Cyclone

By Victoria Dekoker

WHEN I was sixteen, I died. Flat lined. Beeeeeeeep.

There are tubes weaving in and out of my body; fluids flowing in, fluids
flowing out. But I don’t know it. I am floating through a grey cloud, a dark
cyclone of nothingness. I don’t see a tunnel of light—I don’t see anything. I
don’t hear a choir of angels because I can't hear.
When I wake up, I am in a golden hospital room, looking down on
myself lying in a bed, nestled in blue blankets. The far wall is mostly window
and behind it, several surgeons stand observing me, their emerald masks
still obscuring their faces. In the corner, there is a woman sitting before a
large machine, reading a magazine.
“What are you doing?” I ask her. She looks up, surprised.
“I’m fixing you,” she answers, her words twisting slightly with an
accent.
“Where are you from?”
“Far away,” she smiled, “But I’m never going back.”

IT is called thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. My little warrior white

blood cells got confused and waged a war on my poor little red cells so my
blood curdled, becoming chunky here and runny there. Brain and Kidney got
confused and started to short. Misfires between Left and Right, little
lightening bolts across the bridge across both hemispheres. Kidney called it
quits. Beeeeeeeep.

THERE is a heat in my body I’ve never felt before, as if I am thawing from

the veins out. I’m radiating. I try to push the scratchy hospital blanket off
my arms and legs, but they are too heavy to move—as if I hadn’t moved in
decades. The light behind my eyes is nearly blinding but when I open them,
it’s dark. The room is dark and shadowy with a metallic kind of feel.
I realize that there is a whispered ticking coming from a large machine
next to me. The triangular knobs were rotating slowly, circulating a dark
purple fluid through a dizzying maze of plastic tubing. I turn to trace the
path of the hose and instantly feel a taught stiffness in my neck. When I
swallow, I can feel the tape on my throat. Then I see that same purple
tubing creeping up the side of the bed, burning along the skin of my forearm
and warming my chest even through the blanket.

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 The machine is connected to my neck.
That’s my blood being pumped out of my body, spun through a
machine and injected back into my jugular. A nurse emerges from the
shadows to ask if I’m cold. I croak that I’m hot.
“The machine warms the blood,” she said, “You’ll cool down when it’s
done.” She approaches the apparatus beside me and inspects a bag of some
mucusy substance hanging from a metal hook stand. “One more bag.
Should be done in about twenty minutes.”
My mouth is prickly dry and my eyelids are too warm to stay open but I
can hear as her uniform shuffles when she sits down and changes the
channel on the television to the gentle cacophony of a sitcom laugh track.

MY mother is here. And my sister too. They say that Dad’s in the waiting
room with his new wife and a couple friends from school came to deliver a
get-well card from my Spanish class. My mother won’t loosen her vice grip
on my hand as she leans forward to look at me as if she might never see me
again. My sister stands behind her, her arms crossed over her chest. Her
face is splotchy and her hair is pulled back into a haphazard knot.
I’m in a different room. It’s bigger than the last. The slate walls are
towering above me, the ceiling drooping down where the central fluorescent
light is glowing. My bed is along the right wall and I feel slightly
discombobulated at the imbalance. There are doctors peering in from the
doorway, nurses buzzing about.
“You’re sick,” my sister said.
“With what?”
“It’s your blood.”

Every morning at 6am a nurse comes in to take blood for tests. My body
is getting tired, though, tired of all the needles and tubes and pills, the pinch
of the blood pressure test, the constant bitter aftertaste of Benadryl as it
seeps into the back of my throat. The blood war is reaching catastrophic
proportions and my shriveled veins are the latest casualties.
The nurse binds my arm above the elbow so tight my fingers begin to
tingle and like Fedallah, he harpoons my sickly white flesh. He misses
because my veins have shrunk deeper, lower into the abyss of cells,
cowering from each painful pinprick.
I am a pincushion. I am the machine-gunned paper shooting target. I
am bled so dry, my blood has turned a bluish color and each drop dribbles
into the vial, too exhausted to protest.

Dr. Lee says he’s going to start a more aggressive approach. More
treatments, more transfusions—he might even take my spleen. My sister
has stopped going to classes, stopped working. She sits by my bedside

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teaching herself accounting, rehearsing Spanish vocabulary, applying
feminist theory to Cuban cinema of the 1960s. We don’t talk much, but a
few times I catch her looking at me.
My mother refuses to leave the room for any reason. She’s
accumulated a battalion of juice and water bottles and a seemingly
academic supply of pop culture magazines. When she’s not interrogating
the doctors, she crunching on pretzels or chips, trying to get her oily fingers
to catch the slick, printed pages of US Weekly as she turns them too fast to
actually be reading. I know that that methodic motion, the way her finger
traces the border of the sheet to the corner, the way her thumb twists as it
fights to move onward to the next page, over and over again, as if reaching
the end of the article might signify the end of this mess.
I know I’m sick. I have a rare blood disease that scientists barely know
how to treat. One in 250,000 people in the world get it and they’re usually
middle aged men or pregnant. I am neither. I’ve been in the hospital for two
weeks receiving plasmapheresis, the transfusion of plasma. I’ve finally
begun to stabilize but no one knows for how long.
I’m slowly going insane from the constant hospital cacophony, the
incessant beeping of the heart monitor, the drip of the IV, the buzzing of the
transfusion machine. The chatter of the television my roommate refuses to
turn off. I can feel the walls bending inward, crushing me. The nurses flitter
about ceaselessly. I haven’t a moment to myself. I can't sleep, I can't eat, I
can't be here anymore. I’m starting to forget what I’m fighting for. There
are nets outside my window in case I decide to jump. I’m starting to wonder
if I even want to get better—I’d rather die than spend another moment in
this disgustingly clean room smelling the plastic of disposable needles. I’d
rather die than live like this for the rest of my life.

“Do you remember what it was like?” my sister asks me years later.
“I remember my first hospital room, the yellow one.”
“You didn’t have a yellow room. It was tiny and gray.”
“I didn’t? I remember being in a yellow room with a window and a
British nurse.”
“You didn’t have a British nurse.”