She pulled a chair close to my bed. “Yeah. I heard what happened. There really isn’t a nice way to say this. What they did was awful.”
Her honesty broke something open in me. I started crying again. Megan didn’t give me empty comfort. She didn’t tell me my parents loved me in their own way. She just handed me tissues and sat beside me in the dark while I mourned the family I had lost.
When I finally stopped crying, she leaned closer.
“I won’t lie to you,” she said. “The next few years will be hard. Treatment is brutal. But you are not doing this alone. I will be here. Every step.”
“You don’t even know me,” I whispered.
“Not yet,” she said with a small smile. “But I think you’re pretty remarkable.”
That night, Megan brought in an old deck of cards. We played Go Fish until two in the morning. She told me about her life. She was divorced. She had always wanted to be a mother but could not have children. She lived in a small house fifteen minutes away with a fat cat named Waffles.
“Why did you become a nurse?” I asked.
“My little brother had leukemia when I was eighteen,” she said. “He survived. But I never forgot the nurses who treated him like a person instead of a broken machine. I wanted to be one of the good ones.”
“Did your parents leave him?” I asked bitterly.
Her expression hardened. “No. They went broke helping him and never complained once. That is what real parents do.”
During that first month of chemotherapy, Megan became my anchor. When the medication made me sick, she held my hair back. When my hair began falling out, she made me laugh by showing me photos of her terrible high school perm. My biological parents never visited. Not once.
