Blue

Cancer was not a word Piper thought she’d hear at age 18. Her golden years fading into a hue of blues. Blue hospital walls, blue curtains and bright LED lights that somehow glowed blue. That sterile, hostile blue. It drove her mad. How could every single surface of this multi-story building be covered in the same colour, it seemed ridiculous.

When she was released from the hospital just some months before her 19th birthday, she returned to her family home. She slowly walked down the halls, dragging her feet behind her barely having the energy to lift them up. She looked up at the staircase, and down at her body, a hollowed shell of who she once was. She picked up her bones, grunting to make it up each step, using her arms to try steady her now unreliable legs. She could not trust her body anymore. She had such little strength, the cancer made sure to take that away, just like it had everything else. After some time, Piper finally made it to her bedroom. She immediately clutched her stomach, the sight of her sheets making her feel sick. They were a beautiful ocean blue, made of linen, and she had always felt so safe curled up underneath the warmth they provided. After standing in her doorway for a few minutes with eyes half open, she made her way to her bed, collapsing into the cold blue that suddenly encased her.

“I’m sorry, this is just for precaution, your heart rate has dropped and we think you might be at risk of - well, that doesn’t matter, you look fine, you’ll be just fine.” The nurse anxiously assured Piper, barely being able to look her in her eyes, as nurses and doctors flooded into her room. Acting together in unison, graceful as a flock of birds in flight they speared her veins, connecting her to a machine infusing her with a chemical that would keep her alive. A defibrillator at the ready, they placed stickers all over her body to connect her to an electrocardiogram machine. They drew blood from the port placed in her chest, spoke amongst each other, and never once spoke to Piper. They kept their faces down, she wouldn’t even be able to recognise them again.

Suddenly, it was as though the temperature dropped in the room. Pipers ears were ringing, but not loud enough so as to not hear the raging machines that were connected to her. As one unit, the strangers all glared at the readings given by the ECG, and then everything went dark.

Piper realised she had stopped breathing. She took a sharp breath in, feeling her heart race. She looked around the room, and when her gaze drifted from her sea blue sheets, she noticed her white walls, the photos stuck to the back of her door, the book collection she had never read, and the large panelled window. She exhaled. Her counsellor had told her again and again, 5 things you can see, 4 things you can hear, 3 things you could smell, and, well, she couldn’t remember the rest. It never worked anyway.

Pipers next few months felt strange. It was as if she was learning to do everything for the first time, and nothing was the same. She couldn’t drink red drinks, that was the colour of her chemotherapy. She had to take liquid panadol for her headaches, the pills were too reminiscent of the steroids that filled her with nausea. She couldn’t drive along the highway, as that was the way she went to hospital. And she certainly couldn’t eat chocolate cake, it was all she could stomach during her treatment, but now the scent of it was enough to send her into an anxiety attack. She kept discovering things she couldn’t do, or eat, and it became an excessive list. Her own body now restricted her too. She wrestled inside this skin that now no longer served her. She was too weak to join her hockey team, and she couldn’t read for long periods because of her brain fog. She could barely remember what she ate for breakfast, let alone a page of her anatomy studies textbook. She felt strangled, like the very bones that she was made of now caged her. The bones that betrayed her, that grew and morphed into this black ick that spread around her body, that suffocated her lungs and tried to kill her. Her own body turned against her, there was now nowhere safe to go.

After her days began to feel normal, and her surroundings were filled with pinks, yellows and greens, Piper returned to the hospital. It was just a routine checkup to make sure her osteosarcoma wasn’t back, which she was certain it wouldn’t be, it had been 2 years now. She sat in the waiting room for some time, surrounded by sterile blue. She abruptly got up and moved into a different seat, the one she was in was no good, it was the seat she sat in last time, and things didn’t go so well. Agitated, she kept checking the time. It had been an hour now, and her surroundings were starting to encase her back into her old world. The world she had been trying so hard to escape. Sinking into her seat, a nurse called her name. She took a deep breath and stood up. She was steady and strong and walked with grace into the private room. Her doctor shuffled their papers, avoiding her eyes as if lasers were shooting out of them. “Uh oh, bad news”, Piper thought to herself.

Piper was right. A small checkup turned into a month long hospital stay. She was once again surrounded by blue, she took her steroid pills and red infusions, and she ate the chocolate cake. Well, the one slice that she could manage anyway.