each other anymore and eventually, they stopped loving each other. They broke up, Dad moving to New York, as far east as he could get, and Mom stayed here in Oklahoma, grieving over the loss of not only her healthy daughters, but her husband as well. Everything was really shit for a while. Well, for seven years actually. I had to go to hospital twice a week for four years to get my lungs pumped which was rubbish, although I did make friends with many of the nurses and many of the permanent residents on the lung disease ward. They'd make me hot chocolate, play cards with me, and Mom would let me chill out for half an hour or so with them. They understood me and I understood them.

Then the hospital appointments then went down to once a week as I got older, this made it easier for Mom. I hated watching what I'd done to her. She didn't deserve any of this shit. Neither did Dad or Maddie. Sometimes, life just really sucks to the point that you struggle to see any beauty in anything anymore. That was where I'd gotten to in life. Well, until a few days ago. Now, everything is going to be 'different'.

I get a second chance at life.