Chapter 1

The waiting room was fairly crowded with the sick, the lame and the wounded.

It was just one of the waiting rooms in this section of the vast hospital complex. Actually, there were eight floors in this central section with waiting rooms on every floor from two to eight. This section of the hospital campus was not the actual hospital. The main hospital was connected by long hallways on each floor to the central receiving section. Still, most of the traffic was routed through the first floor hallway because it was important for the patients and the visitors to flow into the registration lobby on the first floor of the hospital proper.

Christie had not been to the main hospital as yet but she was told that she would be sent there in the near future for some further testing. The nineteen year old student didn’t like the sound of that but she accepted the fact that she had very little to say in this situation and all she could do was to go along with the program with a brave little smile on her face hiding her runaway fears deep inside.

She did her best to fade away into relative invisibility in the last row of the waiting area tucking her legs up underneath her backside in a way that she knew her mother would definitely disapprove of because some not-so-sick pervert could peek at her panties without permission.

This was one of her good days and she was not in her “I don’t care” mood that seemed so prevalent ever since she had received the fateful diagnosis of a possibly fatal disease. She remembered that day because the information had been transmitted to her by telephone directly into the principal’s office from the nurse in the doctor’s office using the contact number given on her original form because her cell phone was sitting in her mother’s purse for the past month due to her excessive texting charges.

She would never forget that day when she first found out she had Cancer on the phone in the principal’s office.

When the nurse spoke the “C” word at the other end of the line, she asked her to repeat it because it was so ridiculous that she was certain it was all a silly mistake. After all, she was only a teenager and not some senior citizen playing bingo in a dreary hall filled with hordes of over the hill has-beens. She didn’t put her Nana into that category because she was still able to make delicious chocolate chip cookies and fantastic apple pie. Then, the nurse went into a long litany of things she needed to do to prepare for further testing and she began to realize the enormity of the predicament and that she had drawn the short end of the stick in the lottery of life.

Her face must have shown her panic, because the principal and the secretary were both looking at her like she had just peed right on their upgraded carpet like an untrained puppy.

“Did you get bad news, honey?”

The secretary was being ultra-nosey, but Christie could understand her reaction because she was seldom in the principal’s office keeping as low a profile possible until she graduated and earned her freedom from the restrictive rules of the private high school that required all students to wear a distinctive uniform that she absolutely hated with a deep and abiding passion. The skirts were much longer than she liked, but she understood the reason for it. The girls were notoriously careless in the way they sat on the benches outside and the staff didn’t want panties on display for obvious reasons of common decency and modesty. In Christie’s romance –starved perspective, a little help in attracting suitors was not necessarily a bad thing. It was a shortcut on the way getting a firm offer of eternal love and devotion from an approved soulmate.

She handed the receiver back to the past middle age secretary and pretended to have something in her eye to hide her sudden tears that betrayed her inner turmoil. The ominous words of the nurse repeating her unbelievable lab results had shaken her to the core and she needed some time to get back on firm ground and hide her feelings of incredulous dismay.

“Thank you, Mrs. Kennedy, they were just changing my appointment and now I will miss my fitting for the play costume.”

Of course, it was a blatant fib given with a firm voice and an innocent face. Christie was good at delivering a whopper after years of mollifying her parents so they wouldn’t worry about her friends of the places she had been without permission. Not that she was a naughty young woman. In fact, she was still a technical virgin and did her best to hide that fact from one and all including her own parents who naturally assumed she must have lost it on her European tour after her sixteenth birthday. The honest truth was that all the young men on the tour were a bunch of pimply-faced youths with little knowledge or experience of the world or of what a woman really wanted from a relationship. All of the foreign males that hovered around the pretty American females were much more able to attract her attention, but they were dissatisfied with her attitude of “go slow” when the tour bus was moving on the next day. The closest she got to doing something was with the Italian waiter with the bedroom eyes that seemed to caress her even at arm’s length. His name was Paulo and he managed to at least get his hands underneath her skirt for a short period of time when the tour guide chaperone was looking the other way.

It was a lot more relaxing to be thinking about the trip around Europe and even parts of the Eastern European countries formerly part of the Soviet Empire. Everyone gushed how much they loved France but Christie was turned off by the hedonistic attitudes in Paris and only wanted to tour the museums and watch the artists as they painted endless street scenes in styles from a long ago age. She had to admit that the food was good in France despite being overpriced in her mind and she was certain there were a “tourist” price and a “local” price to everything on the menu.

The pretty nurse wearing the cute little white cap came to the waiting room door once again and this time she called out Christie’s name in a clear voice that cut right through her reverie like a sharp knife in a surgeon’s hands.

“That’s me. I’m coming.” She gathered her bits and pieces into her shoulder bag and was mortified when her mother trailed along behind like some guardian angel attached by an invisible cord to her darling daughter. It was too late to tell her not come with her without creating a scene. That was the last thing she wanted in the crowded waiting room. She just smiled like it was the most natural thing in the world and followed the attractive nurse down the hallway to a room with lucky number seven in a light right on top. When she escorted them inside, she switched on the light so everyone would be aware that room was in use. It was a long hallway with twenty rooms all numbered and she saw that several of them already had their lights on just like hers.

It looked like it was a busy day on the cancer floor of the hospital.

Christie was just as out of place in this part of the hospital as she had been in the waiting room. At least, in the waiting room or downstairs in the lab or in the main lobby, she could easily pass as one of the many visitors or caretakers for the unlucky sick people. She really hated that look she seemed to be getting lately from a lot of sick people that seemed to recognize that certain look telling them she was one of them. She did her best to ignore the hint of pity and shrugged off their sense of “niceness” as something she would rather do without. On the outside, she was suitably resigned and passive to her fate, but inside her body was churning with disturbed rejection of her misfortune. Despite her vow to stay uninvolved in the process of fighting off the invading death cells, she sometimes found the probing and the loss of dignity wearing the silly hospital gowns almost too much to be endured. The cruelly designed things were open in the back allowing a number of strangers to see her normally carefully hidden female assets. It was similar to being reduced to a side of beef being slowly sent through the one way journey of a meat packing factory. That was a sure way for her to fall into the spell of depression that had haunted her at night just when she was searching for something nice to thing about before falling into a deep sleep. She always tried to think of something or someone she liked best of all so that her dreams would be good ones and not the stupid nightmares that plagued her more often lately.

The nurse peppered her with a rapid-fire string of instructions about what to take off, what to wash, and the ultimate loss of identity with specifics about urination that made her want to burst out in tears each time it came into the conversation. She had always been quite secretive about such matters and would always talk of “powdering her nose” or “freshen up” when the urge hit her with human regularity. Now, it seemed that such things were a matter of joint discussion and she was being evaluated by the color, the density and the timing of her production of urine.

One of the young patients with oldster eyes told her,

“You are lucky they are not after your blood. I had that for so long; I couldn’t stand the thought of another needle. I felt like I was in a den of vampires and they were using me as a food supply for their godless existence. At least, with the urine tests, you can just do what comes naturally and try to think of something else without being used as a pin cushion.”

No matter what the girl with no hair on her bald head said, Christie didn’t feel very lucky.

In fact, she was filled with a huge amount of self-pity that grew with each passing day and threatened to overwhelm her with tentacles of despair.

She undressed slowly hoping none of the hospital staff would come in on her just when she was taking off her bra or her panties. She had a silly virginal dread of being caught in that moment of exposure. Christie knew it was unreasonable because she would be quick to don a bikini for a beach outing knowing that tons of strange males would be ogling her goodies all day long. In her confused mine, it was a different situation because it was a normal affirmation of her youth and her femaleness. Besides, she found the fact that men and boys looking at her body filled her with a sense of rightness and satisfied something she was lacking down deep inside. She wondered if it was naughty to think like that but she suspected that all the girls had the same thoughts even if they didn’t have much to offer in the game of sexuality. Of course, she pretended to be aghast when she caught a boy peeking at her in a changing room or even on the beach, but she still enjoyed the fact of her attractiveness to the other gender.