The Saints Of Mibba

“Mom, I can’t see.”

My brain went into an information overload as my other senses kicked into overdrive.

“Mom! Mom!” I began to cry out into the unknown darkness as I thrashed around beneath the covers of my cold bed. I cried; so many emotions being flooded through my system at the same time. I could feel the obvious, fear, but I could also feel strength and faith for reasons I am yet to understand.

Hands grabbed my body while muffled cries filled my eardrums. Before long, mumbles were all I could hear.

I can’t remember if I screamed or not, nor do I wish to remember. Nothing about my experience was something that I wanted to remember, but it wasn’t my decision.

“You have blah, blah, blah, blah, series of surgeries, blah, blah, blah,”

I didn’t want to hear the doctor. I wanted my Susie-doll. She was home laying on my unmade bed, just waiting for me to come home.

“She should have been brought in to see me years ago,” the doctor went on.

I was only twelve at the time, so new to the world, new to everything around me. I was getting into exploring different aspects of education, because unlike most girls of my age, I actually gave a damn about the world and the people in it.

My mother started crying as my father wrapped his arms around her. I was confused, so oblivious to everything that was going on. I glanced around and ignored the cries, I was examining the artwork hanging against the puke green wall colour of the Janeway Hospital For Sick Children.

“Is it as bad as I think it is?” My mother asked, “What exactly do all that mean?”

I watched her, wondering why she started crying without exactly knowing what the doctor was saying.

The doctor didn’t say anything to her, he just scribbled his pen across his paper. He looked back up once his pen touched the table.

“Your daughter has a collapsed ear drum, she has this because of a build up behind the organ. The build up contains active cancer cells.”

That was when I started to rethink my view on the world and my faith in whoever created us. I, just a mere child, had been diagnosed with a deadly disease. I just couldn’t figure out why. I thought about it for days on end. I was always spaced out while being showered with presents and get wells.

“I don’t want to do this,”

My mom looked at me as she took my hand and walked me to pre-operating room.

“Can I refuse these surgeries?” I asked, feeling stupid to have not researched anything about my rights.

“Since you’re not an adult, no, you can’t,” my mother told me.

“I don’t want to do this.” I repeated, being that stubborn child that I always was.

“You need to do this.”

That was a pretty sketchy thing for my mother to say, wasn’t it? I mean, if you look at all the things you need, surgery for cancer wasn’t one of them. Do you know why? Because not everyone was diagnosed with cancer, so not every needed the surgery for it to become an essential ‘need’ to your life.

Pain was what I felt for three whole days. No medicine could evaporate the throb of my inner ear. Not even snuggling up to my Susie-doll could settle my body.

Infection. Yeah, that’s what set in after the growth was removed.

“It seems as though the packing was left in her inner ear too long, and it has developed into a serious infection,”

My mother looked furious.

“We would give her antibiotics, but her system has become immune to them.”

“So what are you going to do? Are you going to do another surgery?”

The doctor sadly shook his head, “We’re going to hope her white blood cells can fight the infection without the aid of medication.”

Doctors. What did they know? Nothing. We went to another doctor. I wasn’t immune to antibiotics, and it wasn’t packing left within my ear. It was surgical steel, left there from the last doctor who operated.

“The cancer was never removed completely.”

That was defiantly not a shocker to me. After losing all faith in the medical world, I saw no point to even bother putting myself through the pain of becoming a human pin cushion once again. Of course, still only being just over thirteen, I couldn’t deny the surgical procedures.

It seemed to me that it was going to be a life long battle that I would never get over alive.

“She had a bad reaction to the anaesthetic, she might not wake up,”

That was the message delivered to my mother out in the waiting room while I was hooked up to several life-saving machines in the Intensive Care Unit. After two or three hours and no sign from my fragile body other than my weak pulse rate, I was transferred to the Critical Care Unit.

My family had been called into the Family Room, my mother was in hysterics and my father was a walking zombie. That was when I proved the medical world wrong. That was when I woke up.

You may be thinking, ‘oh, that’s impossible, if the doctor says you’re going to die, you’re going to die’. Well, if you still think that even after reading this, then you’re easily misled.

Even though all the odds were against me and my life, I didn’t give up. That’s what saved my life, the will power. I knew there was something different about me as a child when I wanted to watch the news as opposed to cartoons.

I had a meaning, I had a call. I wasn’t meant to die in a hospital bed in the Janeway. I was meant to take my intelligence and do something with my life.

That was the year I started writing.

Today, as a sixteen-year-old, I still don’t have the choice to refuse surgeries. I still can’t do a lot of things. I can’t vote, I can’t buy alcohol and I can’t drive.

None of those things matter to me. Why, you ask?

Because I can live, and because I can live, I want you to live, too.