I wake up in an unfamiliar bed, the sickeningly strong smell I associate with disinfectant all around me. Something is different; something is wrong. I can’t breath.

Loud bleeping fills my head as my hand travels upwards of it’s own accord, reaching my chest and the foreign object resting there. A tube; disappearing under my skin. This isn’t normal. This isn’t right.

I tug on it but nothing happens and somewhere in my hazy-mind I realise that I must still be pretty drugged up from the aesthetic. I tug again: I don’t like it. It shouldn’t be there; it doesn’t belong in my body.  

Another tug, and this time, I can feel a slight burn rising inside me, like I’m going to be sick. I try with shaking hands to rip off the bandage that covers half of my neck, down to my right breast. At some point I must scream in frustration because the next thing I know warm hands are closed around mine, pushing me back into the lumpy bed. I struggle and kick furiously; barely registering the concerned faces staring down at me, making me feel like an animal in a zoo. The person I’m fighting is stronger than me. He smells like lavender shampoo, coffee and home.

“Calm down,” he’s whispering. “Riley, Ri, come back to me, come on, please.”

I manage to focus on him long enough to see the tears in his eyes: more than enough to set me off. Because my brother never cries. I don’t care about the stereotypes that people have about guys like Jamie being soft or ‘in touch with their emotions’ – yeah, he’s probably one of the most thoughtful guys I’ve ever known, but I’ve never, ever seen him cry. And I know then. I know exactly how serious this is, how scared they all are for me.

I’m scared too.

I’m Riley Connell. I’m 15 years old and yesterday I was diagnosed with Leukaemia. Let me tell you how I got here.

            It started as something you wouldn’t really notice, until the detention slips began to pile up. Falling asleep in class, in turns out, is frowned upon. My form teacher wasn’t happy about that; she called a meeting with me and went through all the usual crap that teachers do when they pretend to be concerned for a student: ‘is everything alright at home?’ ‘Are you having trouble with friends?’ ‘Does it have something to do with a boy, perhaps?’ ‘Is there a reason you think you’re not sleeping properly?’ The thing was, I’d been sleeping just fine. I’d been sleeping every chance I got; yet still I felt woozy from just the short walk to school. At first, my mum assured me that it was normal; that when you got to a certain age, it was much easier to sleep until noon and not want to get up. She put it down to my being a teenager. It was only when a bruise formed within minutes of me banging my wrist against a shelf that she decided to take me to the doctors, her biggest concern that I might be anaemic.

            I’d always considered my doctor a sweet sort: a bit old, but competent enough. When mum and me went to see him that first time, he assured us that there was nothing wrong and that I would be back to normal in a few days at most. Two weeks later, when I was showering, I noticed small purplish spots on my skin, scattered over my arms, legs and stomach. I prodded a finger at them and didn’t feel any pain, so didn’t mention it for another few days, until Jamie spotted them after I’d fallen asleep with my head draped over his shoulder. Then we were back at the doctors again. He was sending us away again: it seemed like a continuous cycle.

Two appointments later and my mum were at her wits end. I was still falling asleep multiple times a day and bruising at the touch of a fingertip. She demanded a blood test.

            Have you ever gotten a phone call and you just know, without answering it, that it’s going to be bad news? Not the kind you get in the middle of the night. That’s obvious: either someone is dead or someone is drunk enough to be calling you at 3am. This call came a couple of hours after my blood test. The same blood test we’d been told they wouldn’t know the results of for at least a week.

That night, four weeks after I’d initially gone to the doctors, I was in hospital with a drip attached to my ankle. It’d been fed into my vein using a green catheter that the nurses had oh so helpfully pointed out looked like a butterfly. Like I’m a child. Like I need to be told the sharp piece of steel about to pierce my skin looks like a harmless garden insect. Like that makes it better.

In the morning, I was transferred to a special children’s hospital: this hospital, where I wasn’t allowed to eat all day, before I was taken to surgery to get this blasted thing shoved into my heart. No one’s really explained properly – something about white blood cells and bone marrow and I don’t even know what bone marrow is. I’m thinking something that is in your bones, although I always thought bones were made entirely of, well, bone. Not marrow.

            It’s probably not the best idea to try and rip the thing out. Jamie seems to realise I know this after my brief lapse of judgement because he loosens his grip on me, but doesn’t let go. I lean my head against his chest because I don’t know what else to do and soon he wrap his arms around me, rocking me gently in a way he hasn’t done for years. Not since our dad left. I fleeting wonder if dad knows about any of this, but shake myself before the disgust rising in me can really take hold.

“You going to let the nurse check you over now?” Jamie asks gently and I nod against him, reluctant to let go.

The women who walks determinedly over to me is dressed in a light pink uniform. She has a kind face really, though her hair is tied back so tightly that some of her features appear a little taut. She talks me through everything she’s going to do, even the simple things like taking my temperature, which relaxes me more than I thought possible in the middle of a ward, where machines are still beeping furiously and kids are crying at fairly regular intervals, as though they have a little rota going.

Jamie is still by my side, holding one of my hands as if he’s afraid I’m going to vanish. I make a note to give him a good slap when the nurse is gone. 

Then I catch my mothers’ eye from where she’s perched at the bottom of the bed, stiff as anything. Her eyes are rimmed red but dark underneath from lack of sleep and she looks as though she could crumble at any minute. I feel a surge of regret pulsing through me for putting her through this. As if she needs more trouble, after everything she’s been through while still managing to raise two kids to be relatively decent human beings. Sometimes I think my mum deserves a medal. Sometimes I want to shake her and tell her to get it together. This is one of those times.

“All done,” the nurse says with cheer that is suddenly repulsive. “My name’s Ally by the way. I’ll be back in a couple of hours with some pills for you, but if you need anything before that just press the buzzer by the bed, okay?”

I nod and watch her retreat across the ward, probably with twenty other patients to deal with, probably with some much more sick than me. To her, I’m just another face of another kid who got ill: someone to pity.

I don’t care then that I’m being unfair. I don’t even care if I’m making it all up in my head, about her not caring about me. I decide I hate her. Walking around with a smile on her face as though we’re all going to be fine. It’s not true. And who’s she to give us that hope? Who’s she to go around to kids of five and six and grin at them as though they were in a playroom of a holiday club, not on the ward of a hospital, where someone could be dying on the other side of a wall. Where people die every day.

Heat rushes to my face and I suddenly feel light headed. The noises of the ward distort and blur in my head, getting louder and louder until I have to shove my hands over my ears in an attempt to stifle them.

Bile rises in my throat, and a cardboard bowl is only just pushed under my face in time before I’m throwing up. I collapse back onto the bed then, exhaustion and the left over chemicals in my system taking over me. My eyes close of their own accord and somewhere in the back of my mind I register the possibility that I might be dreaming. Even then I know it’s wishful thinking. I know that when I wake up, it’s going to be to harsh glare of the hospital lights. I know it, but I still hope it’s not true.