Ditched Cheating Alpha, I Led My Daughter to Life's Peak novel Chapter 122

But I was wrong in a way. It was about the loss of a baby. The baby just wasn't inside me. It was me, because when the nurse's eyes looked back to tell the bad news, it was my mother's eyes she connected with. They reflected the light of the screen, glossily. A part of her cheek did too, for just a moment, and I didn't understand why. I just wanted to wipe the gel off. I had no concept of a lifetime of tests and tubes and pain. I was just twelve years old. What did I know about time?

The nurse smiled at me, tight lipped, and told my mother that I could get dressed while she went to get the doctor.

The conclusion: cardiac arrhythmia caused by a kind of septal defect.

In other words, the theory was that my heart was racing out of control because there was a gaping hole in it, which sounded about right. Fix the hole, fix the problem. They fixed the hole, I fixed the problem by selling the lie that I felt better... Until my lungs gave out.

How'd it happen? Well they put me on a stress test a while after the surgery to see how well my heart was doing.

"Just to be sure," the nurse said with a big ol' smile.

She was onto me. I knew it. I googled nonstop in incognito mode how to fake a stress test with your mother standing right next to you. There was no answer, so I hobbled into the facility ready to do my best and hope it was enough. I knew it wouldn't be, but I thought, "How bad could it be?"

I feel off that treadmill faster than I fall over in Coach Kenet's class. It was a disaster. I thought I was caught immediately, but they wheeled me over to the respiratory department so fast my head spun. That's where I met Greg. Oh Greg and his breathing tests. But that's a story for another day.