Floor 4C

The following narrative essay was written somewhere around ten years ago. I have never shared it on this blog, until now. It was posted on my friend Will Kenyon's blog about eight years ago. He also did some editing for me.

Enjoy and please let me know what you think by leaving a comment. I would love to engage with all of you!

Floor 4C

Perhaps due to luck, perhaps due to fate, and completely due to genetics, I was born with Cystic Fibrosis, a chronic disease that affects the lungs and digestive system. The average life expectancy of a Cystic Fibrosis patient is 40, give or take a few years, depending on severity. My case is a moderate one. I have problems with both my lungs and my digestive system, but none of my issues are extreme so far. Because of the nature of my disease, normal day-to-day routines often leave me out of breath, tired, and weak. Also, I become depressed and cynical, especially when I think about how I’m living with a chronic, terminal disease. I think that when you are born with or develop a terminal disease, it’s easy to pity yourself and prey on the sympathies of others. It’s incredibly easy to maintain a grim perspective on life, and that’s just what I did until I was thirteen.

When I was five, my doctor recommended to my parents that I see a psychiatrist to assess my mental well being, so they made an appointment and we went, thinking nothing of it. When we got to the psychiatrist’s office, she gave me some basic psychological tests to complete. One was to draw a picture of anything I wanted. After about ten minutes, I handed her a colored drawing.

“What is it?” she asked.

“It’s a sad pine tree,” I replied.

Worried, the doctor told my parents what I had drawn and offered some suggestions. To this day, my mother jokingly tells me that she should have paid attention to the doctor and foreseen what I’d be like in the following years.

Sometimes I had to go to Egleston Children’s Hospital on the Emory campus in Atlanta, where I’d stay on floor 4C, the area for Cystic Fibrosis patients. The halls on floor 4C had walls painted purple, with green stripes running down the center, and with a thick, white handrail running the length of the wall. The floors were tiled with slick white, speckled tile that allowed for loud and fast rides down the hallways on squeaky-wheeled IV poles. The rooms themselves had the same color scheme as the hall, except that the floor tiles were colored. The rooms were small  - just big enough for a bed, a nightstand, drawers mounted in the walls for clothing, and a little couch. The bathroom had tiled floors and walls, and some of them had drawings from former patients on them. The two windows in the room I usually occupied looked into the hallway and out toward the side of the hospital. They were useless for receiving natural light. Being trapped in a room like that for two weeks at a time often drained any brightness from my personality. But on a particular trip I made when I was thirteen, things turned out to be different.

During my various stays in the hospital, I have met a number of people who opened my eyes to the world around me. The most significant of these was four-year-old Abigail.

Abigail had severe liver failure as well as some heart problems, and was on the list for transplants. She had a fairly large scar that ran vertically up her stomach to her chest, and the funny thing about our first encounter was her willingness to compare scars. I showed her the scar I had gotten from stomach surgeries that runs horizontally across my abdomen. Abigail found this to be especially funny, and enjoyed talking about our matching (well, opposite) scars. As for her other physical features, she had short, curly blonde hair and light blue eyes, and she stood at about four feet tall.

When Abigail was two her parents had brought her to Egleston and left her so that they wouldn’t have to bear the so-called burdens of her condition. The worst part was that her parents would visit her on her birthday, but never any time other than that. This must-have caused a lot of confusion for her because at night, when I would wander the halls while I couldn’t sleep, I would hear her sad and unanswered calls for her parents. Hearing Abigail’s muffled cries forced me to contemplate my own situation. It was then that I came to the realization that this young girl was caught in a web that was far worse than the tangled mess I perceived myself to be in. I didn’t understand then and still don’t understand how any parent could just leave a child to die at a hospital.

I still remember the first day I met Abigail. I was walking by the playroom on floor 4C during my rather routine stay, and I saw her there, playing with Legos and dolls and wearing a face of complete and utter boredom. She looked up at me as I passed, and asked, “Do you want to play with me?” Since I was also completely bored after spending a week in a hospital room, I decided to say yes, and went in to spend some time with her. Aside from a low, round table and the toys scattered around the carpeted floor, the playroom looked exactly like any other room on the floor. It was even as small as the other rooms.

As we began to play together, her bored and indifferent face quickly turned into a big, bright smile, and for days afterward, every time I walked by the playroom, I would hear a voice ask, “Do you want to play?” I always did, and playing with Abigail erased the monotony of my time at Egleston that year.

A year later I went back to floor 4C after having surgery to remove part of my colon, and I had the opportunity to see Abigail again. She was in even worse condition than the year before, and still hadn’t received her transplants, but she was still so happy to see me, and I still hold her joy dearly in my memory. 

Seven months later I returned to floor 4C and found out that she’d never received her transplants, and had finally passed away.

That a young girl of five, with problems far worse than my own, could wake up, ignore the cluster of IVs she was connected to, and ask me to play with her was truly eye-opening. How could anyone deny the request of such a trooper? I sure couldn’t.

It was absolutely amazing to me that Abigail could be so happy in spite of her condition, while I was always so morose.

Every time I saw Abigail, she was ecstatic, yet I struggled to find that mood within myself. This puzzled me. I wondered why I felt the way I did and came to the realization that I needed to stop thinking long-term and begin thinking short-term. The question became, if a child can live day to day, why can’t I?

I still haven’t found the answer that I’m looking for, but I’m closer than before. I still have good and bad days and I’m not always the most cheerful person to be around, but the same could be said for Abigail, or any other human being for that matter. But by shifting my focus from the very broad and future-based to day-to-day, and by appreciating the life I do have, and not the life I wish I had, I have made myself a happier person and given myself a more fruitful existence. And I know that my current, more positive outlook on life with a terminal illness can be attributed to my time spent with a five-year-old girl who exemplified maintaining a bright outlook in the midst of turmoil.

Realizing that I only get out of life what I put into it has been a great help in the adjustment of my attitude from negative to positive. Additionally, understanding and coming to terms with the fact that death is inevitable, while a grim thought to be sure, is in my opinion key to obtaining and maintaining a child-like attitude in life. Children like Abigail don’t dwell on the inevitability of death and are, for the most part, happy. So would I not be better off in adopting this train of thought as well…?