Contest Entry: Round One

Written to the prompt: Write a story or poem about challenging yourself to do something you've never done before, something that frightens you. What happens? How does it turn out? Whether it's fiction or true, you must write in first person in order to qualify.

Round One

(500 words)

Everything was strangely unfamiliar. The waiting room, how it smelled of fresh coffee and something else. Not bleach or alcohol, but something antiseptic. The clock on the wall ticking sharply. The nurse staring expectantly from the open door.

I glanced at the other women. Four were much older than me, much heavier. One was about a decade younger, slender, but pregnant. A couple of men dotted the room. Husbands, I guessed. Everyone was somber, silent, staring at me.

“Aren’t you River?” the nurse repeated.

I looked back at her. Nodded slowly. Wiped my damp hands on my sweat pants.

“You’re first.” She smiled, swung wide the door.

Swallowing hard, I stood, followed her down a short hall to a nook.

“Have to weigh you,” she said.

I sighed and stepped on the scale.

“Looks like --.” She adjusted the weight until the bar came to rest between the brackets. “Looks like one-seventeen. You must take good care of yourself.”

It was the first time I’d been weighed since the surgery. Only three weeks and I’d dropped twenty pounds. I sighed. “I’m on the cancer diet.”

The nurse chuckled, then led me into a bright room. In the front was a large nurses’ station where another nurse -- Rhonda, her name badge read -- was sorting IV bags filled with clear liquids. In the back were six recliners. “Take your pick,” my nurse said, sweeping her arm wide.

I stared at the recliners, then at the tall IV poles and medical stands beside them. Someone had laid out several pairs of gloves, a small stack of alcohol swabs, a half-dozen syringes on each.

I can’t do this, a voice inside cried. I can’t do this.

“Where would you like to be?”

My heart pounded wildly. Anywhere else in the universe, I wanted to say. Instead, I forced myself to sit in the first chair.

“Great,” she said. She took my blood pressure and temperature and checked my blood oxygen level. “You’re good to go. Rhonda will get you started in a minute.”

As I waited for Rhonda, each of the women from the waiting room, even the pregnant one, was led into the room, seated, had her vitals taken. The woman nearest me tried to strike up a conversation, but I ignored her, ignored the nurses. My thoughts were locked onto the chemicals, the Taxol and the Carboplatin, that would soon be pumped into the port implanted in my chest. They were poisonous. Toxic. They would make me bald, anemic, and violently ill, then drag my ravaged body toward the precipice of death before -- hopefully -- letting go. That’s how chemo worked. It tried to kill the cancer before killing the patient. But, if I refused them, if I jumped up and ran out of there, the cancer would kill me for sure.

Rhonda walked over, smiled gently. “Ready for round one?”

Tears streamed down my face. I shook my head and began unbuttoning my shirt.

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