Nothing to Lose

Chapter Nine

"What the heck is that?" I asked as my mother wheeled me back into my room that evening. What I was referring to was the bright white, plastic urine container that sat on the previously empty bed next to mine with "NIKITA" written on it in thick Sharpie ink.

It's at this point that I must mention a ridiculously humiliating and strange practice at Lucille Packard. We weren't allowed to use the toilets. We had to tuck the edges of a plastic urine trapping device under the seat in order to capture our liquid waste. This was supposedly to check our "levels", but what exactly they were testing the "levels" of were never revealed to me. When I asked, they'd just vaguely reply, "Oh, you know, levels." This leads me to believe that there was no real purpose to the animalistic ritual other than to make us feel stupid when family came to visit and had to awkwardly pretend a container of your piss wasn't sitting on the floor of the bathroom.

Each pan had our name written on it when we arrived, so the nurses would know who was in what room, and so they wouldn't confuse our samples. I hadn't had a roommate for my entire stay, so seeing a name written on this pristine new container was startling. What if they didn't like getting up at five? What if they played the TV too loud and too late? What if they insisted on watching the Katy Perry Movie, forcing me to relive the two hours of rock bottom I'd never get back? More than this, I was selfishly afraid that she would have a mother like mine, who never left. I'd very much enjoyed my privacy- a room I could escape to during Group Activity or Free Time so I could cry with only my mother present.

When my nurse came to take my nighttime vitals, I asked when Nikita was coming.

"Tomorrow, probably. She's in the hospital, but in the ER. They'll wheel her up when she's closer to being stable." Oof, the ER. You only got sent there if you passed out or worse. I felt sorry for her, since in the ER, you didn't get the option to eat- you only got The Tube.

The next morning, while we sat in the dining hall waiting for breakfast to be delievered, a gurney was buzzed in. We all watched silently as a very tiny girl with a pixie cut was wheeled down the hall. She had an embarassed look on her face, so we all just smiled sheepishly as if to say, "We're not judging you, we get it."

"Maris, didn't you say Nikita would be your roommate?" Lindsay asked.

"Yeah, why?"

"They're wheeling her into my room."

Lindsay, the petite and adorable twelve year old, also had no roommate. It was a fairly empty week for the wing, so they hadn't worried about combining us. It worked out pretty well- my mom got a bed, and she got storage space. Turns out, Lindsay was popular. She'd recieved package after package just in the few days I'd been there. Each one seemed to relate to an inside joke with her friends. One box held more than fifty rubber ducks that she laughed hysterically at. A huge teddy bear arrived holding a plastic lawn flamingo. A gigantic envelope contained dozens of handwritten notes from her brother's preschool class. A couple candystripers came to hang a large, "GET WELL SOON, LINDSAY."

I have to say, I was a tad jealous, but I shouldn't have been. Alex bought me a stuffed tiger in the hospital gift shop, and my dad brought me fuzzy socks. I recieved a beautiful balloon bouquet with the ominous card, "Get well soon, love, your friends!", leaving me wondering if my mom bought them for me. A point of pride for me was that I got so many flowers from family members that I caused a girl to have an allergic reaction. My mother helped me arrange my flora around my bed so I was encapsulated in my own little forest, a place where, if I closed my eyes long enough, I could pretend I was at peace. My favorite gift by far, however, was a huge butterfly balloon that my mother's boss brought me when she came to visit, along with a potted fern.

Erika is a very....unique person.

"Hippie Dippy" is the best phrase I can think of to describe her. She has a blog about discovering her inner self, and she whole heartedly believes in magic and "energy work". Her definition of magic, however, is basically karma. What goes around comes around. Good people have the ability to make great things happen. When she came to visit, she asked me to do some of her "energy work" with her. I was a little uncertain, as the last time I'd participated in this, I'd simply cried nonstop while she asked me questions about myself. She came to the conclusion that I simply cared too much. About everything. Whether she read that from my aura or my responses, she was right.

In the hospital, however, she had me lay down on my bed while she closed her eyes and held her hands above me.

"Oh yes, this place is working." She said with a soft smile. "Your light is already brighter."

She continued on like this for quite awhile, telling me I'd be alright, telling me that she believed in me. She held me when I cried about how badly I wanted to go home, and even cried with me. One thing about Erika is that she feels everyone's pain, exactly as if it where her own. She's a passionate and sometimes crazy woman, but I'll always be thankful to her for sharing her story with me. Here was this happy and content lady who could find the bright side to anything, and she herself had dealt with anorexia. It gave me the slightest sliver of hope.

"The fern is symbolic, you know." She said before she left. "Everyone else gave you flowers. They're very pretty, but they're going to die pretty soon. No matter how much you water them, how much of that packaged plant food you give them, they'll wilt. That fern though, you have the power to save that fern. If you don't take care of it, it'll wilt just like the flowers. But you can decide what you want to do with it."

And with that, she made her favorite kind of exit, a dramatic one.