Chapter Sixteen; A Head Cold

  Ryan was now a little sick, he had a head cold. He had it for a few days now, and it wasn’t getting better. He started getting a weird spot on his skin, it was big and covered a centimeter of his arm. His mother felt suspicious and took him to the doctor. “It feels like I have been to the doctor 1,000,000 times now!!” He said sarcastically.

He sat in the office for an hour! He forgot his phone at home and had nothing to do. A few toys were on the floor, but he didn’t want to seem like a baby playing with them. After the slow hour of sitting there staring at the fish tank, the doctor finally came and examined Ryan. He sat on the paper covered bed that smelled like gloves and laid down.

The doctor took off his shirt and told him to breath deeply. He had a stuffy nose so his voice sounded grumbly. When the doctor found the spot on his arm, he looked at it for a while scratching his chin.

He went out of the room to call another doctor in to see the mark. When they came back, the doctor put on two gloves and patted the mark. They took a blood test and found something bad about the spot, “Mrs. Miller, your son has a precancerous spot on his arm. If we can remove it in less than four days, your son will be fine.” The doctor said.

His mother nodded and agreed to the treatment. She scheduled an an appointment for the next day, and went home. Ryan was silent the rest of the day. “Precancer?” he questioned himself throughout the day. His mother cooked him some soup, and he slurped it up in a few drinks. For the rest of the day, he played with legos and watched T.V.

Lucy on the other hand, had a bit of trouble throughout the day. And bathroom trips were horrid, she would be lifted out of her chair, and sat of the toilet while someone watched her. She wanted to scream at them to get out, but she couldn’t speak.

It damaged the part of her brain that helped her walk and talk. And she would never talk again. She could use her hands to eat, so she wasn’t fed like a baby. They rolled outside to take a roll in the park. Lucy was clapping at birds, frogs, even leaves!

And it seemed to amuse her throughout the day. Her arm was healed so now she could pick up rocks and pebbles. At one point in the stroll, they took Lucy out of the chair and set her down by the water. Her feet would occasionally get washed over by small waves of the cool water. A bit later, the waves washed up a tadpole that sat on her feet.

Lucy grabbed the baby frog and pushed it back into the water. She waved goodbye as the tadpole disappeared into the murky water. They put Lucy back into the chair to continue their walk in the park. They encountered hard turns to get Lucy around and took a while to steer her out of the way. At the end of the stroll, they rolled Lucy back to the house when she asked for something that they couldn’t understand. Lucy continuously pointed at her mouth shaking her head no at every wrong answer, “Food? Drink? Toothache? Are you sick? Are you choking?” She shook her head no and began to cry, “Candy? Words?” She stopped crying and nodded her head as she said “Words” “Oh! You want me to make you word cards?” she asked.

Lucy nodded fast as a smile came on her face. Her mother grabbed a stack of word cards and wrote down a new one on each card. She ended up with 50 words she could now communicate. Simple words like At, The, To, Eat.

She tried to form short sentences with the words and made, “At Food Place Want To Eat.” It took her mother a while to figure out that she wanted to go out to eat. She had no more cards, so she had to resort to the nodding technique, “McDonald's? Wendy’s? Pizza Hut? Bob Evan’s?” each time she shook her head, no.

Her mother found a sticky note and put all  the letters of the alphabet so she could spell it out. “S. T. E. A. K. A. N. D. S. H. A. K. E.” she touched. Her mother found out Steak & Shake was the place she wanted to go. They hopped into the car and drove off. They had a great meal, Milk shakes and all. Lucy loved the chocolate chunk milkshake.