riley06’s Blog

         My palms were wet; Damp and obnoxiously chilled like how blue jeans get at the beach.  My small limp fingers clasped the crinkled newspaper cut out that my mom had handed to me.  I could feel her gaze at me as I stared at it, waiting for my reaction as if she had a bold black question mark drawn on her face.  There had been an eerie essence about the day, like the calm, sticky hot feeling right before a terrible storm.  My heart felt heavy and restless as I scanned the article.  A stinging sense of electric shock jolted through my body, and what it brought was confusion, an odd sense of calmness, and understanding, because I ultimately knew what was to come.

          I squinted closer at the crisp black & white photo of a twelve year old girl, upright in a hospital bed, examining her stuffed animals and cards with a wiry smile stretched across her face.  She was blanketed by a solemn haunting fog that shielded her icy blue eyes.

          I knew then that I was wrong in thinking my older cousin Courtney had a cold.  Or the chicken pocks, or the flu.  I knew why my aunt was whispering when she had told my mom months before that Courtney was sick.  I knew that the sickness consuming Courtney was not curable by chicken soup, or even the awful cherry cough syrup my mom so often forced down my throat.

          Courtney, who had always been my beautiful, brave, glowing cousin, 5 years older than I, had changed.  Her skin was a matte grey and her lips, a light purple.  She looked tiny and frail, like a doll you leave in its box to keep from breaking.  Her long, golden hair that had always reminded me of my Barbie dolls was gone, leaving behind a barren bald head.  She had leukemia.

          Cancer was an unused word in my life until then.  I had had family members pass away from it, as I would learn later, two aunts who had survived from it, and would end up having an uncle pass away from it. My feeling of invisibility and the dreamy notion that bad things never happen to kids, was gone.  This meant not only that Courtney might die from this, but one day, might I. 

          I didn’t understand much of the article, or even much of the situation for that matter.  But thoughts aroused by my mom’s explanations shot like lightening through my mind.   She was to undergo surgeries, including a bone marrow transplant, for which she need a match.  She couldn’t simply cut the disease out; she had to kill it.  Kill it and her ability to have hair again, her ability to grown taller than her tiny five feet and one inch, and her ability to have children.

          It was the first time I had come to terms with the idea of dying.  Courtney was facing a battle so terrible, so unforgiving, so defining, at the mere age of twelve; before high school, before her first date, before graduation, before her life had even begun.

          It took nearly 2 years for Courtney to recover and start high school with her twin brother McKenzie.  She is now 21, and remains one of the strongest people I have ever known.  But from the day I discovered the disease that would change my cousin’s life forever, I’ve known the piece of her that cancer took away was one she will never get back.