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.

I used to be a sick hospital girl who got in the way of her family's lives with her problems (even if they never made me feel that way). Now I'm just a sick girl, and I can enjoy life with them, even if it hurts sometimes. It's nice to see my mom getting a chance to follow her dreams. It's nice to see my dad not having to be the sole provider for all my other siblings so that my mom can have time for me. It's nice to feel like I'm not hogging a parent, or time, or the spotlight.

It dawns on me, slowly and then all at once, that I'm not just lying somewhere anymore. Someone's holding me. I feel the points where they're body makes contact with me, as if holding on for dear life. I see the hall, but then I don't. It's like an abstract painting. Nothing's quite right about it, or me. I don't feel myself.

Just like back then I didn't feel like myself. I felt like a fraud, a crook.

One time, Megan broke her arm and she didn't even think it was worth mentioning when I got back from the hospital. There was barely any space left on her cast for me to sign (mainly because Michael decided to write his full name for no apparent reason, and then Charlie did the same thing-with the help of Michael of course. And then Dad followed, not being one to let Michael one up him on his own daughter's arm. And then Mom got to the markers before me, and in the end, there was half an inch left for me to scrawl on my initials).