too.”
I’d never thought about that. I play aggressively on defense, all about the slide tackle, even in practice. I play clean, but intense. I’m that girl that the other team starts fouling before the first half ends.
“So you need to get your grades up,” she finished.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, which in most of my other classes so far hadn’t included finishing homework.
“Good. We need you.”
No pressure, or anything.
11
The first time Beep temporarily died, he picked an inconvenient night. It was the evening in October when I was supposed to put together the final PowerPoint for our World History group presentation and email it to Kayla and Ashley and Jamaal, so they could practice it before morning. Instead, I saw Beep go into cardiac arrest and stop breathing for a while.
Beep had been pretty thrashed coming off radiation treatments, and they’d put him on an even more barf-o-matic chemo cocktail than usual, which made him throw up so much that his esophagus ruptured and started bleeding, as he weakly puked red streams. With a lot of blood cancers—including Beep’s—bleeding isn’t good: Your blood is so messed up it doesn’t clot; once it starts pouring out, it won’t stop.
The whole family had been visiting Beep when he started the red spit business. Mom freaked out, which, for once, was totally appropriate. She put half the hospital staff in headlocks until they’d come look at Beep. Pretty soon the room was crowded with scrubs. Beep’s vital signs crashed and he stopped breathing, and his heart stopped. At that point, they semi-threw us out. Mom, wanting us out of the way of the medical staff, herded the family to the waiting room to sit, terrified.
I get why you push the family out, so they aren’t in the way, when you’re trying to save a kid’s life. Still, the waiting room? Where we can’t even hear what’s going on? While my brother might be dying? It was partly Mom’s doing, but that was bull manure piled so deep it could drown short people.
Mom, Dad, and Rachel were sitting in the waiting room clutching each other looking frozen—except Dad, who was trying, but failing, to look
not
scared, which was somehow scarier. I said I was going to the bathroom, and instead marched toward the ICU. Dad made sputtering Dad noises, but Mom shouted after me, “Report back.”
Sneaking into the ICU is easy—just don’t skulk. Stride down the hall like you belong or even actually own the hospital wing because of some huge charity donation. It’s not hard, because (1) any hospital floor has dozens of rooms screened off by curtains, with plenty of places to duck into, (2) during a code involving your brother, with his heart and breathing stopped, the scrubs-people have plenty to do other than keeping you out of the room next door, and (3) I did belong. By then I’d logged more hours in the ICU than most bone marrow kids.
So I strode back to the room next to Beep’s. The kid in there was a frightened ten-year-old named Nathan with ALL, who stared at me with wide eyes. His mom had stepped away for all of fifteen minutes to the cafeteria, leaving the poor guy to overhear a nearby cardiac arrest after chemo.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine,” I lied confidently. “And his kind of cancer is different from yours.” But not being able to see what was going on ramped up my anxiety. “I’ll check on him, though, to make sure.”
I scuttled over into Beep’s room and slid into a corner, like I was invisible. The nurses and the doc working on Beep were matter-of-fact about it, which was slightly reassuring. Nurse Chestopher was doing Beep’s breathing for him, holding a plastic balloon up to Beep’s face. It’s called hand-bagging, which sounds like hitting someone with a purse but was totally different. He squeezed it to force air into Beep’s lungs. At the same time, Nurse Adrienne was next to the bed, mashing on Beep’s chest to keep his blood flowing. She was also
I’d never thought about that. I play aggressively on defense, all about the slide tackle, even in practice. I play clean, but intense. I’m that girl that the other team starts fouling before the first half ends.
“So you need to get your grades up,” she finished.
“I’ll do what I can,” I said, which in most of my other classes so far hadn’t included finishing homework.
“Good. We need you.”
No pressure, or anything.
11
The first time Beep temporarily died, he picked an inconvenient night. It was the evening in October when I was supposed to put together the final PowerPoint for our World History group presentation and email it to Kayla and Ashley and Jamaal, so they could practice it before morning. Instead, I saw Beep go into cardiac arrest and stop breathing for a while.
Beep had been pretty thrashed coming off radiation treatments, and they’d put him on an even more barf-o-matic chemo cocktail than usual, which made him throw up so much that his esophagus ruptured and started bleeding, as he weakly puked red streams. With a lot of blood cancers—including Beep’s—bleeding isn’t good: Your blood is so messed up it doesn’t clot; once it starts pouring out, it won’t stop.
The whole family had been visiting Beep when he started the red spit business. Mom freaked out, which, for once, was totally appropriate. She put half the hospital staff in headlocks until they’d come look at Beep. Pretty soon the room was crowded with scrubs. Beep’s vital signs crashed and he stopped breathing, and his heart stopped. At that point, they semi-threw us out. Mom, wanting us out of the way of the medical staff, herded the family to the waiting room to sit, terrified.
I get why you push the family out, so they aren’t in the way, when you’re trying to save a kid’s life. Still, the waiting room? Where we can’t even hear what’s going on? While my brother might be dying? It was partly Mom’s doing, but that was bull manure piled so deep it could drown short people.
Mom, Dad, and Rachel were sitting in the waiting room clutching each other looking frozen—except Dad, who was trying, but failing, to look
not
scared, which was somehow scarier. I said I was going to the bathroom, and instead marched toward the ICU. Dad made sputtering Dad noises, but Mom shouted after me, “Report back.”
Sneaking into the ICU is easy—just don’t skulk. Stride down the hall like you belong or even actually own the hospital wing because of some huge charity donation. It’s not hard, because (1) any hospital floor has dozens of rooms screened off by curtains, with plenty of places to duck into, (2) during a code involving your brother, with his heart and breathing stopped, the scrubs-people have plenty to do other than keeping you out of the room next door, and (3) I did belong. By then I’d logged more hours in the ICU than most bone marrow kids.
So I strode back to the room next to Beep’s. The kid in there was a frightened ten-year-old named Nathan with ALL, who stared at me with wide eyes. His mom had stepped away for all of fifteen minutes to the cafeteria, leaving the poor guy to overhear a nearby cardiac arrest after chemo.
“Don’t worry, he’s fine,” I lied confidently. “And his kind of cancer is different from yours.” But not being able to see what was going on ramped up my anxiety. “I’ll check on him, though, to make sure.”
I scuttled over into Beep’s room and slid into a corner, like I was invisible. The nurses and the doc working on Beep were matter-of-fact about it, which was slightly reassuring. Nurse Chestopher was doing Beep’s breathing for him, holding a plastic balloon up to Beep’s face. It’s called hand-bagging, which sounds like hitting someone with a purse but was totally different. He squeezed it to force air into Beep’s lungs. At the same time, Nurse Adrienne was next to the bed, mashing on Beep’s chest to keep his blood flowing. She was also
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