Doctor-Patient Confidentiality: New Adult Enemies-to-Lovers Romance

Chapter Seventy-Two

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That's what he'd said.

A fucking tumor.

At first, I wasn't sure I heard him right. I mean, I couldn't have. But then, he came and sat down next to me, his eyes focused and slightly cautious, with a sort of concern showing through the depths of icy blue that I'd never seen before.

And then he handed me the brown folder.

I took it warily, opening it with trembling hands and a creased forehead, still trying to wrap my mind around what he'd just said. My eyes shot to what was inside, and I was met with a handful of stills; about four or five pictures of my insides taken during the endoscopy. They all showed varying angles of the same thing; the apparent tumor. It was this disgusting purplish color, like it got beaten to a pulp in a bar brawl. It looked weirdly swollen and lumpy, like some sort of defective, lopsided balloon that was inflated in some parts and flat in others. It actually looked angry. But most of all, it looked out of place. It clearly didn't belong there. And from everything Frost was saying, he obviously concurred.

"Ramona, we found a tumor in your stomach..."

"It's just below your diaphragm, which explains why you've been having those pseudo-hiccup episodes and abdominal pain..."

"...the way it's isolated is usually typical with benign tumors, but its appearance, size and location concern me quite a bit..."

"...we can't know with a hundred percent certainty whether it's cancerous or not until we perform a biopsy..."

It was really weird and shocking seeing it, knowing that it was just sitting there inside me, and that it would still be inside me when I left to go home. I had a really hard time focusing on what he was saying, my brain too busy trying to make sense of the images in my shaky hands. I could barely even breathe right, let alone say anything. I had so many questions, but immense shock kept me silent, unable to voice any of them. I just...I couldn't believe it.

A fucking tumor.

And...it could possibly be cancer?

Is that what he was telling me? That at twenty-four years old, I could have the same, draining, exhaustive, incurable disease that took the lives of my mother and grandfather? That this horrible illness that's taken so much from me already won't be satisfied until it claims my life, too?

I feel myself getting lightheaded again as the unwelcomed memory vividly replays itself in my mind. The news was just too sudden. Too abrupt. And absolutely nothing could have prepared me to hear it. It's almost as if I had just dreamed it, that I'd imagined the whole thing. For several minutes after the words left his lips, I truly felt like I was just having some sort of sick and twisted nightmare that I'd eventually wake up from, or that I was being set up for some god awful prank by someone with an incredibly shitty sense of humor.

Minutes passed and I didn't wake up with strained breaths and flailing arms. No one came barging into the room with cameras to tell me I was being punked. Nothing. I just sat there on the bed in silence, perfectly still as if I was paralyzed; my brain fuzzy, my vision hazy, like I was in some sort of trance. But deep down in my heart, beneath all the initial disbelief and denial, I knew it was real. That it was actually happening. That it was my life playing out before me, and not someone else's.