When Rosie looked again, the cannula was already pricked into the vein on the back of her hand, secure with a dressing, and the nurse was walking away.
She watched the drip drip drip of the vincristine drug in its solution inside the transparent bag, hanging from its stand, and tried not to think about how bad the side effects of the chemotherapy might be. Whatever worries she had didn’t come close to matching the fears that constantly bubbled up inside her about her tumour and what the cancer might do to her.
She had googled survival rates for low-grade gliomas like hers constantly, after her diagnosis, trying to decipher her future from the numbers and graphs. When she had started reading about the experiences of other patients like her, everybody had seemed to have their own story to tell. It had all seemed so random to Rosie that she eventually gave up using them to search for clues to the truth about how her own story was going to turn out. Despite being told by doctors that having chemotherapy before surgery might be very effective in her particular circumstances it was hard not to daydream about the worst of it now that she was here finally embarking on her treatment.
Seeing Daniel’s father made all her fears seem more real too. The man had seemed so empty inside, like something hollowed out. It reminded her of the eggs she and her mum used to paint at Easter when she was younger, the shells pricked through with pins so the yolks and the whites could be blown out into a Pyrex bowl and kept for cooking. Rosie wished she had been able to do more to help him, and to help Daniel too. But she hadn’t seemed close to being able to make anything happen, not even right up to the moment she had felt the sting of Bennett’s slap and her eyes had snapped open.
Her hands balled into white-hot fists the more she thought about it, refusing to believe that she and Daniel had made the best fit they could. It felt like everything was up to her to try harder because Daniel was only the battery who increased her power.
She began to watch the two other teenagers in the room who were also receiving their chemotherapy, both of them lying on beds and wearing headphones, plugged into screens. Rosie knew a little bit about the girl because they had met on the ward before. Her name was Sophie. She was a year older and had been diagnosed with a medulloblastoma. Rosie focused on her first, trying to use her talents to find out something personal about the girl, about what her life was like outside the ward.
But the drip drip drip of the vincristine in the bag hanging above her seemed to get in the way of Rosie’s thinking. She found it impossible to get a hold on Sophie and find out anything. She kept trying, but her brain felt useless and heavy. She could have been holding hot coals in her hands as she clenched her fists to try harder. The coil of tubing on the pillow beside her moved when she did and kept breaking her concentration.
Frustrated, she turned her attention to the patient sitting on the other side of her, a boy called Mike who was the same age as her. He had been diagnosed with a rare form of leukaemia and his bare scalp shone in the daylight like a wet rock. But when she tried to look inside him nothing happened, as if a valve had been switched off inside her to stop her using her gift. The harder she tried, the more the drip drip drip of the drug in the bag above her seemed to grow louder until it was all she could hear, like something was dripping inside her.
When Rosie gave up trying, she decided the efforts with Daniel’s father must have tired her out. Maybe she needed to recharge somehow. So she sat back and wished the drugs into her system and deep into the tumour that had grown mysteriously and silently in her brain.
The infusion only took ten minutes after which the cannula was removed. Rosie was given two different coloured tablets – one blue and one ivory. She was asked to repeat the strict instructions about when to take the tablets in the upcoming days because the nurse wanted to make sure she understood.
‘How will I feel?’ asked Rosie. ‘How long will any side effects last?’
‘Do you feel ill now?’ asked the nurse, concerned.
‘No . . . but . . .’ She paused and wondered what to say. ‘No, I’m OK,’ she said and bit the inside of her cheek as her mother pushed open the doors and came back through into the unit, ready to whisk her home.