A second chance.
That was what I wished for.
The one thing I prayed for every night before I sleep. The one thing I prayed for, at the very night before I woke up in an entirely different life.
A new life.
My second chance.
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I was 30 years old wh...
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—Present life, year 2017—
I never told my mother.
It was a really close call, however, when I was sitting there in the dining room with my mother who was stubborn enough not to listen to her daughter, and Taehyung who was completely speechless and as terribly clueless as I was. But I managed to convince her enough to come with me to the hospital by the end of the week. Although I had to make a sacrifice of my own—
"I need to get a follow-up check myself sometime this year, don't I? I know it's too early for that, but I feel like I need one already before finals come up. Come with me, Mom. Let's take it together."
After a long series of convincing, whining, pleading, and heaps of lies about my health problem—which I was not having, by the way, but there was no need for her to know that—and making her worry about our health conditions, she finally gave in. Taehyung was there with us while my mother and I went through a whole set of procedures at the hospital. We both went through blood tests and all the lab tests we needed to take, all the things that involved being poked by needles and other unknown devices to take samples of our bodies, and a few X-ray photos.
Taehyung was always there as our driver and escort, while Kara came by to join us once and a while as a support. My father was never there.
Within the second week, we found out that while I was doing perfectly fine—so far, at least—they found that my mother's body held secrets of its own.
A dormant tumour.
It was found located on her left breast, pressing down her heart as if it belonged there like any other organs inside her body. Nobody knew when it had first come to exist, or how it had started to grow before it stopped at its current state. But the doctors had told us that if we ever had left it as it is, then it would mutate into a more active cell one day without our knowledge. As in, actively growing and giving her a life-threatening condition in the future.
One that—according to the faint memory I had—would start growing inside her, not only on the level of pain but also by size, many years after due to stress and thanks to a few medications which she took after getting a different kind of illness. We still had time to prepare for the latter one. But hopefully, after finding out about this so early in time, we could stop that one from happening too.
One month later, we had a surgery held to remove the mass, along with any suspicious tissue they had found surrounding it. She had to stay at the hospital during her recovery for the next two weeks. And it was a relief for me that I was having a midterm break that I was able to stand by and nurse her, making sure that she would never have to endure it all on her own.
I never cared about having to sleep on the floor at night if I had to, just because she wanted me close by her bed. I was happy that I had a chance to be close to her. It felt somewhat surreal to be by her side all the time, to be able to hold her hands when she felt pain, to listen to her talk at night before she fell asleep, to help her eat—just like how she did when she nursed me back to health when I was fighting my battles. It felt like I had gained something, as if there was a void to be filled when I had a chance to experience all the things that I was surely missing out on at my past life.
