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It’s quite a feast compared to lying in C6 with tubes stuck in me.
    Today is Sis’s birthday—she’s twenty-five. A quarter century already. Despite everything, I’ve always known that I love her, but knowing and feeling are two different things. Knowing is two-dimensional. Feeling is tangible. I carry the feeling with me the way I carry mam’s chestnut with me. I enjoy it strongest when she’s caressing my back as I fall asleep, but also when she’s just sitting next to me at the kitchen table, absorbed in her studies.
    We’ve gone through all the sisterhood stages: best friends, best foes, and now back to best friends. She’s always been very caring, the person who silently moves around the house to make sure everybody’s okay. When our mother turns moody, she silently goes and does what needs to be done, while I would be too occupied by being moody that my mam suddenly turned moody. And then, when we were still younger, she would even make me a cup of tea and bring it to me—with all the stairs in the house that’s quite a task—checking to see if I was okay.
    I had forgotten about these cups of tea.
    Dr. L stops by to see how I’m coping with the side effects of the chemotherapy and to check the color of my cheeks. He mumbles something, looks uncomfortable, and gets down to business as soon as he possibly can.
    â€œAre you noticing any tingling in your fingertips and toes?” he asks. “We need to keep a close eye on the side effects of the vincristine because you’re getting plenty of it.”
    I shake my head. No tingling, but I have been feeling stabbing pains everywhere since the chemo started. As if fighting my disease had truly woken it up and sent it raging throughout my body. I start to wonder why we aren’t called “chemo patients” instead of “cancer patients.” It’s hard to feel the difference between the stabs from the chemo and those from the cancer. Sometimes I get an overwhelming premonition that the cancer has spread through my entire body, but one of Dr. L’s assistants has done a good job of convincing me that this is almost impossible—a shame Dr. L himself doesn’t possess that gift.
    â€œYour HB, your red blood cell count, is a little low”—doctor-speak for “You look washed out”—“so at the end of this week I’ll give you a blood transfusion. There is always a small risk attached to transfusions”—a risk of like one in a million, that is—“but I prefer them over EPO.”
    â€œEPO?”
    â€œA hormonal injection to stimulate the production of red blood cells in your bone marrow. It could also stimulate the growth of your tumors.”
    â€œOh. Like Lance?”
    â€œSomething like that. And how are the night sweats?”
    Dr. L sure knows how to keep a conversation going. The tumor sweat has been pouring from my body for the past few weeks and has my parents in its hypnotic grip. On the worst nights my bed is remade three times and my T-shirts changed up to five times. I keep getting weaker and losing more weight. “It’s getting better, but last two nights were pretty wet.”
    â€œThat’s not a good sign.” My mention of “getting better” goes unnoticed. “We’ll keep an eye on it.”
    Nearly two months have gone by, but as far as I’m concerned, Dr. L is still the nasty man who turned my whole life upside down. As if he’s the one to blame for the tumors in my body. He’s the one who gave them a name, after all. His nametag says DR. L , but the nurses call him by his first name. So do I. Calling him “Prick” to his face might not be the best idea. He comes by virtually every day, to see how his cancer-patient vegetable garden is doing. His bedside manner varies between rude, stiff, and socially awkward. Toward his patients, that is: I often hear him laughing and