“Can you give me any inclination as to what’s going on?” I asked.
And then, the nurse said something that shivered me to my bones.
“You’re going to want to wait until the doctor gets here.”
I felt my body tense up completely, and for the first time in my life, I was truly petrified. Not scared. Not anxious. Not even nervous. But sickeningly petrified. Even when those thugs had ripped me out of bed by my neck when I was still in L.A., I hadn’t been as scared as I was at that moment.
I felt my nausea wave back through my body as the doctor’s voice came booming at my side.
“Miss Ryan, can you open your eyes for me?” he asked.
I shook my head no, hoping he would just leave it at that.
“All right. My name’s Doctor Osmunt. I’ve been overseeing your testing today. How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Like shit,” I said.
“All right.”
I heard him wheel up a chair and sit down beside me, and even though I couldn’t open my eyes, I felt a somber mood hit the room. My body was tightening, and my stomach was roaring with something akin to a sickening despair, rendering my body lifeless as tears prickled the backs of my eyes. I shook my head and chuckled, trying to lighten the mood of the room with the fake happiness I tried to pour into it.
But the doctor didn’t respond. He only reached out and took my hand in his.
I’d watched enough movies in my lifetime to know that was never a good sign.
“Miss Ryan, how frequently have you been having these migraines?” he asked.
“I don’t know. A few weeks now, I guess. Maybe three months?”
“Have they varied in intensity?” he asked.
“Yes. They weren’t too bad in the beginning, but the one this morning practically took me by surprise,” I said, giggling.
And still, the doctor didn’t giggle along with me.
“Miss Ryan, my specialty here at the hospital is oncology,” he said.
I felt my blood run cold as my mind stopped in its tracks.
“Do you know what that means?”
I nodded my head silently, trying to keep my tears at bay while images of Bryan’s face flash through my mind.
Now, I was glad he wasn’t here.
“Miss Ryan, you have a malignant brain tumor,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “So, what do we do about it? Where do we go from here?”
The mood in the room changed once again and tears poured down my cheeks like my body knew the secret it had been holding onto even though my brain hadn’t quite processed what was going on yet.
“It’s very severe,” he said. “The cancer started in your kidney and metastasized to your brain, and it’s in a part of your brain that is almost impossible to operate on.”
“So, w-what are you saying?” I asked.
The medicine was doing nothing to touch the headache that was still raging through my body.
My body that was failing me.