Once Upon a Wish (17 page)

A break dance spin from one of the interns cut her question in half, and Brittney started to laugh as he impressively stood on his head.

“Don’t quit your day jobs!” she teased as everyone in the group snapped into final poses.

Brittney’s radiologist caught her breath, walked over to her, and put an arm around her shoulder.

“You have affected us more than any other patient with your charisma, your wit, and your inner strength. We wanted to do this for you,” she said with tears in her eyes.

“You always have a smile on your face …” she continued before her voice cracked and trailed off. She didn’t need to say any more.

Brittney hugged her tightly and thanked the rest for a performance she would always remember.

   6   

The tumor was shrinking, Brittney was out of the hospital, and things were finally looking up—but the battle was not over. It was
time to start chemotherapy again, and all they could do was pray that this time, it would work.

At home, Brittney took one pill a week and went in just as often to have her blood drawn. T’Ann continued living by the rules that could save Brittney’s life—watch her weight, rush her to the emergency room if her temperature rises above 101°F, make sure she gets all of her meds, including pills for sleeping and nausea. Her cupboards were overflowing with the shots and pills it was taking to shrink the spiteful tumor.

Brittney continued physical therapy to heal her hands, and she took advantage of every moment she felt well enough to do the things she enjoyed doing—spending time with her mom and Andy, hanging out with her dad, cooking, watching movies, reading, playing with her dogs. She loved shopping and going to the drive-in movie theater with Charlie to watch double features, but she was always a little apprehensive to leave the house.

“Dad, you don’t know what it’s like to be bald,” she said one day as they were leaving to go shopping for wigs.

You’re right, I don’t
, he thought as he scooped her into his arms, kissing the top of her head. “But you’re still as beautiful as ever.”

After dropping Brittney off at T’Ann’s house that evening, Charlie drove home and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He knew that the inevitable brown, leathery skin he’d developed after many years of working construction would look ridiculous with a bald head that had never seen an ounce of sun, but he pulled out his razor and did not hesitate.

With one solid motion after another, piles of blonde hair fell to the ground around him until bright bathroom light bounced from his head with a subtle white glow. He smiled, pleased, and the next time he went to pick Brittney up, her jaw dropped and her eyes bulged.

“Dad! What did you do?!”

“You said I didn’t understand, and I wanted to.”

She hugged him tightly and never wore a wig again.

Brittney had spent the summer before her eighth-grade year in and out of the hospital, and all she talked about as she grew stronger was going back to school to see her friends, especially Andrea, her best friend in the world. They met in the fourth grade and were instantly connected like sisters. They played in the dirt as little girls, went swimming in the summer, joined student council together in elementary school, and shared their dreams with each other.

As Brittney grew sicker and started losing her hair, Andrea was the only friend she would proudly show her bald head to. It made them laugh and smile, and though Brittney knew she wouldn’t be joining Andrea when their eighth-grade year began, she would study at home and stay caught up. Their school years together would continue in high school.

In the meantime, the girl who knew she was going to grow up to become a doctor or lawyer focused diligently on her school work and, over time, decided on a new career path.

“When I beat this, I want to help kids who have cancer,” Brittney told T’Ann one day. “I’ll give talks and do seminars on what I went through so they’ll know they’re not alone.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” T’Ann said, knowing her daughter could change the world if that’s what she set out to do.

In elementary school, Brittney had become a teacher’s aide for her favorite teacher. In first grade, she was a peer helper for the kindergartners and joined the safety patrol.

She was on the student council in fourth grade, and during the summer between then and fifth, she voluntarily went to summer camp to learn Spanish. This was a girl who knew what she wanted, and T’Ann had no doubt in her mind that Brittney could inspire children with her story … if she lived to tell it.

After three months of chemotherapy at home, Brittney’s doctors changed her treatment from pill to liquid form and surgically inserted a Port-A-Cath, an implanted device used to administer the liquid chemo, in order to avoid invading her weakened veins. She went to the hospital monthly for treatment, and at home, T’Ann filled her IVs with fats and lipids and administered eight-hour drips once a day for the next six weeks so Brittney would gain some weight. During that time, she became more ill and fragile than she had ever been. Since her next round of chemo included twenty-four-hour drips followed by forty-eight-hour flushes, doctors admitted her back into the hospital.

She had more bad days than good, but when Brittney was feeling up to it, T’Ann would sneak a phone call to Andy and whisper, “Today’s a good day.”

He would show up a few hours later and cross the grassy courtyard area to a door leading right to Brittney’s hallway. He’d walk at a swift, practiced pace while looking over his shoulder for anyone who might see him and wonder what he was hiding beneath the pile of jackets in his arms.

He’d walk quietly down the hallway and poke his head through the door of Brittney’s room and present the jackets. She would sit up as much as she could and smile with big, waiting eyes until Casey made her appearance. Brown snout leading the way, their chocolate Labrador puppy would poke her head through the pile, spot Brittney and, with all four legs in gear, scramble frantically from the jackets to lick her face until it was wet.

“Hey, baby girl!” Brittney would say in the loudest whisper she could find. She giggled uncontrollably as Casey pounced across the bed, played under the covers, and licked her hands.

They were able to let Casey stay only a few hours at a time for fear that a nurse or doctor would catch her in there. Brittney became
good at calming her down and hiding her at the right moments. She was thrilled every time Andy snuck her in, but those times became fewer as her good days dwindled.

As Brittney’s treatment continued, her skin’s girlish glow turned pasty, with charcoal rings forming around her big, brown eyes, bones straining against thin skin. Her body wasn’t fighting back as it always had and she felt it giving up, shutting down. It took weeks to recuperate from her second-to-last round of chemo, and with one treatment left, the overwhelming gut feeling Brittney had learned to trust was telling her not to do it.

“Mom, will you ask Dr. Kadota if I can skip the last treatment and have my MRI early?” Brittney pleaded with a quiet voice. “I don’t think I’ll live through another round of chemo.”

She took deep, hard breaths in between sentences and stared at her mother through hollow eyes.

Tears ran down her face when she added, “The tumor is gone, Mom. I can feel it.”

Through her own tears, T’Ann nodded and whispered, “I’ll ask him.”

   7   

T’Ann prayed with all her soul that she had made the right decision, and when Dr. Kadota scheduled an early MRI and gave her the results, she knew she had.

“You did it,” he said with a pleased grin in a tone that revealed as much surprise as excitement. “The tumor is gone.”

“It’s gone?” T’Ann cried. “Gone?” The word had an entirely different meaning than it ever had before.

She turned to Brittney and screamed, “It’s gone!”

T’Ann fell to the floor beside her daughter and cried unabashedly.
Every fear, every worry, every ounce of desperation inside that had consumed her for the past sixteen months shed through those tears. Her daughter was free. And so was T’Ann. Together, they had won the battle.

T’Ann grabbed the handles of Brittney’s wheelchair and hurried down the halls of the hospital wing, announcing to everyone that her daughter’s cancer was gone. The sound of rejoice did not often fill those halls, but when it did, it was received with smiles, hugs, and tears of hope. Every victory was a reminder to the rest, to the parents poking their heads from their child’s room to witness the patient’s newfound freedom and happiness, to those whose lives were still fully consumed by cancer, that it could be beat. It made every parent and child in that hospital wing believe that their moment was next. They needed to believe because hope was all they had left, and watching Brittney that day filled them with that hope.

The greatest fear of someone living in remission is that the cancer will one day make its selfish return, but on this day, this very special day, it was gone.

The celebration did not end that day. Over the next couple of weeks, as Brittney regained some of her strength, she planned a “Celebrating Life” party to reunite with the friends and family she had stayed away from during her illness. From the beginning, she had found comfort in protecting them from the worst of her cancer. It somehow made her stronger to save them the heartache of seeing her that way.