A Box Of Tissues

A Box Of Tissues (AIRTEL 0414 2743 8670 0199)
By Ezioma Kalu

“I’m sorry, Oluoma, but you have Glioblastoma,” Dr Dozie apologizes, not out of accountability, but to voice the unfairness of the situation. He strokes his forearm lightly and stares at me; hot arrows of pity escape his eyes and perforate my skin.  But my face is deadpan as if I can’t make meaning out of his words, as if I am diagnosed with Alexithymia and not Glioblastoma as if I’m not able to express emotions.

“Glioblastoma is a fast-growing brain tumour, an aggressive type of cancer that occurs in the brain. It forms cells in the brain called Astrocytes that support nerve cells,” his dulcet voice which normally soothes me like a mint balm, sounds unnecessarily hoarse today. It is as if he speaks Korean and not English, and I want to tell him my grasp of Korean is poor, I don’t really understand the language, so he could switch to English. I could feel the incomprehensible words permeate through my being like I’m undergoing some kind of Osmosis, yet, they make no meaning.

“I’m so sorry, but you only have hundred days to live,” he finishes his death sentence and offers a deep sigh. I am gazing at him, but my view is blurry and hazy. Why does he have three heads and six eyes? And why are his six eyes narrowing simultaneously, their eyebrows pulling down in concentration?

He offers me a box of tissues and I realize the Niagara has been flowing sporadically from the sockets below my forehead. It’s an outlandish feeling to me; shedding tears. I lost the ability to do that, aeons ago, when both my parents died in a car crash. I didn’t shed a tear then, and I have never shed any, till now. Maybe this is the side effect of swallowing my tears. I never cry, even when the world charges at me with the belligerence of a Spartan warrior, even when I couldn’t make lemonades out of the lemons being hurled at me, even when daily living means existing as a cypher and drinking from the goblet of animosity; offered by friends and foes. I guess all those liquid soldiers; brawling for emancipation from the captivity my eyes held them, formed an alliance and marched to my brain in protest. Hence, this macabre reality I’m a victim of.

I suddenly regain access to my larynx, but I notice I’m transmogrifying to a stutterer.

“Doc. Doctor, why, why, why Gli Glioblastoma? Ehn? Why, why not a headache, or Ty, Ty Typhoid, or even Fibroid? I’m not even old, I’m not yet married, I’m just 25, so why?” my voice breaks like the foundation on my face, I droop my shoulders and sniff.

I slant him a sidelong stare, he has a tear in his left eye and is swallowing snort. I’m not even sad, nor am I scared, what I’m feeling is beyond these mere adjectives. The world has become a Carousel and is spinning, or is it slowing down?  It beats me. There’s a deep soreness in my throat, in my lungs…

The beep of the alarm jerks me from the taciturn reverie, and I instantaneously squirm in acute pangs. This is my twentieth day in this place, but I’m not used to this beep yet. I still feel my heart midway to my throat, struggling to penetrate my oesophagus, each time I hear the sound. But today’s experience is different, I feel my heart is finally getting a hint of its new role because it is no longer in a scuffle with my throat, rather it is gathering explosives waiting for the right time to detonate. I close my eyes and wait for the bomb blast, but it didn’t occur, rather the beep becomes more reverberating, and my heart keeps gathering explosives.

The monitor that is connected to my heart, the one that beeps in a rhythmic crescendo, from a barely audible low tone, to an outrageously shrill pitch, has started its daily, disturbing beeps that fling me to my fight-or-flight mode each time I hear them.

The Panel beater in my head is callous. Anytime he smacks and thumps his hammer on the metals in my head, I snivel in sheer anguish. Nurse Miriam calls it a migraine, but I’m sure there’s no known name for this acute pain I feel. She says the anaesthesia she injects in me frequently, would induce a loss of sensitivity to the life-threatening pains I experience, but that too is no more than a ludicrous fiasco. The acutely, unpleasant physical discomfort, increases by the day and tortures me from the inside out.

Life comes at you outrageously rapidly, like Usain Bolt on his way to the finish line. Today, you’re a Marketer in a Microfinance Bank, the next day, you’re a Glioblastoma patient laying on a Hospice bed and pondering on what to do with the remaining eighty days of your life.

St. Bridget’s Hospice Care – a white bungalow with four large rooms and a compound so wide that it could contain a hundred choreographers and it would be spacious enough for them to do their somersaults with ease, is my new home.

Being an orphan, who has no family, Dr Dozie referred me to a Hospice Care Centre – A place that provides ruthful care for people in the last phases of incurable diseases.

My ward – the gigantic room that houses four terminally ill patients; I inclusive, reeks of Antiseptics. Every morning, when Ekaete; the horizontally endowed cleaner, who has a signature smile permanently emblazoned on her face, cleans the ward, I flinch and clamp my nose with both my hands. I’d curse under my breath, as I watch her soak her mop in antiseptic-bathed water, squeeze it and meticulously scrub and dry the white tiles, till they sparkle in utmost glittery.

I have only eighty more days to live and I know it’s useless to add Antiseptics to my already filled-to-brim list of worries, but I allow myself to drink from its chalice of distress anyways. The antiseptic redolence complements the Panel beater’s brutality; and hand-in-hand, they slog me to the abyss of terror and torture me till I become numb.

When the room isn’t stinking of faecal-coated odour, it oozes antiseptics, with undertones of the artificial fragrance contained in soaps and disinfectants.

The patient, whose bed is adjacent to mine, is an MRSA (Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) patient and that explains the perfect blend of Antiseptics and Fecal odour. I wonder if she’s also demented because she’s had a few manic attacks since I joined them.

Some days she’d yell at unknown enemies while screaming she wants to go home. She’d kick and bite and stomp nurses who rush in to hold her, with thick green veins popping out in every corner of her fair hands. Other days, she’d stay on her bed and talk and laugh to herself, calling a name – Chioma continuously. “Chioma, they said I’m dying, Chioma won’t you come and bade me farewell?” she’d then laugh hysterically and I wonder if she’s also an orphan like me.

Nurse Miriam is approaching my bed now, the nurse who talks in a voice a little higher than a whisper, the nurse that tells me before she takes my blood sample, gives me injections, checks my vitals, and tightens or loosens the tourniquet. She is smiling as she is advancing, her dimples are as deep as a well and her eyes appear half-lidded when she smiles. She’d be in her twenties and she’s a Nubile to the core.

She strides in a catwalk, just like a model. Her voluptuous body glues to her short, white gown and her ebony skin shines just like a pearl. It’s ironic, how she seems indubitably elated but, I am wallowing away in my deathbed, enraged and furious at the universe. Suddenly, I wish I can share in her felicity, but once again, the killjoy; the Panel Beater who works overtime in my body, hits a heavy hammer on my head and I writhe in agony.

I am woozy, and I hear nausea’s footsteps as it saunters through my stomach, to my throat. My right-hand wobbles, as it makes its way underneath my bed, to pick up my Spittoon. I let out a yelp and squirm, as the pang stings me with its fangs, while I retch out my entire intestines in the Spittoon. The pain is seven times more extreme than any other pain I’ve experienced in my life.

“False alarm huh?” she asks, after checking my heart monitor. She is still smiling wholeheartedly, revealing a set of perfectly arranged dentitions, when she opines; “it says here you’re breathing normally, but the alarm suggests otherwise. You know 90% of the time, these alarms are false, so most of us are already sick and numb to them, that explains why we don’t come running here when it rings. We call it Alarm fatigue”. She pauses to gaze at me, then continues; ‘how do you feel today Oluoma?’

I want to tell her that there are no known adjectives to describe the kind of migraines I feel which occur in painful batches every five minutes, that I’m nauseous and retch every other second, and I really don’t think the seizures that accompany all these pains are necessary, but I smile a painful smile and tell her I’m fine.

“So have you thought of what you’d like to do for the next eighty days? Places you’d love to go? Just mention anything, I’d try and be of help,” she whispers and reaches out to hold my hands. Her hands are warm and soft. I want to get up on my own, but my body dares me to try. My head spins like a standing fan and I let out a squeak. ‘Sorry, let me help you up she says, and helps me sit erect, my head resting on the cosy pillow.

‘Yes Nurse, I’ve thought about it and I’d tell you my decision’, I say in a strange voice that sounds so faint like an old woman saying her last words. I don’t want to believe that uncanny whisper is actually from my voice box.

‘Nurse, I’d love to have sex’, I blurt and sense a shifting feeling in my heart. My eyebrows quirk in concord as the pains set in again. I look at her, and she has the expressions I rightly predict she’d have. Her mouth falls apart, her hands fly to her chest, and she gives me an incredulous stare that would mean; ‘No, tell me you’re joking. I shut my eyes and nodded slowly, before continuing.

‘I’m a 25-year-old virgin, whose life has been a series of gruesome episodes. First, I lost my parents at the tender age of seven, and I was plunged into an orphanage by a family friend.

Not once have I ever felt someone care for or cherish me. My life has been a constant and ferocious battle, between survival and the will to survive. The tiniest piece of hope that holds my life together in a life-support machine, is the optimism that one day, I’d fall in love and make a family of my own. But I guess I’m a freak, who is undeserving of any bit of comfort in this world. The life-support machine has become astronomically exorbitant, that an impecunious like me can never afford, ‘I cough a very painful, chesty cough, and spit the phlegm inside my Spittoon, cover the lid firmly and exhale deeply. I stare at my clammy hands and continue.

‘I have never fallen in love, nor had the opportunity to enjoy the sweet, sexual sensations’, I let out a wry smile, as the memories of all the erotic books I’ve ever read pop up in my brain.

‘Now, I have only eighty days to live’, I shake my head in regret, and sigh sorrowfully. ‘So I want to at least feel my heart flutter and butterflies sing in my belly. I want to kiss someone’s son passionately and exhale in ecstasy, while he in turn strokes my back. I want to feel the pain, the pleasure, the sensation, I want to feel it all, my dear loving, Nurse. Can you pull it off for me?’ I cast a glance at her and see her exuding that sympathetic emotion I greatly detest. She’s sniffing now as the tears roll uncontrollably down her cheeks and the mucous from her nose stream downwards like they want to meet with her tongue in her mouth.

I give her a box of tissues; the one Dr Dozie gave me on his last visit. ‘Wipe yourself, the tears are much’ I say and let out a smile that bellies my pain and fear and regrets.

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