SHE | alex karev

chapter twenty

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CHAPTER TWENTY
blues for sister someone.
season two, episode twenty-three.

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Billie had always loved hospitals.

She'd spent her whole childhood hanging out in them, getting her mother to sneak her up into OR galleries so that she could watch her operate or waiting for her to finish surgery as she sat in the waiting room with her father and brother.

She loved watching her mother in action and getting to talk to her patients before the surgeries. She loved inspecting the board as if she somewhat understood what was written on it. She loved saying hello to every nurse she knew and getting carried around by her mother's colleagues; particularly, Dr. Jensen from pediatrics, who Billie had always had a soft spot for and vice versa.

However, when she turned six, the visits to the hospital became even more reoccurring, but this time, they weren't work-related. It was the moment her mother got cancer and instead of going to work, the visits to the hospital were really just appointments with her surgical oncologist.

Ivory began chemotherapy really early due to the fact that she had triple-negative breast cancer, the most aggressive type. By the time Billie was eight, her mother had lost all of her hair, had gotten way too weak to operate and was laying on a hospital bed, breathing through tubes and fighting against a cancer that wasn't only on her breast, but had now also spread to her lungs and brain.

Billie remembered it very clearly; soon, her mother's skin stretched with the veil of early eld and illness, the weakness darkened her eyes and blanched her lips, and her voice trailed off until it was just a whisper. Billie was nine, but she remembered sitting on the waiting room with her father and brother as Ivory underwent what felt like the hundredth surgery in only three years.

It became a routine. Watching her mother getting poked and prodded, being scared whenever she closed her eyes, wanting to cry everyday.

Billie remembered how every nurse and doctor in the hospital would visit her, grant her their best wishes, and leave a basket of treats on their way out. Ivory's favorite was the one left by Dr. Jensen, which was usually filled with plump, juicy cherries. But despite the fun they had eating homemade chocolate-chip cookies and sweet oranges, the disease reached a point where Ivory would crash every other day. At some moment, Billie lost count of how many times her mother died and was brought back.

When Billie was ten, Ivory signed a DNR. Do Not Resuscitate.

Dying had become a routine, as weird as it was. The pain, the suffering, the tears. Four years of grieving will do that to a person; it'll force them to normalize it. Because it was their reality: Ivory was sick and they would stay by her side, even if that meant they'd never really be happy again. Sure, they'd have moments of content. But real happiness wouldn't meet them until years later, once they'd all parted ways.

Ivory LeBlanc passed away on February the fourteenth of 1991.

Billie was in the room when she did. The only sound that filled the space was the constant beeping of her mother's heart monitor, which showed the slow heartbeat that she housed within her chest. Tears streamed down everyone's eyes when Ivory grabbed her daughter's chin and said her final words.

You'll grow up, she began, and I won't be there. But that's okay.

Billie sobbed. Her mother's hand was a susurration against her skin, weak like the graze of a feather.