Shifting Gears: The Complete Series (Sports Bad Boy Romance) (35 page)

“It was fun. We just watched a movie. How
was yours?”

“The car show was good, but Tim’s mom’s
house was…questionable. I had serious concerns about her housekeeping methods.”
Megan was kind of a clean-freak which wasn’t a bad thing, but I worry that she
might have to kill Jake when they finally decide to get married or live
together. From what Brock told me, he is kind of a slob.

“I have to pee,” Megan said.

I shook my head. I don’t know if it’s a
psychological thing or what, but every time I go into the bathroom, Megan has
to pee. I was okay with it now, though it was really hot in the bathroom. I got
this sudden, overwhelming need for air. I went out into the room and opened the
one and only window we have. It’s not that big, but I hung my head out of it
like a dog out of a car window. As soon as the fresh air hit my lungs I became
nauseated and my head started feeling a little foggy. As I stood there,
clutching on to the windowsill, the room started to spin. Maybe it was the
bagel….

I turned around and tried to make it to my
bed about the time that Megan came out of the bathroom. One look at me sent her
running to my side. She grabbed my arm and helped me get to the bed and then
she said, “Molly you’re as white as a sheet.”

“I’m a little light-headed,” I told her.
“I just need to lie down.”

Megan helped me lay back on the bed. The
room was spinning now and my ears were ringing. I suddenly felt like I needed
to puke and I tried to get up but I was too off-balance to stand.

Megan grabbed her purse and said, “We’re
going to the hospital.”

“No,” I protested. “I’m okay.” To prove I
was a liar no doubt, I stumbled into the desk between our beds.

“Molly, you’re going with me or I’m
calling an ambulance. Wait right there I’m going to get Debbie.”

Debbie was our “house-mother” at the
dorms. She knew about my illness, she had to…just in case, my grandma had said.
I tried to protest again, but when I opened my mouth I realized that any motion
at all was going to make me puke. I sat down in the desk chair and leaned
forward with my head close to the metal trash can…just in case, and waited for
them to get back.

Megan and Debbie were back in five
minutes. Debbie was a good choice for house-mother. She was a senior and very
smart, and not prone to panic at all. She took charge right away, taking me
under one arm and telling Megan to get under the other.

“Do you have her purse with her I.D. and
all that?” Debbie asked Meggs. Megan grabbed it and, acting as if they were
leading a rag doll, we were on our way. I tried to tell them that I would be
okay, and that I didn’t want to go to the hospital, but they acted like they
couldn’t hear me. For a few seconds I thought maybe I was only saying it in my
head. When we got downstairs, Debbie told Megan to go get the car and pull it
up to the curb. When she had gone, Debbie looked at me and said, “Should I call
Grandma?” I thought about being sarcastic and telling her I didn’t care if she
called her grandma, but she was being nice and there was no reason for me to be
a bitch just because I felt like throwing up and passing out.

“I’m really fine, Debbie. I don’t think we
need to worry her.”

Debbie didn’t say anything, but she didn’t
look convinced either. When Megan pulled the car up out front, Debbie tucked me
into the passenger seat and told her, “Take her to the ambulance bay side.
There will be wheelchairs there. If they keep her, even for a few hours, call
her grandmother.”

Megan said she would and Debbie closed the
door. I had a feeling that once she got inside she was going to decide to call
grandma herself. It was nice of her to worry, but I hated it. I despised being
the center of all of this negative attention. I closed my eyes and lay my head
back against the seat and thought once again…
I just want to be normal
.

When I opened my eyes again, we were at
the emergency entrance of the hospital. Megan parked where the ambulances go,
and I was trying to tell her she wasn’t supposed to park there. She acted like
she couldn’t hear me again and jumped out to grab a wheelchair. She opened the
car door and was going to try and help me out, although I could have done it
myself, when an orderly showed up.

“You need some help?”

“No, I can do it myself.”

“Yes, please,” Megan said.

Am
I not talking out loud?

“She’s really weak; I don’t want her to
fall.”

The orderly told Megan where to park the
chair and once again I was treated like Ragged-Ann. He put his hands around my
waist and told me to hold on around his shoulders and then he lifted me into
the chair. It was really way too much of a production and I told Megan so as he
pushed me inside. I guess she must have been able to hear me that time, because
she finally said, “Shhh, Molly. Hush!” Now my feelings were hurt. I was sick
and she was yelling at me.

The guy who had helped us pushed me up to
the triage desk and then told Megan she could go move her car. I had to answer
a bunch of questions and while I was doing that the nausea returned and I found
myself staring at the bottom of a Pepto-Bismol pink plastic bucket. I had the
dry heaves a few times, but nothing was coming out. The nurse was taking my
vitals now, and she said that I was running a temperature, my pulse was high
and my blood pressure low. She and I both knew what that meant, I was
dehydrated.

“Have you been drinking water?” she asked.

“Does coffee count?” I asked her.

She wasn’t in the mood for humor though. I
guess because of what they see every day, nurses rarely are. I admitted that I
may have forgotten to drink enough but just for the last two days. Otherwise I
was usually really good about it. She didn’t give me credit for that though,
and excused herself when Megan came back and went to call my oncologist. Jeez!
What a tattle-tale. When I was able to lift my head out of the bucket, I looked
at Meggs and said, “Now I’m going to get a lecture you know.”

My best friend looked me in the eyes and
said, “Good. You need to take better care of yourself.”

“I usually do…” I wanted to defend myself,
but mean or not, she was right. I stick to my diet religiously, and usually
make sure to drink six bottles of water a day. I knew how prone I was to
getting dehydrated. I had been a little distracted lately…maybe it was Brock.
If that were the case however, then it came back to being Megan’s fault. She
was the one who introduced us.

When the nurse came back, she told me that
Dr. Harris wanted her to admit me. I protested again. I was fine; I would just
go home and drink some more water. I them so, and again my words fell on deaf
ears. As she got the paperwork ready, Megan said, “I’m going to step out in the
lobby and call your grandma.”

“I don’t think that’s necessary, Meg.
They’re going to stick an IV in me and pump me with some fluids and cut me
loose. I don’t want to worry her.” She’ll come right away, and she’ll have that
look she gets when her eyebrows have been drawn together in the middle too
long.

“We don’t know that,” Megan was saying.
“If I don’t call her, Dr. Harris will. Then I’ll be the one getting the lecture
when she gets here.”

Megan was right; grandma would be pissed
if they didn’t call her. “Okay, but be sure to tell her I’m okay and not to
race right over here.”

“Yeah,” Megan said with a little laugh,
“that’ll work.” She knew my grandma about as well as I did. Before leaving, she
leaned down and hugged me real quick and said, “I’ll be right back.”

When Megan got back they were trying to
start the IV. Once the ER nurses got the fluids running in me they would take
me to the oncology unit. When I was really sick and getting chemo in the
hospital every month I had a Meta-port. It was implanted in my chest and they
would numb the spot and access my veins through my chest. It kept the veins in
my arms and hands from getting ruined from the harsh drugs, plus it was easy if
I was dehydrated, or needed blood. I remember being so happy when I was in
remission, and they had taken it out. Now as the nurse dug into my arm, looking
for the scrawny vein that had packed up and moved away, I wished I had it back.
After three tries, a male nurse finally found one in my hand.

“It’s probably not going to work if you
need meds, it’s so small. Hopefully we can get enough fluids in you to pump up
the other ones before they need them.”

They took me to the oncology unit then and
got me checked into a room. It felt good to lie on the cool sheets of the
hospital bed and I had just started to fall asleep when the nurse came in to
check my vitals. After she did that, she told me that Dr. Harris wanted them to
draw blood too. Great, hopefully my little skinny vein held up. I looked at
poor Meg, sitting there at the bedside and told her, “Hey, thanks for bringing
me. You don’t have to stay here.”

She just made a face at me. I knew that no
matter what I said, she wouldn’t leave me alone. When grandma got here, and I
knew too that she would come, then Meggs might leave. The nurse took the blood
and left, and I finally got to drift off to sleep for a while.

I had strange dreams; it probably had
something to do with not having much fluid in my brain. Brock was in all of
them, and we were dancing on the rooftops of all the building at the
university. He was singing to me, sometimes it was Justin Timberlake, but one
time…it was Brittany Spears and I have to admit, I was embarrassed for him.
Just about the time we had danced our way across the rooftops and were standing
at the edge of the roof of the three story tall library, he went in for the
kiss. This time I was going to do it, I couldn’t wait for our lips to meet….

“Molly…Molly wake up.” I opened one eye.
It was Dr. Harris.
Damn you evil
oncologist!
I opened the other eye, and where Megan had been in my peripheral
vision before now sat Grandma.

“Hi Grandma,” I said, “Hi, Dr. Harris.” I
was still mad at him for ruining the kiss, but Grandma was here so I had to be
polite.

“Hey Molly. How are you feeling?” Grandma
asked.

“I’m okay, Grandma,” I told her. “I’m just
a little dehydrated. Everyone’s overreacting a bit, I think.”

Dr. Harris cut in then and said, “Molly,
your hemoglobin is low. We’re going to have to give you some blood too.” See,
pure evil. Now I would be here all day. He wasn’t finished yet though, as he
went on to say, “I’m going to admit you at least overnight too.”

“Oh no, I have classes tomorrow. I don’t
have time to be lying in a bed…”

“Molly,” he interrupted me. He was not
only evil, he was rude. “Your Bun/Creatinine ratio is 10:1.”

I wished that I didn’t know what that
meant. But, unfortunately, my evil oncologist was one of those outstanding
communicators and excellent teachers. When we first started all of this
nonsense he had explained to me more than I thought I needed to know about
Blood Urea Nitrogen and Creatinine. The BUN was a molecule that came from
protein breakdown. It mostly gets excreted when we pee, but the amount of it in
your blood can indicate the rate of blood flow through your nephrons.

Creatinine is also released into the blood
by muscle, and it measurement shows how well the kidneys are able to either
reabsorb it…as they should, or if it’s just excreted. If I was normal, my ratio
would be around 15:1. A 10:1 meant bad things, likely a necrotic kidney, or at
least necrotic nephrons inside the kidney. Necrotic means dead and to a girl
with only one kidney, that could mean dead period. It was not the best news I
had ever gotten.

“So what do we do about that?” I asked
him.

“First we take care of your blood count,
and then we’ll run some more tests,” he said.

I looked at Grandma. Her face was drawn
tight like it always is when she worries about me and that line between her
eyebrows was deep. Poor thing, she was really pretty for an almost
sixty-year-old woman. In her heyday, she had been beautiful. Sometimes when I
look at her and I see the lines around her eyes I wonder if she would look ten
years younger if it hadn’t been for me and all of the worrying she does. I held
my hand out to her and she took it. She smiled at me; she wanted me to believe
everything would be okay. That’s what grandma’s do. I closed my eyes and tried
to drift back into the dream.

CHAPTER
TWELVE

BROCK

Jake was on the couch playing video games
when I came out of my room with my guitar slung across my shoulder.

“Where are you off to?” Jake asked me as
he shot at the zombies that ran amok through the city.

“I’m going to go over to the hospital. I
don’t have much going on today. I thought I’d see if they’d let me play for
some of the kids or old people in the oncology unit.”

“Not hanging out with Molly today?”

It was hard to have a conversation with a
guy in his boxers, sitting sideways with his tongue hanging out for balance. “I
don’t know, maybe later,” I said. “Where’s Megan today?”

Jake shrugged, “I think she had her fill
of me last night. She wasn’t impressed with the place we stayed. I guess it was
because she had to move dirty dishes and empty pizza boxes off the sofa where
she was supposed to sleep. Tim’s mom works…a lot. She’s not much of a housekeeper.
I forgot to tell Megan that before she agreed to stay there.”