Read Online Ryan White - My Own Story by Ryan & Cunningham White - Free Book Online

pentamidine shots in my thigh—yech!—but later I could get it intravenously. When Mom heard this, she began to believe that I’d live longer than the three to six months Grandpa had predicted. She asked my grandparents to take poor worn-out Andrea home with them so she could sleep in a bed for once instead of under a hospital lounge chair. That night Mom slept well herself for the first time since I’d gone into the hospital.
    The next day was her favorite of the entire year—Christmas. Mom starts planning for Christmas well before Halloween. She begins decorating our house at Thanksgiving, and sometimes leaves all the trimmings up until March, just because she hates taking everything down. “The house looks so blah,” she complains. We always have at least two trees: a big one covered with all kind of ornaments that Mom has collected, and a little one hung with framed photographs of everyone in the family. Even Dad is on our family portrait tree—and certainly Steve.
    As for our big tree, Mom’s been known to set the whole thing up, lights and all—and then decide she doesn’t like the way it looks, tear everything down, and start all over again. She crochets snowflakes, and she clips real candles in tin holders onto the tree’s branches. She makes popcorn chains for the tree that she puts in the freezer after Christmas so they’ll keep until the next year. She bakes her special stained-glass cookies, made with melted Life Savers inside. They’re so pretty that they make perfect ornaments, but she can never save them; someone always eats them long before Christmas!
    When Mom said good night to me at Riley she left the winking lights on my little tree, along with my guardian angel. We had lots of cards to decorate my room—word had gotten around my neighborhood and church. Some kids at Western, my school, had sent me cards too—even some kids I didn’t know. They said they thought I was brave, and they hoped I was feeling better. My school also sent a giant computer banner. The computer had printed out “Get Well Soon” in huge letters. We hung it over my window and made a wreath of cards around it.

Ryan’s first day back at Western Middle School. Behind him is his stepfather Steve Ford.







Ryan with his dog Wally, 1989.
    Every year Mom makes sure that Andrea and I find tons of presents under our tree. She gets a kick out of picking out things she knows we want. “If I don’t have anything to show at Christmas after all my years at Delco,” she always says, “I’m in bad shape.” That year she’d worked a lot of overtime in October and had done all her shopping by the time I got so sick. She had plenty of presents for both of us in her closet, including a computer for me. She asked my grandparents to bring our gifts on Christmas Day so Andrea and I could open them at the hospital.
    On Christmas morning—it was a white Christmas—Mom was eating breakfast in the hospital cafeteria when she was paged. My grandma was on the line, frantic.
    “Jeanne, this is terrible! I dropped by your house to get your gifts—and you’ve been robbed. Christmas is gone. They took all your presents and your VCR and your videotapes of Andrea skating at the nationals.”
    Mom felt numb. She’d worked hard to make this Christmas as perfect as possible—and now she didn’t even have any presents for us. The culprits must have been some neighbors whom she suspected were into drugs.
    “I’ll just have to try to explain things to the kids,” she sighed to Grandma. In Mom’s bedroom Grandma had uncovered some stocking stuffers that the burglars had overlooked. At least Andrea and I would have a few small presents.
    Poor Andrea was devastated. No presents was bad enough, but her skating tapes couldn’t be replaced. Now she would never be able to show anyone what she’d done to win at the nationals.
    Mom found me listening to tapes on my new cassette player. When she told me what had happened, my stomach dropped.