Taking Angels (The Angel Crusades) (2 page)

The doctor ran some more tests to assure my
stability after the ride over the waterfalls. He scratched
his head as he signed the discharge papers, a crooked
smile on his face.

“Looks like someone was watching out for you
today, young lady,” he said as my parents grinned at me
over his shoulder.

“Uh, I guess.” I shrugged.
“I can’t check your cancer without sending blood
and tissue samples out to a lab. I’ve been in contact with
your specialists at Mayo and they want you to head down
there for a look-see.” He glanced back at Mom and Dad
who nodded their agreement. The Mayo Clinic in
Rochester was our second home and the best medical
facility around.
“She looks different from before,” Mom said and
all eyes turned to her.
“Different how?” the doctor asked.
“Well, she was a lot thinner this morning,” Mom
began.
“That can be due to some swelling from the
tumble she took,” the doctor explained.
“And her hair is growing again,” Mom continued.
“We don’t know a lot about how the body reacts
to the radiation and chemo. I’ve seen patients who
haven’t had hair for years. They begin growing hair again
out of the blue.”
“But her eyes,” Mom whispered.
“My eyes?” I said as the doctor and Dad echoed,
“Her eyes?”
“Yes, they were brown. Now they’re…” she
hesitated as the men turned to me.
“Blue.” Dad stared at me, surprised, and turned
back to Mom.
“Let me see,” I demanded.
The doctor reached in the drawer of my side table
and pulled out a small mirror. He handed it to me and
stepped back beside my parents.
Lifting the mirror I looked at a stranger. Light
colored fuzz covered my head, softening the appearance
of the purple scar from the most recent surgery and deep
blue eyes met my gaze. I stared for a long time as the
room remained silent except for the steady breathing
from the other occupants. My breathing, on the other
hand, came in uneven rasps as my mind tried to wrap
around all of this. The waterfall, the angels, my changed
appearance; they must be connected, but how?
“There are known cases of accidents where head
trauma has altered the person’s eye color, although it is
very rare. Britt doesn’t show any signs of head trauma.
She doesn’t show any signs of trauma from going over
the falls at all.” The doctor shrugged, clearly bewildered.
He handed me my discharge papers, placed a hand on my
shoulder, and gave me a comforting smile as I lowered
the mirror and looked at him, also at a loss.
“Good luck, Britt. I hope your good fortune
continues.” He turned and walked away as my eyes
followed his white lab coat out the door.
We left the hospital, rushed back to Grand Rapids,
packed up some things, and headed to the Rochester
Mayo Clinic to see my specialists. The entire ride to
Rochester, Mom kept peering back at me as if I would
grow another head or something. The fact was I didn’t
know for sure I wouldn’t. I couldn’t even rule that out for
sure. Staring out the window, trying to ignore her, I
thought about the encounter with the angels. Why did this
happen to me? It felt as though someone had interceded
in my life, giving me another chance. But why? What
made me special?
We reached the Mayo Clinic early the next the
morning and they admitted me. I slipped into the too
familiar hospital gown and climbed between the notquite-soft sterilized linens I’d vowed to avoid a mere
twelve hours ago while floating in the cold lake.
“Hey Britt.” A red-headed nurse greeted me as she
entered the room.
“Hey Sandy,” I sighed.
“You missed us so much you had to visit early?”
she teased.
“Guess so.” I shrugged, not amused.
“Little miss sunshine.” A large man with a long
blonde pony-tail and a big grin on his face chimed in as
he walked in.
“Hi Roger.” I sat up, smiling.
“The Doc says you need to give us some blood to
check out.” He placed the kit complete with test tubes and
vials sticking out of the compartments on the stand next
to the bed.
“You guys are like vampires,” I groaned,
extending an arm.
“The life of a lab tech,” he chuckled.
Sandy hooked up the standard equipment and
started an IV in the other arm as Roger drew some blood.
None of it fazed me anymore and I sat looking at them in
silence until they finished.
“There you go.” Roger opened a Band-Aid to
cover the fresh puncture mark. “Hopefully we won’t need
anymore.”
“I’ve heard that before. You’ll know where to find
me if you do.”
“Hey, where did it go?” Roger said, moving my
arm and looking at it from different angles.
“Where’d what go?” Sandy asked, walking over
next to him.
“The needle mark.” Roger motioned to my arm. “I
can’t see it.”
We stared at my arm as Roger lifted it to look
closer, but none of us could see the mark.
“That’s odd.” Sandy shrugged at Roger.
Roger tossed the opened Band-Aid in the trash,
got up, and walked out shaking his head.
“Just give me a buzz if you need anything,
alright?” Sandy said to me as Roger left.
“Yeah,” I acknowledged, looking past her to my
parents as they visited quietly. This all seemed routine,
yet hope tingled in the back of my mind that it didn’t
have to be, not anymore. Lifting my arm closer to my
face, I studied the perfect skin. Drawing blood usually
made me bleed a lot. This wasn’t normal. My breath
caught in my throat as my eyes widened.

When I was eight, I wiped out on my bike and
broke my arm leaving a long scar where the bone
punctured the skin. The scar was gone. Lifting my other
arm, the scar from getting burned on a hot poker stick at
the campfire was missing as well. Staring at Mom and
Dad for a moment to assure they weren’t watching, I
shifted in my bed and pulled the open back of the hospital
gown around to look at my right side. Smooth skin
replaced the four inch appendix scar.

Did the angel’s touch do this? Lying back, I
wondered what other changes might come. I pondered
this until I fell asleep, ending the craziest day of my
life…so far.

I woke the next morning to see Doctor Morgan,
my epidemiologist, smiling at me. My parents rubbed the
sleep out of their eyes and straightened their clothes as
they sat on the two small couches in the room; their beds
last night.

“Good Morning, Britt,” Doctor Morgan greeted
me. “I understand you decided to take a water ride
without the water park.”

“The blood work came back and the results are
quite surprising.”
Mom gasped and Doctor Morgan turned to her.
“Nothing bad, just surprising,” he assured her and then
looked back to me. “The preliminary tests show your
cancer is gone.”
My parent’s cries of joy filled the room as I stared
at the wall. A tickle in the back of my mind kept me from
feeling the happiness my parents felt. Something about
the way the angels spoke of ‘touching’ me came back,
giving me pause. Like something wasn’t right about what
they’d done.
“I’d like some other specialists to take a look and
see if we can figure out what happened,” Doctor Morgan
said.
“What kind of specialists?” I asked.
“Another epidemiologist and a neurosurgeon,” he
said calmly.
“Neurosurgeon?” Mom spoke up.
“Doctor Kramer from Ely mentioned your eyes
changed from brown to blue.” He leaned closer, verifying
my eye color and leaned back nodding. “We have to
make certain you didn’t sustain any sort of head trauma.
We should have you out of here by the end of the week.”
“A week?” I moaned.
“We don’t want to miss anything,” he said
pressing his lips tight together. “Let me examine you
before we start the next round of tests.” He stepped over
and began to run his hands along my arms, watching my
reaction as he pressed in the joints, the muscles, and
along the bones. “Does that hurt?”
“No.”
“Let’s take a look at your incision from your last
surgery,” he said, as I leaned my head forward and he ran
a hand through the new growth of fuzz. “When did this
start coming back?”
“After the accident,” I said, stumbling over the
word, ‘accident.’
“This is odd.” Doctor Morgan reached over,
clicking on the exam light and pulling the extending arm
over my head.
“What?” I said.
“What is?” Mom said, as she came over to stand
next to the doctor.
“Her scar is gone,” Doctor Morgan said.
“No way.” I lifted my head only to have him push
it back down again.
“Oh my lord,” Mom gasped.
Dad shuffled over and his feet joined Mom’s and
Doctor Morgan’s in front of me.
“I’ll be damned,” Dad sighed.
“Really?” I asked, forcing my head up against the
doctor’s hands until he let me look up.
“No scar.” Mom nodded.
“We all saw it at the hospital in Ely,” Dad
murmured.
“But it isn’t there now,” Doctor Morgan said.
“Cool,” I grinned.
“Yeah, cool, but strange. We need to get those
tests going and the other specialists in here. We’ll have
them in to see you right away.” He looked at me and then
my parents. “Alright, talk to you later.” He nodded and
walked out.
Mom leaned over and gave me a hug. “I’m so
happy,” she whispered.
Dad looked at me, a blank expression. A slight
smile curled his lips as he stared in a daze. This was
much better than having them watch me die and me
watching them watch me die. A slow smile spread across
my face at the thought of having a normal life, for once.
“Morning Britt.” A woman broke in as she pushed
a wheelchair into the room.
“Morning Courtney.”
“Ready to take a ride to the MRI?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“Not really,” Courtney joked as she took the IV
tubing from the shunt in my arm and hung it over the
monitor.
I climbed out of bed and into the chair, glancing
over at Mom and Dad. “Be back in a flash.”
“Well, more than a flash, probably a couple of
hours. Plenty of time to go to the cafeteria,” Courtney
said.
“See you later,” Dad said, standing and coming
over to give me a kiss on the top of the head.
“We’ll be here when you get back.” Mom joined
Dad by my side and placed a hand on my shoulder.
“No worries,” I said. “It’s not my first time around
the block.”
Courtney wheeled me out of the room and down
the hall into an elevator. As the doors closed, she stepped
around me to tap a button on the panel.
“Waterfall?” she asked, turning to stare at me in
disbelief.
“What?”
“You went over a waterfall?”
“Yeah.”
“Now I’ve heard it all.” She shook her head.
Guess everyone had heard it by now. News
travelled fast in these halls.
I lay in the MRI for over an hour, trying to stay
still, until Courtney wheeled me back to my room and my
waiting parents. I climbed into bed and fell asleep,
exhausted by the morning’s activities. It takes a lot of
effort to stay still.
I dreamt of the voices, the sensations surrounding
me in my moment spent in heaven. They spoke uneasy,
not certain about what they’d done. What had they done?
I woke with a heavy feeling of uncertainty, but was
determined to keep a positive attitude. Doctor Morgan sat
visiting with my parents. When he saw me awake, he
stood and came over to the bed and sat down on the edge.
“The MRI was inconclusive,” he began. “We
would like to do some injections and then run it again.”
“Inconclusive?”
“We couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary and
that concerns us.”
“So if there is nothing out of the ordinary, does
that mean the tumor is gone?” I asked, already knowing
in my heart it was.
“We aren’t sure. A tumor like that doesn’t just go
away. We need to discover what happened. We’ll run
another MRI tomorrow and then do a CT the next day.”
“What else?” I asked, reading his hesitancy.
“We need to take some bone marrow from you
and check that as well.”
“No, not that, any of the other tests, but not bone
marrow.”
“Britt, I know it’s unpleasant…”
“Unpleasant? Have you ever had it done to you?”
Doctor Morgan shook his head.
“Exactly. If you had, you’d know it’s a lot more
than unpleasant. Next you’re going to tell me that I need
a spinal tap too.” My jaw dropped at his blank
expression.
“Britt, we need to be certain the cancer hasn’t
relocated. We have to check every possibility.”
Tears filled my eyes as I looked to my parents.
Their faces told me they weren’t going to be any help. I
turned back to the doctor.
“I’m sorry, but we’re hopeful there’ll be nothing
to find.” He stood, gave a nod to my parents, and walked
out.
“This really sucks,” I said, rolling away from my
parents and pulling the covers up to my neck.
Lab techs came in two more times to draw blood,
making it impossible to get to sleep until after dinner. The
dreams of my angels came again. Only the good parts as
the voices reassured me everything would be alright. The
soothing, melodic way they spoke sent waves of comfort
through me, giving me a fresh attitude before waking up
to more tests.
The next morning, true to his word, Doctor
Morgan had them take me back to the MRI after injecting
me with some sort of dye. I struggled to hold still as they
searched, and searched, and searched.
The CT scan was next and I didn’t get back to my
room until just before dinner. Sliding into bed,
completely exhausted, Mom handed me her cell phone.
Staring at her questioningly, she motioned for me to talk.
“Hello?”
“Britt, is it true?” A familiar voice said.
“Hey Trish,” I grinned into the phone. “So far, so
good.”
“That’s crazy,” a different person said.
“Elisa?”
“Hey Britt,” Elisa said.
“Where is…”I began.
“I’m here too,” a third voice spoke up.
“Cassie,” I laughed.
Cassie, Trish, and Elisa were my three best friends
in the whole world. “The three amigos” I called them,
well, Dad started calling them that first because they were
inseparable. They always came around to lift my spirits
after tough chemo bouts and kept me up to speed with the
high school gossip.
“Your Mom got us on a conference call and filled
us in,” Trish said.
“Your cancer is gone?” Cassie asked.
“She’ll tell us if we let her talk,” Elisa moaned.
“So far all the tests show no signs of cancer
anymore,” I explained.
“How many more tests do you have before you
can come home?”
“Only the two crappiest ones, bone marrow and
spinal,” I sighed.
“Just think about all the fun we’re going to have
once you get back,” Elisa encouraged.
“We miss you, girl,” Cassie added.
“Hang in there, Britt, we love you,” Trish said.
“I love you guys too. Thanks and see you soon.
Bye.” Hitting ‘end’ on the phone, I handed it back to
Mom as she stood with tears in her eyes.
“What?”
“I’m so happy you can share your life with friends
like them,” Mom sniffled.
“Me too, they’re the best.”
Dad sat quietly in the corner, smiling. That was
enough for me.