Chemical Cage

Sixty-five roses. A sweet name for such a silent killer. It sneaks into the bodies of our young where it begins it's silent work. She'll always be smaller that the others, get winded quickly when she tries to play. I stay up at night hearing these loud coughs as she struggles to clear her throat so she can breath. Legs shake and wobble like there is a strong wind. Her back looks like a dragon spine. Doctors will puzzle, tell me she is just sickly. Pills will come in a flood.

Christmas time, she is 9 years old. Out of her hospital window I see a weak powdery blanket of rare Texas snow. She is laying in her bed with a monkey on her back she tries to turn and see. Her lung collapsed and now she is in a morphine delirium. It will take her months to shake the drug's grasping hand of addiction. She did not get to see the snow that year.

Summer comes and goes, she is indoors gasping for breath because we are too poor to afford an air conditioner.By this time she has had three collapses of her lungs and countless bouts of pneumonia which leave scarring in her lungs that will never heal. Each morning I wake up to her coughing as she gets her nebulizor ready for her treatments. Albuterol, Broncho Saline, and Tobramycin. Along with a battery of enzymes so she can eat and a gastrointestinal button which feeds liquid nourishment directly to her stomach, her day is a long and hard one.

Houston, a year and a half ago. They take her for a risky transplant. She has Nocardia in her lungs. It goes well enough, the lungs come from a young girl and are only a tiny bit too big. I see her at home after the operation and she tells me she feels like a runny egg. Fluid has built up everywhere on her body giving her hound dog jowls and Fred Flintstone's feet. Along her chest is a raw, red centipede of staples where they had cut her open and took out her old lungs to give her new ones.

She never feels healthy after this. Before she had to carry oxygen, but she was at her physical peak. Now she has become so stressed and confused she picks at herself like a meth head. Her body is covered in scabs where she picks, picks, and picks. Her eyebrow is half gone from rubbing at it in a nervous tick. She has been in the hospital every three weeks since the operation a year and a half ago. A few days ago, they finally told me she was not going to get any better.

After so many tries to keep her healthy, her body just does not want that little girl's lungs. It has decided to reject them and all we can do is race her body with medication to slow the process. She can not get another transplant. She is my soul. She is my sister. We shared a room every day of our lives until I graduated High School. We shared our hopes, dreams, our secrets with each other. My sister was everything to me and she still is. I can feel her hand in mine, so small and shaking so furiously from the steroids. I love my baby sister and I can only hope her time left is the best of her life and that I can be there for her.

Sixty-five roses, a beautiful name for an ugly disease. Each rose has took a part of her away from me. What will be left?




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The photo is of my sister, the subject of my writing.