Hello Stranger

I was still breathing heavily as I dropped onto the mattress and pulled her close. She was still breathing heavily right back as she snaked her arm around my waist and rested her cheek on my chest.

I held her tight, and we collected ourselves together. Flesh to flesh. Wrapped up in limbs and needs and wants, and so much still unsaid.

She was the one to open the door to the unspoken and set the wheels in motion.

“Your mum told me a lot about you,” she said.27LoganMy mum always starts with the happy parts. She tells the stories of how I obsessed with medical books as soon as I was able to read them, or how I’d wanted to be a doctor since I was old enough to understand what a doctor really was. She calls it vocation. Life purpose. Fate.

It was none of those things.

It was being a tiny child in hospital relying on doctors to save my life. Relying on doctors to give me the strength I needed when I was scared and small and trying to manage the pain and fear of Childhood Leukaemia. It still gives me shivers thinking about it now. The nights when Mum had fallen asleep exhausted beside me and I was still awake, my young mind churning with what-ifs you should never have to contemplate at five years old.

What if I die? Will it hurt? Will an angel come for me?

Tossing and turning and watching Mum sleep.

What will Mummy do if I leave her? How sad will she be? How much will she cry then, when I’m in heaven? Who will hug me like she does when I’m not alive anymore?

She tried to be strong for me, and did excellently, but it was an arduous task. I’d catch her crying when she thought I was sleeping. I’d stare at her trying to hold back her sobs when she saw me in pain. I saw the fear in her eyes, mirroring mine, even though she held me tight and told me everything would be ok.

She told me over and over and over again that I’d get better, and most of the time I believed her, or I tried. Other times I felt like I was an unlucky boy who wouldn’t ever get to live the life most little boys did. I wouldn’t get years ahead of Santa Claus, or sports games, or friends’ birthday parties with cake and games in the backyard. I wouldn’t get to meet animals at the safari park, or go on holidays to the beach and build sandcastles.

As it turns out, I did. Mum was right and I was lucky, but even at that age, I knew others wouldn’t be.

My mother likes to tell everyone how brave I was. How well I dealt with the treatment – the chemotherapy and the pain and the fear, and how I was such a strong little soul, always such a strong little soul. Still, you can see it in their eyes, when they register the sadness of the condition I went through. The sympathy, the sorrow, that poor Logan face.

That look that only grows sadder when she gets out the pictures of me as a tiny little body with no hair, holding on to her as tight as I could.

People think my alopecia might cause me some kind of self-consciousness problems and they avoid ever mentioning it. It’s almost funny to see their expressions as they first register the patches on my scalp and pretend they haven’t noticed. They couldn’t be more wrong.

I addressed any worries I had about losing my hair long ago. I still remember it falling out around me in bed at night, and trying to put it back on my head in the morning before anyone noticed. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing my sad eyes underneath my rapidly balding scalp and hoping it would grow back one day.

It was hard.

The whole experience of the treatment, and the hospital stays, and the pain was intense. Petrifying.

It took over eight hundred days until I was given the all clear. I still remember that rush of utter relief when they told me it was done. No more drips, no more consultations, no more days wandering around hospital wards with other kids trying to smile like me.

I knew other people wouldn’t be so lucky – that’s why I gave my attention to them. That’s why I wanted to be the doctor who took people in their lowest moments, when there was no hope left, and made the end of their life as easy as possible for both them and their families.

It’s never easy, not even close, but I try my damn hardest.

I will never forget my mother’s fear in her lowest moments, etched so deep onto her face that I could read it in the lines, even though she never stopped smiling on the surface.