Acute. Sharp. Driving. Pain shoves aside the anesthesia. It sprints down my left arm, and I practically come up off the gurney. Gentle hands push me back down, all the while pulling my left arm up.
Why does my arm hurt? Wasn’t this supposed to be about my side? My lungs? Reminded that those organs exist, my nervous system kicks in with a dull, stabbing pain from three points on my side. The world swims around me as I try to remember where I am and what has happened.
Here the light is white and the world is a wash of blues. Nurses in full scrub gear dance around me and blend in with the background as if I’m in the middle of a Degas painting.
I pull at my left arm. Give it back, make it stop. But the hands grip tighter and raise it above my heart. Then comes a new pain that slithers between layers of skin. Tubing being extracted from deep in my body, igniting a fresh wave of pain.
“Please…,” I say, wanting them to stop and let me go. My right hand is basically useless, kept trapped under the stupid heated blankets.
“Ellie, I need you to relax,” the nurse says. Her voice is calm even as it feels like she’s wrenching my arm out of its socket. Why is this happening? What went wrong with my arm? I can feel the IV tube and tape farther down from the pain site.
“What happened…?” The words swim in my mouth. My head can barely keep track of what’s happening between the hands on me and the pain.
“Just relax,” the nurse continues.
Pain congregates in my left wrist and drips down my arm. One thought breaks through everything: That is not where pain should be.
I blink and then my parents are there in recovery. Familiar faces among the chaos still whirling around me. Mom leans over the side of the gurney and Dad hovers in the background.
“Mom?” What’s happened doesn’t matter, I just want Mom to make it all better. To make it stop. She can go back to blaming me for ruining her life tomorrow as long as she fixes mine today.
“Oh, sweetie,” she says, and I can hear the sadness in her voice. She strokes my cheek. Anger mixes with pain, leaving me feeling more drugged than usual. I just want everything to be normal, at least as normal as it ever is in surgery.
Panic spikes and I quickly test each appendage. Two hands. Two legs. Yup, I can feel everything, so not a spinal cord injury. I force my eyes open. I am awake. I didn’t die.
“Did they get it?” I say, but the moment I hear these words I know I’m still under anesthesia’s power. It sounds more like “Diths zhauy geth ehth.”
She smiles, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. She digs through the blankets so that she can take my right hand. The head torturer is still busy with my left arm. Mom smooths back the hair from my face. “It’ll be okay.” Down here so alone, I try to shove aside the anger pounding in my chest, because I want an ally. Even one who is only partially on my side.
Her eyes tell me a different story, and she can’t lie to me. I look around at the bright lights, the beeps and bops from the machines. Recovery is that strange place and I’m never sure how long I stay here, but it always feels like both forever and the blink of an eye. These things that dot my childhood, this was once my playground. Now everything hurts. My arm in particular, my good arm. And no one will answer my questions.
As if to prove that something went drastically wrong, my lungs seize and I cough. The nurse still has hold of my arm and won’t let it go as my body deals with my lungs.
The coughs force me to suck in air, which clears out the anesthesia. It hits me: the surgery did not work. And no one wants to tell me why. My side burns with pain and all I want to do is sink deep into the haze of medical-grade painkillers.
It’s a while before my senses return and they wheel me up from recovery to my room. Once there, Dad hands over my phone. “I think you have a few messages,” he says, planting a kiss on my head. Surgery and Darlington’s failings seem to have fixed everything for them, while I’m drowning in both.
He’s not wrong. There are several.
Jack (1)
Ryan (5)
Tumor Squad (111)
I click over to Tumor Squad first. I’m slow going, trying to navigate my phone with my right hand as the nurse finishes putting the bandages on my left.
TUMOR SQUAD
Ellie
111 messages? Really?
Sum up.
Text dots appear almost instantly. Congrats on getting out of surgery pour in and I almost drop my phone. Their well-wishes are sandpaper on my skin. They all think this worked, that I’m better now, because that’s what Ryan has led us all to believe.
Anger flares in my chest and makes it hard to breathe. All I want is to scream. To bang my phone against the side of the bed until it cracks and I don’t have to talk to anyone ever again. I’m going to have to relive and manage all of their disappointment before I can process my own. Why did I ever listen to him?
Ping!
Ryan
Hey—glad to hear you’re out.
It’s so strange to look at my last text message to him. I wanted Ryan to be the one to know I was going down over Jack. I wish I could go back in time and tell past Ellie not to waste her time. Ryan had me believing that doctors could do anything. He’s lucky I can barely text.
This is why you don’t hang on every word that doctors say, because then you start expecting things to work out and it’s all the more crushing when they don’t.
I swallow, trying to push everything down. All I get is the scratch all the way down my esophagus like when I dry swallow big pills. No, I don’t want any of this. My phone goes off, more pings as my group chat tries to catch me up.
I want none of it.
I flip my phone to silent and bury it in the covers.
Mom and Dad still won’t tell me what happened—mostly, I think, because they’re not sure themselves. When things go right, we know how to explain them because that’s what the doctors have briefed us on. But when they go wrong, we’re in the dark.
Dr. Darlington comes late in the afternoon in scrubs and his white coat. Mom and Dad have retreated to the edges after I snapped at them. No, I haven’t forgotten what Mom said or what she blames me for. I’m furious, but anger sits differently in a recovering body. It weighs on me, pressing me into the bed. Normally anger seems to give me fuel, make me rise.
But now, I’m drowning under the weight of it.
“What happened,” I croak out, my voice still hoarse from the intubation.
He has scans with him, because of course he does. Interns cower in the corners, eager to learn about what happens when things go wrong. I want to yell at them to get out, that I am not here for them to ogle at. I am not a public subject.
Then again, maybe I am. What does it matter if Mom stops writing about me? Doctors still see me as a case to present to the world, one that can fuel papers and win awards at that. I’m just a piece in their lives to be picked up and discarded as necessary. My value is linked to what I can provide or what I take away from people.
He pops the scans into the wall lights. For all the high-tech equipment in the offices at Coffman, there are still wall lights to display scans.
He traces the wisp-like fibers that blow across my lungs like spiderwebs. I’ve seen a million X-rays, MRIs, and CTs and nothing about this seems abnormal. It just looks like lung tissue.
“What the scans didn’t show us—couldn’t show us—is that you have lots of tiny blood vessels that run from the back of your lungs to your rib cage. We couldn’t get the lap around them without breaking them. The only option would have been to completely open up your back, which would have necessitated a full blood transfusion.”
I squirm in my bed, and pain spikes. Those three tiny incisions are a bigger issue than any other surgery I can remember. He may say they’re small, but I don’t believe him. I’m never going to believe anything that comes out of his mouth ever again.
“So why didn’t you do it?” My voice hits like acid, and everyone flinches.
Good. I want them to feel it. They all deserve it.
I stare around the room at the doctor, my parents—why am I here with this thing still inside me? I went through all of this pain, and for what? There was a backup plan. The thoracotomy. I was ready. I signed up for this. I listened to the doctors and they can’t even do their job when I did mine.
“I wanted it out, why didn’t you do it,” I scream, because that’s where I am. I’m angry and hurt and everything is always against me. For once could Mom have just done what she wanted? This was her idea.
Darlington steps up as if he’s ready to take the brunt of my anger. “Because when your parents and I discussed it, they asked if I believed this was the cause of your illness and how sure I was of that.”
I turn my head and body slowly toward Dr. Darlington. This is my worst fear—I knew he couldn’t be trusted.
“And?” I ask, fear spiking in my chest. This was what I was afraid of, a scalpel-happy doctor. Someone who wanted to cut me open just to poke around.
“And I think there is a twenty percent chance your cyst is the cause of your illness.”
I’m angry, furious. With myself and the hospital. But mostly with Ryan. Wasn’t it his fault I decided to try this out? To trust doctors? If Darlington all but knew this wasn’t the cause, then shouldn’t he have said so before I even went under the knife?
“We wanted answers. Laparoscopically, if it could have been removed, it would have been for the best. There was a strong case for it—to try.”
Right, because medicine isn’t about answers, it’s about guesses. Hypotheses—that’s what science calls guessing, isn’t it?
“But it wasn’t worth ending up in the ICU, Ellie,” Dad says. Mom looks down at the floor, and I wonder if she would have been game for it if he weren’t here. We would still be locked in silent battle and she would be free to write about my full thoracotomy all she wanted. Maybe what started with the best of intentions hasn’t continued in that way.
“And now what, I just go back to where I was?”
No one wants to answer that question because no one likes to say they’ve failed. That’s what happened here today: we failed.
No, they failed.
Dr. Darlington tries to make some excuses, some plans for the future. But what does it matter? My life is just going to play out like this. “Am I just going to be stuck like this?”
“We hope that when the weather changes, you will be able to get better faster. There won’t be viruses or colds that can agitate your lungs.”
“So for like half a year I’m just”—I look around the room, my parents worn out from worry and Darlington trying to be sure—“sick?” This illness will lay me out. I won’t be able to go to school. I’ll fall off the face of the earth. Then, for six months, I’ll live again. A never-ending half-life.
His smile consoles no one. He nods to my parents and backs out of the room.