The Aortic Arch
When I was a little girl my mother would take me by the hand, tugging me towards our secret place. Together we would skip down the old yellow path, weeds tickling our feet. I still remember how her eyes would flash with laughter and the way her long blonde hair would sway from side to side as we made those trips to the garden. Together we would turn the soil, letting the buried earth meet the sky. We pressed seeds deep down and the garden flourished. A myriad of colours and scents pressed for attention; roses, lavender, lilies, daffodils, peonies, poppies, tulips. When we finished we would lie down on the rich ground together with the worms and ladybugs, birds and bees. “Do you hear it?” she would ask turning towards me. Pressing my ear to the dark earth I did; the steady pulse of the roots, the sighing sound of buds as they curl upwards towards the light. “Magic!” I’d say smiling. And she would smile back “Yes Sera, the magic of life.”
It has been a long time since my mother and I spoke of magic. Our garden, withered, from years of neglect, the bed once filled with flowers now the home of weeds. Her hair is also long gone, the price paid for hope as she underwent chemotherapy for the cancer she thought she had beaten. She doesn’t laugh with me anymore either...only with them, in that room where I can never truly belong, where the failing body seems to create a bond stronger than family.
I wish I was in that room too.
School no longer held answers. People treated me differently. I was the girl whose mother was dying. They smiled at me, asked me how I was doing, but they expected no reply and pity was in their eyes. Friends I once counted on were awkward and they talked to me less and less as I withdrew from the frivolity of boys, shopping and parties. I didn’t care. They were nothing like the supportive group that surrounded my mother. I didn’t want them. Sickness consumed me.
I spent every afternoon at the hospital, with my mother on her bed before my grandmother picked me up. There I found solace. I found sickness. In my twisted mind I thought every headache was a brain tumour whilst every hint of pain in my body became fears of internal bleeding or blood clots. Colds turned into pneumonia and heart burn transformed into the symptoms of a heart attack. I constantly complained to my mother’s doctors, begging for them to test me for something... anything. But again and again they light-heartedly assured me I was a healthy sixteen year old girl.
My health became the most prominent thing in my life. Every day I wished to be sick and finally fit in at the place where I wanted to be. The hospital was my dream and the patients inside it my future family. School had no place there. I dropped out. My mother cried. I stopped listening. All my time was now spent at the hospital. I became more and more obsessed with my mother’s illness. I wandered through oncology, met the dying. I sat outside the chemo room, gazing at the patients for hours, longing to be a part of them yet always apart. I saw nurses watching me warily, worriedly and whisper once I’d passed. It was a day like any other as I walked to the hospital for the last time. A day like any other until I was out of breath walking just 3 blocks. A sharp biting pain grabbed at my jaw as I walked in the automatic doors of the hospital. A mirror, mounted to the whitewashed wall of my mother’s hospital wing caught my eye. A small, feeble girl stood before it. Her skin was swallow and deathly pale whilst her eyes portrayed the pain from within. I smiled and the reflection of the girl returned the favour. My chest was heavy as I walked into my mother’s room.
“My jaw hurts” I said as I entered. My mother rolled her eyes. The pain in my chest became agonising. I clutched at it and collapsed. The world was black and I was going to die.
I don’t want to die.
I woke up in a hospital room, sterile and bland. Doctors would soon come in explaining why my heart failed. A coarctation of the aortic arch they would say, a congenital heart defect, my aortic arch was too narrow, my heart had to pump blood at higher pressure to make up for it, and cardiac failure ensued, it’s ok because they fixed it, I’ll be fine. But I wasn’t fine my heart had worked itself into exhaustion and given up. In that moment of perfect clarity I realised I didn’t belong here, I didn’t want to belong here. I wanted to get better. To move on.
Crisis, the failure of the body; these things brought people together, helped them cope with their loss. But I no longer wanted to be one of them. I wanted to leave this hospital and never return. A few days later I did.
My mother now does her chemo at home. I am happier. Today I walked down the old yellow path, almost overgrown with weeds. I sunk my hands deep into the rich moist soil and dug up the buried earth, letting it breathe for the first time in years. My mother walks up behind me, her eyes are bruised and her head covered with a pink scarf. “Do you hear it?” she asks. I lie down and press myself against the ground. I listen; the potential for healing, the gentle twinkling of underground life. “Magic” I say. Our garden will flourish.