I wake up every morning, hearing the same sound, every single day. A nurse opens the window, and I smell the salty breeze. I hear the waves crashing against shore, and I hear the seabirds quacking. If I had the strength, I would walk towards the window, and gaze at the beauty of the Californian beach. If I run away from this jail like room, will I be able to walk around, like I used to? The thermometer beeps, pulling me away from my daydream.

“Good morning, May Belle, how do you feel?” The name tag on the nurse says Monika Butter. I didn’t know that “Butter” could be a last name. If I was well, I wouldn’t be here, I thought. I ignored her. I was hospitalized two weeks ago, after my great accident. It wasn’t the accident that got me in here, but if it wasn’t for the accident, I would have never made my way here.

On a bright sunny day, two weeks ago, I was jogging like any other day. I was in the track and field team, and I never, ever skipped my daily jogging. Today was a beautiful, sunny day, not too hot, not too cold. I was planning on jogging for a couple of hours. I changed into my outfit, and headed towards my jogging course. I was running at a pretty fast pace, and as usual, I was listening to my iPod. My body didn’t feel like my usual self. Recently, it had always felt like this. I had shorter breaths, and I was a lot more tired at the end of the day, even if I didn’t do anything different. I just passed those abnormal things as if I had a cold or something. I thought it was a cold, anyway. But was it really just a normal cold? No, it wasn’t.

I was running at a high pace. Suddenly, it became harder to breathe, and I was choking. I was gasping, and I fell to the ground. Unfortunately, the place where I landed was a hard, concrete surface. I hit my head pretty hard. I remember the pain. But that is all that I remember. When I woke up, I was in a boring white room, and I had a bracelet that had my name and room number on it. I was wearing a blue hospital gown instead of the jogging gear I had been wearing. What had happened? I had never been in a hospital before, and I was scared because there was nobody nearby. When you see people wake up shocked in hospitals, there are usually people who are sitting next to the bed, waiting for him/her to wake up. When the person wakes up, they cheer, crying. But the chairs next to my bed were empty. Nobody was waiting for me to wake up. Was this a dream? I was confused and afraid at the same time. I pinched myself. It hurt. So it wasn’t a dream. I looked around for something that would prove that this was real life. I noticed a small mirror on the desk on my right side. I peeked into it, and screamed. My whole head was in a huge white bandage, and my hair was somewhere underneath. I was connected to a lot of cords, one of them coming from my nostrils. The only place that showed was my left eye. I started panicking, not knowing why I was here, and what the machines were. Suddenly, I started to feel pain in my head, and I felt stiff. I felt around for the nurse button. I’ve seen in movies that patients have a button to call a nurse for help. I must have sounded pretty panicked when I screamed, because a nurse came before I even found the button. I don’t remember the name of that nurse, but she had heard me from the next room. If she was next door the whole time, then why did it take her so long to get to my room? She got me a cold glass of water, and went to fetch a doctor.

It took her a really long time to get my doctor. It seemed like hours. I watched the ocean swooshing and crashing against the boulders, not knowing that it would be the only pretty thing I would see for the rest of my life. The doctor finally came, and introduced himself politely.

“Hello, May Belle. I’m Dr. Morgan. Please call me Skylar.”
He spoke in a slow, thick voice. I could tell that this was a very serious matter. My heart started to beat faster, and I noticed that the machine was beeping along with the sound of my heartbeat.

“You have a severe form of asthma.” He stated. He stopped, hesitating to say something.
Oh, I thought. I’ve heard of asthma before. It means that you have breathing troubles. What else was there?

“Okay, take a deep breath and listen to what I say carefully. You came in yesterday, hardly breathing. We did emergency tests, and found that you have a disease. I have called your parents, and informed them about your condition. Your parents know your disease, and they have told me to tell you that you have a severe form of asthma. I think you know, but they are in Alaska right now, and they cannot come back until June. I cannot lie about this for long. I cannot wait until they come here. I must tell you the truth. We have to start the medical treatments immediately. What you have is not asthma. You have lung cancer.”

My heartbeat almost stopped. This was too much for an innocent 16 year old. What did he just say? Did he say that I was going to die? That my parents were not going to come home, knowing that their daughter has cancer? What was I to them? Did I really have cancer? I was running like a normal girl until yesterday. I answered in a quivering voice, “You’re not joking…?”

“No, I am not.”

He went on blabbing on about things I couldn’t really catch. I was in my own world. All I wanted was for my parents to come home. Dr. Morgan left, leaving me alone. I began to think about my life. What would happen to me? I thought seriously. What was God doing to me? My brain was working at full speed. 15 minutes later, I was interrupted by a nurse who brought me my lunch. I wasn’t really hungry, but I was forced to eat. I went to sleep, awfully tired.

I slept through the night, and woke up the next morning. It was early, and the seabirds were not even awake yet. I looked around my room for the first time. The walls were ugly gray, and there was a TV hanging from the ceiling. The TV was attached to the ceiling so securely that you couldn’t even change the angle a bit. Who would try to smuggle a TV? It would be pretty hard to walk out the hospital with a huge TV in your pocket. My neck hurt from the unnatural angle the TV was fixed at. I tried to find other “interesting” things in my room. I didn’t find anything else. All I noticed was the room was completely colorless. My eyes were tired from seeing only black and white. The only colored thing was me. I was wearing a blue gown. It was blue, but you could say it was gray also. It wasn’t a happy color. Also, I noticed that there was the name of the hospital sewed onto the gown. It said, “John Central Emergency Hospital” in big bold letters and in ugly black thread. Who would want to steal a hospital gown? Why would you want a souvenir from the hospital? Nobody wants to remember their sad days, right? It would be pretty crazy to take the gown home to sleep in, unless you are homeless or something. I thought about trying to steal a hospital gown, just to try, but I didn’t want to have to sleep in the uncomfortable cloth. I would much rather prefer the soft silk pajama’s I have at home. Home. All I really wanted to do right now was to go home.
I sighed, not knowing what was going to happen in the future. I was worried. I was lonely.
Dr. Skylar came in, and he got me off of the cords and he took my bandages off. It made me comfortable to see me the way I used to be. It was close, anyway. We talked about what we were going to do to help me. What “he” was going to do, to be exact. I got a pretty good image of what was going to happen during the next few months. We were going to try to make me live until my parents come home.
I went to sleep again, after the short discussion with Dr. Skylar, hearing only the sound of my precious breath, being cut out by the crashing sound of the waves, surrounded by a colorless world. I was going to have to get used to the colorless world, because it was apparently going to be my home for the rest of my life.
But this happening wasn’t going to make my life colorless. I knew that.