Not the Fault in Our Stars
Looking through the eyes of someone with chronic illness
Story by Anonymous
It’s raining again today. I haven’t even looked through my window yet but my bones feel the clouds, laying heavy on my joints. It’s a little easier to breathe this morning, so I stick my inhaler back in my drawer. I can see my mom left me a cup of water by my bedside.
She recently told me about a conversation she had with our pastor.
“How are you?” he asked.
“She’s doing a lot better! The arthritis in her legs is subsiding and the tumors in her lungs cleared benign,” she said.
“No, I said how are you?”
I can tell she cried recently; puffy eyes like that don’t come out of nowhere.
Preparing for another doctor’s visit, I stack on two pairs of socks under a pair of old sandals that should’ve been thrown out in last summer’s Goodwill pile. I know it makes it easier for the nurses to weigh me if I didn’t wear high tops like I used to.
Twenty-six million people in America, including me, walk around with chronic illness. At face value, I look “normal.” But the fact of the matter is I feel like crap all the time.
When I was diagnosed, I hid my body under oversized flannels and old camp t-shirts. My arms bruised from the IVs and blood draws, and my frame changed from the steroids and chemo. I called the bags under my eyes designer because they were created by big name pharmaceuticals that made my skin feel paper thin.
I would run my fingers against the tiger stripes on my hips, then against the bruises by a navel that I couldn’t get pierced like every other 17 year old because of risk of infection. My rings don’t fit like they used to on my boney fingers.
One fall, there was a boy. Because there was a boy, and because I had a frequent flyer card on my wrist from the hospital, I was cast by my classmates in my suburban, hormone-filled high school as a character in “The Fault in Our Stars.”
But my life wasn’t a teenage rom-com filled with cigarette metaphors and boys that told me they loved me. There were no late nights sneaking out or eggs being thrown at cars. Part of me hates John Green for that book and the other part hates society for making it seem like being chronically ill spices up your love life. If you’re wondering, the boy never made it past the second MRI.
Today was the fourth day of appointments this week. It feels like I am running out of veins to poke from. A sterile room is painted with colorful animals as if it would distract from the ruffling of sanitary paper on the bed.
My mom rubs the part of my back that peeks out of my gown. She helps me take the Band-Aid off where they put the needle in my spine. While she drinks her stale coffee, I get dressed, knowing tomorrow wouldn’t look much different. At least the rain stopped pouring as we left.