“Hey there, Sarah,” she said softly, pulling my chart from the foot of the bed. “I’m Rachel. I’m going to be your night nurse. How are you holding up?”
“Terrible,” I whispered, my throat raw from hours of silent sobbing.
She pulled up a chair, dragging it close to my bed, and gave me her undivided attention. “Yeah. I heard what happened with your parents. There aren’t really words for how messed up that is.”
Her blunt honesty cracked the dam. I started crying again, my shoulders heaving. Rachel didn’t offer empty platitudes. She didn’t tell me everything happened for a reason, or that my parents were just confused. She just handed me a box of soft tissues and sat with me in the dark, letting me grieve the death of my family.
When the tears finally subsided, she leaned in close. “I’m not going to lie to you, Sarah. The next few years are going to be a nightmare. Cancer treatment is brutal. But you know what? You’re tougher than cancer. You’re tougher than people who don’t deserve you. And you are not doing this alone. I’m going to be here every single step of the way.”
“You don’t even know me,” I sniffled.
“Not yet,” she smiled. “But I have a feeling you’re pretty remarkable.”
That night, Rachel smuggled in a deck of worn playing cards. We played Go Fish until two in the morning. She told me about her life—she was divorced, had always desperately wanted to be a mother but couldn’t conceive, and lived in a tiny house fifteen minutes away with a fat, judgmental cat named Pancake.
“Why nursing?” I asked as she shuffled the cards.
“My little brother had leukemia when I was eighteen,” she said, her eyes softening. “He beat it. But I remember watching him suffer. I remember the nurses who actually made a difference, and the ones who just treated him like a broken machine. I wanted to be the kind who makes a difference.”
“Did your parents abandon him?” The question slipped out, bitter and sharp.
“God, no,” Rachel said fiercely. “My parents went bankrupt paying for things insurance wouldn’t cover, and they never complained for a single second. That’s what parents do, Sarah. Real parents.”
Over the next grueling month of induction chemotherapy, Rachel became my anchor. When the chemicals pumped into my veins made me violently ill, she held back my hair and wiped my face with cool cloths. When my hair started falling out in clumps, leaving me looking like a sickly ghost, she brought in photos of herself during an unfortunate high school phase with a terrible perm, making me laugh until my stomach ached. My biological parents never visited. Not once. My assigned social worker, Margaret, informed me they had signed the final surrender papers. They had legally erased me.
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