My Delicate Destruction: Book One of the Wolfegang Series (4 page)

“I think she’s awake,” I heard someone whisper.

I looked over to see my parents, and Kris. A nurse leaned over me to adjust my IV.

“The doctor will be with you in a minute,” she told us. “Would you like some water?”

All I could do was nod. She lifted a glass of water to my lips and I took a sip. My mom’s eyes were tearing up and she came to stand next to the bed to hold my hand desperately.

“Hey,” I said. My voice was barely even a whisper. My lips cracked and I could taste blood.

“Baby, I was so worried,” Mom said, her voice choking up. “Don’t scare us like that again.” I wished I could comfort her, but I had no idea what happened. The last thing I remembered was being at Kevin’s house.

“Where’s Kevin?” I asked. I looked around and didn’t see him. Maybe he was getting some coffee.

Kris stayed back with our Dad, leaning against the wall. “He had to go to work, but he said he’d be back as soon as he could get someone to cover his shift,” my twin replied. He winked.

I smiled back at him. I knew him better than myself, and that wink didn’t fool me. He was worried and stressed. His jiggling leg always gave him away.

I wished I could figure out what happened. I was fine one moment and then the next I was gone, and I only had one beer. It couldn’t be more than simple dehydration; I mean I had spent all day in the sun. That had to be what it was. There was this feeling I couldn’t shake, one that made me wonder if maybe it was something else; something much worse. Hospitals gave me the creeps, and doomsday thinking was easy to jump to when the building reeked of the sick and dying.

Finally my doctor walked in carrying my chart and followed by the nurse who had been in to see me earlier.

“So we did a standard tox screen, and checked for possible drug use. It came back clean. There was nothing to indicate someone had slipped you Rohypnol. What we did find was an abnormality in your platelet levels.”

I exchanged a look with my twin. After dealing with Kris’ cancer for years we knew what that could mean. Was that even possible? Could twins contract the same disease years apart?

“We are going to need to draw some more blood before we can determine anything concrete. My nurse here will be able to help you.”

Okay, I knew what he was checking for but there were a lot of things that could explain why I would pass out, throw up, sleep for days at a time, and then not sleep for a week. I thought it was kind of normal for someone my age. There was a lot of stress around midterms and finals. The college student who drank too much, or who crashes after studying for forty-eight hours straight; drinking nine Red Bulls or coffee was not unusual.

The doctor looked almost curious. He eyed Kris, and I knew he recognized the signs of his recent chemotherapy. “I will be back with your test results as soon as possible. I will make sure they are rushed through the lab.” He left before any of us could possibly ask any more questions.

The nurse came over and sterilized my arm before stabbing it with a needle. She took four vials of my blood and I felt even more lightheaded than before. I glared at her as she worked. I was even more convinced that the medical profession was sadistic.

“Don’t worry, dear,” she said. “We’ll take good care of you.” She patted my arm after putting a SpongeBob Band-Aid on it. “The saline we have you hooked up to should help with the dizziness.” She swept away with most of my blood in those vials, or so it seemed.

My mother softly approached me from the chair she had been sitting in near the door. “Baby,” she said carefully, as if I would shatter if she was too loud. “Your father and I have to go to work but your brother will stay here with you.”

I nodded, almost relieved they were leaving. It was hard to see them so worried, and so uncomfortable. She kissed my forehead, and straightened, wiping tears away. My father just squeezed my hand and silently went out the door. Saying he was reserved was like saying the Pope was only a little religious.

Kris perched on the edge of my bed and gave me his knowing look. “You know what it might be, don’t you?” he asked.

“No,” I said stubbornly. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“Look,” he said. He pulled back the band-aid to show me my arm. The tiny wound was still bleeding heavily with no sign of slowing down. The nurse had left at least ten minutes ago.

“Your blood isn’t clotting like it should,” he said, stating the obvious.

“Kris, we don’t know anything yet.” My tone ended that conversation. I crossed my arms and looked away from him.

Dawn was breaking over a new day. I had been out of it for a while. I sighed, realizing how much time I had lost. I may be freaking out, but I wasn’t going to tell Kris. He would just tell me ‘I told you so.’

Kris crawled into the bed and lay next to me as we waited. He comforted me with his presence without having to say anything. I couldn’t stop thinking about what he had said. We both had studied oncology extensively since he had been diagnosed. I rested my forehead against his shoulder. It didn’t matter how tough I acted, how much I tried to convince him or myself; we both knew I was terrified. We stayed like that for awhile until I fell asleep.

Around noon the doctor finally came back and Kris woke me up. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and tried to look like I was awake.

“I’m sorry about the wait miss, but we want to have your parents here before we go over the procedures.”

“What kind of procedures?” I asked, alarmed.

“It’s nothing to worry about Ms. Anderson.” And he was gone in a flurry of white coats and stethoscopes. This doctor was getting on my nerves.

I looked up at Kris, but he looked just as confused as I did. Since when does a doctor need the parents’ consent when the patient is of legal age? Whatever it was, it wasn’t reassuring.

I tried to keep my mind off of it while we waited for the hospital to call our parents, and them to finally listen to the messages, and then they would head over. It would be at least a few hours. We decided to watch TV. There’s really nothing you can do in a hospital when all you are doing is waiting for news. There were reruns on TV but nothing worth watching, though we kept it on for the noise.

Normally we would be racing around the corridors in wheel chairs, visiting patients we knew in the oncology ward, and playing endless games of chess and Connect Four. That was what we did when Kris was in the hospital, but for some reason this was different, our roles were reversed and neither of us knew what to do.

It gave me too much time to think. It wasn’t the best thing to do given the circumstance, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want my life to change in the way I knew it would.

I was happy. Well, happier than I had been for a long time. The comparison was relative. Regardless, I did not want to spend the rest of my life in a hospital, not being able to do the few things that made me happy. I loved racing.

To be honest, I was afraid. The situation made me feel like a victim, which was almost worse than the fear.

A few hours passed by and just as predicted my mom and dad were ushered into the room by a nurse, hours after they were called. My mom looked like she had been crying again.

“Dr. O’Leary will be with you in a minute,” the nurse said. She left my family in an awkward silence.

Kris went over and held her hand while we waited, again. Just a few seconds later Dr. O’Leary walked into my room, startling us all by being punctual.

I appraised him as he looked over my chart. This was a different doctor than the previous one. He was a short man, bald with only his sideburns and beard left, and they were a fiery red. He had a sweet face that had laugh lines, but at the moment he looked serious and a little sad, like he was going to tell us something we weren’t going to like.

He sat down on the little doctor’s chair and crossed his arms over the chart. He gave me a quick look, and then shifted his gaze to my parents as he began.

“Your blood work came back. It has far too many platelets and leukocytes, or more commonly known as white blood cells.”

I couldn’t breathe.

“We tested the cells and it came back positive for acute leukemia.” Dr. O’Leary’s face drew in as he waited for us to process, but there was no way I could accept what he had just said, let alone process it.

“Now,” he said. “It’s already quite advanced. Your damaged cells are reproducing far too rapidly and you may have only a few months if it isn’t treated immediately.”

“How could this have happened?” I asked, desperate for an explanation. “Shouldn’t there have been signs, or something?”

His frown deepened. “There are many different types of leukemia. Yours has developed differently and more rapidly than your twin’s. There are rarely signs with this type of leukemia.” He was one of the few doctors I’d seen that didn’t look like he enjoyed giving bad news.

“Well what kind is it?” Kris asked.

“She has Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia also known as CML. The bone marrow cells are multiplying outside of the bone marrow tissue. It is caused by an abnormality in the DNA. It causes uncontrolled reproduction of all types of white blood cells and platelets.” Dr. O’Leary looked straight at me before he told me exactly what I was afraid of. “Unfortunately it is not yet curable by standard methods of chemotherapy or immunotherapy.”

He took a breath to consider my lack of a reaction. Sometimes when the worst happens, it is so terrible that you kind of accept it in stride, knowing nothing worse could possibly happen.

“Katerina, he said. “You are very lucky that we discovered it when we did because the disease has no early symptoms and is usually found by accident.” He shifted in his seat as he spoke.

I narrowed my eyes in suspicion. He was fidgeting. There was something else he wasn’t telling us. If he didn’t get to the point soon I was going to throw something at him.

“There are three stages of this disease,” he continued. “There’s the chronic phase where there are fewer than five percent damaged cells. The accelerated phase that has more than five percent and less than thirty percent damaged cells. You are already in the accelerated phase, where there are more than thirty percent damaged cells in your blood stream and bone marrow. It has transformed into aggressive acute leukemia.”

My mom was crying openly and my father stood there, he seemed confused, as if he had no idea what to believe or how to react. But Kris and I had the same look on our faces, complete and utter disbelief. What were the odds, what were the chances that multiple children in the same family were diagnosed with cancer? What were the odds that my twin and I were diagnosed with the same type of cancer but with varying degrees of severity? I knew the chances were so small that they were practically negligible. Yet, here we were.

“What is the next step?” Kris asked the doctor. Neither of our parents were equipped to deal with this at the moment.

Dr. O’Leary’s frown grew deeper. “I already looked over your medical files, Kristopher, to see if your marrow was a possible match for a bone marrow transplant. While you are a perfect match, your cells are not healthy enough to help Katerina. Neither of your parents were a match. Those tests were in your file Kris.”

I rolled my eyes. I could have told him that. I had done more transplants than I could count for my brother, but it had been almost a year since his last bone marrow transplant.

“I’m sorry to say this,” he went on. “But you do not have time to wait on a transplant list, Katerina. The only other option is treatment with the cytotoxic drugs, daunorubicin and cytarabine.” He paused. It was almost like he was speaking another language. “The damaged cells will be reduced temporarily, but they will increase again in three to six weeks.” He paused again, and then really looked at me. “Your chances of survival are not very good.”

Dr. O’Leary said nothing while he waited for us to realize, that there really wasn’t a next step. The next step was for me to wait around and die. “This is fucking stupid.” What the hell? How did this even happen? Why did it have to happen to me? Why wasn’t I graced with the same chances my twin had? I almost felt guilty for thinking that. I had been perfectly healthy during all those years he had been sick, and barely holding on to life.

Then I started to laugh. Just when I thought things couldn’t get any worse, they did, I shouldn’t have even thought there was no way it could be worse, that was always the cue for the universe to screw you further.

My dad was a statue, only blinking every few minutes while he stared at the doctor as the silence stretched on. He looked like he wanted to be anywhere else than that hospital.

“There is one other option,” Dr. O’Leary said warily.

I eyed him. I was suspicious, but desperate enough to ask. “What option?” I had done thorough research on all types of leukemia for my brother, and to my knowledge there were no other options.

“The UCLA medical center is conducting a research study,” Dr. O’Leary began. “They are looking for the cure to all types of leukemia with just one drug. Not just to send it into remission, but to wipe out the damaged cells completely and to revert the DNA abnormality. It is completely experimental, but in your case it would be worth a try.”

Yes, otherwise all I had to look forward to was death in varying lengths of time. “Explain it to me,” I demanded.