It was raining when I woke up the next morning. I could hear it pattering lightly against my bedroom window as I drifted awake, the sound blending with those of the house waking up – the shower in the bathroom a few rooms away starting, distant conversation, and what sounded like the radio drifting up from downstairs. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and glanced over at my alarm clock, letting out a tired groan when I saw what time it was. The bright white digits of the clock’s display gave the time as 6:12.

“I was just about to come and wake you up,” Mum said as I wandered into the kitchen about fifteen minutes later, phone in one hand and the zipped case that held all of my medication under that same arm. “Did you sleep okay?”

I had to think about my answer for a little while. “Not really,” I replied as I sat down at the dining table, wincing slightly as my joints complained. “I was awake until about two o’clock thinking about my appointment this morning. I just…” I trailed off before shaking my head. “Forget it. I’m probably worrying about nothing.”

“Sweetheart…” The kitchen tap started running, and about half a minute later Mum put a glass of water down on the table in front of me. “Of course you’re not worrying about nothing. What you’re going through is a pretty big deal. In fact I’d be worried if you weren’t.” She sat down in the chair next to mine and tucked some of my hair behind my ear. “Come on, tell your old mum what’s on your mind.”

“You’re not old.”

Mum chuckled softly. “Flatterer.”

I gave her a small smile. “I try.” The smile disappeared with my next words. “What if the doctor I have to see this morning tells me there’s nothing they can do, and that I’ve only got a couple of months left?”

Mum’s immediate response wasn’t verbal. She shifted her chair closer to mine and slipped an arm around me, and I immediately leaned closer to her, putting my head down on her shoulder and closing my eyes. I could feel her stroking my shoulder with her thumb through the thin fabric of my shirt.

“I very much doubt that’s what will happen,” she said quietly. “But if it does, then we will make the best of things. You won’t have to go through it alone.”

“I’m so scared, Mum,” I whispered.

“I know, love. I am too.”

Things shifted into slightly higher gear after that. I had so many things that needed to be done before I could even think about leaving for my appointment, and first among those was taking the tablets that made up my morning doses of medication. I unzipped my medication case and took out the necessary bottles and packets, lining each tablet up on the table in front of me – my allergy medication, the beta blocker that was supposed to prevent my migraines, the antidepressant that I’d been taking for nearly a decade, and my ADHD medication. Orange, green, white and yellow. If there was one thing I was particularly not looking forward to once I started chemotherapy, it was adding even more medication to what I already took every day.

“Okay, I have to ask,” I heard Zoë saying from behind me, and I looked back over my shoulder midway through taking my medication. She was leaning against the kitchen island, a bowl of cornflakes clasped in both of her hands. “It’s summer, so why the hell are you wearing long sleeves and pants?”

Part of me wanted to tell my sister the truth, even though I didn’t know everything about what I was facing just yet, but I held back. Rather than come up with a lie on the spot, I held up my left index finger while I finished taking my tablets.

“I’m wearing long sleeves and pants because I’m cold, Zoë,” I replied at last. I was packing my medication away in its case as I spoke. As soon as this was done I ticked each dose off in the medication tracker on my phone and eased myself back to my feet, dizziness sweeping over me as I straightened up. I grabbed onto the edge of the table, closed my eyes and waited for the world to stop spinning.

“Are you okay?” Zoë asked, sounding worried, and I nodded.

“Yeah, I just don’t feel great right now,” I replied without opening my eyes. That at least wasn’t a lie. “Still hungover from that migraine yesterday, probably.”

It took a few minutes for everything to stop spinning around me, and I cautiously worked an eye open to see Zoë looking at me, the same worry I’d heard in her voice clear as day in her eyes. “Zo, I’m okay,” I assured her. “Yesterday was just a really long day, that’s all, and I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night.”

I could tell straight away that she wasn’t quite convinced by this – she was biting her bottom lip in imitation of what I did when I was thinking or worried, and one of her hands had moved to worrying at the hem of her T-shirt. Rather than keep on trying to convince her, I decided to try another tack.

“Look, I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’ve got a doctor’s appointment this morning. If it turns out that I’m not okay after all, you can hit me or something. How’s that sound?”

This got the reaction I was hoping for – Zoë let out a startled-sounding laugh, and I grinned.

The Princes Highway was already a sea of cars when Mum, Dad and I headed out for my appointment, just after half-past seven. Lifehouse was only about thirty kilometres from home, in the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital precinct in Sydney’s Inner West, but driving to that part of the city could take anywhere from thirty minutes to two hours. It was still raining, the windscreen wipers moving rhythmically across the windscreen of Dad’s car and droplets of water racing one another down my car window.

In a desperate attempt to distract myself from what awaited me at the end of the drive, I pulled my phone out and read through the email that had dropped into my inbox the evening before.

Your Medicare card or private health insurance card
A copy of your referral form or letter
Copies of any test results
The pre-admission booklet you were sent via email

By the time my name was called for my appointment, a couple of minutes after ten o’clock, I was a nervous wreck. If it hadn’t been for Dad helping me to my feet and guiding me through the waiting area with a steady arm around my shoulders, I wasn’t sure I could have stayed standing.

“Thanks for coming in today,” a woman I figured was Dr. Peterson said as she closed the door of the office. The small room was like any other doctor’s office I’d ever spent time in – examination table against one wall, desk and chairs against another, a set of bookshelves packed almost to bursting with books, and a fluorescent light strip set into the ceiling that was flickering almost imperceptibly, but enough to make my head start aching. “How are you travelling?”

“Honestly, I’m absolutely terrified,” I admitted once I’d sat down. Mum slid her hand into mine, and I curled my fingers around it. “This is…I can honestly say I never expected it, not in a million years.”

“It’s completely normal to feel that way, Taylor – may I call you that?” I nodded at this. “Leukaemia is a pretty frightening thing to go through at the best of times. I would be concerned if you felt otherwise, to be completely honest.”

She started typing on the keyboard of her computer, the office filled for the moment with the sound of clicking keys. “Now, as I understand it, you saw your GP back in Fremantle just after Christmas after you’d been feeling considerably under the weather for a number of weeks,” she said at last.

“Yeah, my fiancée kind of made me go,” I said with a small, sheepish laugh. “I was tired all the time, I kept getting nosebleeds, and the day before I saw my GP I almost passed out after I’d been for a surf. Had a bunch of blood tests and a bone marrow biopsy done, and, well…” I shrugged a little. “Got diagnosed with anaemia and acute myeloid leukaemia a week and a half ago, and here I am.”

“Well, I for one am very glad that she did,” Mum said. She gave my hand a squeeze that I returned.

“As am I,” Dr. Peterson said. “It means that it’s been caught relatively early. But that being said, however…” She let out a quiet, almost regretful sigh. “This particular form of AML that you’ve been diagnosed with – we call it acute monocytic leukaemia – is not only highly aggressive, but it has a higher tendency to metastasise, or spread, than any other does. I need to you be prepared for that to happen, all right?”

“Where could it spread to?” Dad asked. I swallowed hard at the sound of fear and worry in his voice – fear and worry that I’d caused.

“There are a few places in particular,” Dr. Peterson replied. “It could spread to your skin, your respiratory tract, even your central nervous system or your brain. Central nervous system involvement is fortunately rare, but it can still happen.”

I knew I had to have gone pale at this, even more so than I’d been recently. Having leukaemia was terrifying enough already, but knowing it could get even worse scared the hell out of me.

“I am going to do everything I can to make sure it doesn’t spread,” Dr. Peterson said. I could tell that she was trying to reassure me, but somehow it didn’t feel that way. “But for that to happen, you’re going to need to have some fairly intensive treatment.”

“And by that you mean chemotherapy,” I said quietly, and Dr. Peterson nodded.

“Eventually I would like you to consider having a stem cell transplant, as that would be your best chance at surviving long-term. But for the moment, yes, you will need to have chemotherapy. The usual approach for newly-diagnosed AML is a regimen called ICE, using drugs called idarubicin, cytarabine and etoposide – you would receive one seven-day cycle of induction chemotherapy, potentially two, with each cycle followed by a three week recovery period. This would be followed by two five-day cycles of consolidation chemotherapy once I’ve confirmed that you’re in remission and you’ve recovered from induction, again with three weeks of recovery in between.”

“What about side effects?” Mum asked.

“I’m going to give you some information about this particular regimen,” Dr. Peterson replied, “so don’t feel like you need to remember all of this. All three of the drugs used have nausea, vomiting and low blood counts as possible side effects – the idarubicin and cytarabine will likely cause you to lose your hair and to have headaches, the cytarabine can cause eye pain, light sensitivity and flu-like symptoms, and the etoposide can result in dizziness, fatigue, muscle cramps or spasms, and nosebleeds.” She was quiet for a moment. “Additionally, the etoposide can cause infertility – as with all the others I’ve mentioned it’s not a guaranteed side effect, but it can and does happen.”

“That…that’s a lot,” I commented.

“It absolutely is,” Dr. Peterson agreed. “But you’ll be given additional medications while you’re in hospital and once you go home – I can’t do much about the possibility of losing your hair, but I’ll do what I can to relieve the nausea and vomiting, and to bring your blood counts up once you’ve finished each cycle.”

“What if all of that doesn’t work?” I asked, dreading Dr. Peterson’s answer.

“There are other regimens we can try in that case. But that isn’t something I want you to think about for the moment, okay? We can cross that particular bridge if we come to it. Not when, if.”

“Okay.” I took in a breath, letting it out as a very shaky sigh. “How long do I have?”

When Dr. Peterson didn’t say anything right away, I knew I wasn’t going to like what she had to say.

“Without treatment, or if you decided to discontinue it, you would have no longer than three months,” she said at last, her words making me feel like I’d been punched in the gut. No sooner had I taken this in, though, that she said the words that made my blood run cold.

“Even with treatment, however, on average most people diagnosed with this particular form of leukaemia don’t survive for much longer than twelve to fifteen months. Without a stem cell transplant, you would likely only live for a year and a half at the most.”

I could feel Mum’s hand tighten around mine as Dr. Peterson finished speaking, and one of Dad’s arms sliding around my shoulders. “Are you absolutely sure?” Dad asked, and I sent a silent thank you in his direction. I was pretty sure that if I tried to say anything, just like at the airport yesterday, I was going to break down crying.

“I wish I could say otherwise,” Dr. Peterson said. “But as I said, it is only an average. Taking into account that you’re young” I almost scoffed aloud at this – thirty-four was hardly young “and that your regular GP reports that apart from a couple of chronic conditions you’re very fit and healthy, it’s entirely possible that you could survive much longer than that. It will depend wholly on you, and how well you respond to and handle chemotherapy.”

Dr. Peterson turned back to her computer and started typing again. “Can I assume that you’ll be going ahead with treatment?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I replied. There was no way in hell I was going to let this beat me. Not without one hell of a fight.

“Excellent. I’m very glad to hear that.” More typing. “However, with that being said, we don’t have the facilities for treating AML here. So instead, I’ll be admitting you to RPA – you’ll still come here for your appointments, but your chemotherapy and blood tests will be done there.”

“When do I have to go to hospital?” I asked.

“Friday afternoon. You need to have something called a central line placed, and there are a few tests you’ll need to have done so that I can get a baseline before you begin treatment on Monday. For now, though, I want you to go home and try to get some rest.” The printer on Dr. Peterson’s desk kicked into gear, and she was soon sliding a stapled-together sheaf of paper across to me. “I don’t expect you to go through this straight away,” she said. “Give it a couple of days. It’s information about this particular form of AML, along with what I’ve just told you about your treatment.”

I felt completely numb as Mum, Dad and I left Dr. Peterson’s office after my appointment. It was one thing to be told that I was seriously ill and that I could die – but to be told there was a high probability that I would die was a different matter entirely. For the first time in my life, I was acutely aware of my own mortality.

“I need to call Shanna,” I just barely managed to get out. The absolute last thing I wanted to do was tell Shanna over the phone everything that Dr. Peterson had told my parents and I, because this was something that should have been talked about face-to-face. But I didn’t want to wait until she arrived in Sydney, whenever that ended up being – I couldn’t wait. She needed to know now.

“We’ll be here the whole time,” Dad said, and I nodded.

Rather than sit out in the clinic’s waiting area to make my phone call, one of the receptionists led us to a small waiting room near the stairs, its door marked with the word PRIVATE. “Just close the door behind you when you leave,” she said once the door was unlocked and open, and the light inside had been switched on.

“Thank you,” Mum said. As soon as the door was closed she guided me across to the lounge that sat against one of the walls. I sat down hard once I’d fished my phone from one of my pockets, and stared at its screen for what felt like forever before I unlocked it and found Shanna’s number in my contacts. “Don’t rush it,” she said quietly, and I nodded.

“Here goes nothing,” I said, and took a deep breath before I hit dial.

For the longest time I thought Shanna wasn’t going to pick up, and that I’d have to leave a message with her voicemail. I had just resigned myself to hanging up and trying again later when she answered.

“Hey you,” she said. It was all I could do not to break down the second I heard her voice. “Everything okay?”

“Not really,” I admitted. “I, um…” I scrubbed a hand over my face. “I got some really bad news just now.”

“Shit.” Just as she said this I could hear the engine of her car in the background, and I suddenly found myself wishing I’d waited to call her. “Lemme find somewhere to pull over, okay?”

It wasn’t long until I heard the sound of her car’s indicator, followed by that of the engine idling. “I didn’t want you to find out this way,” I said. “I wanted to wait until you got here. But…” I let out a very shaky sigh. “I didn’t want you to be the last person to find out.”

“Find out what?” she asked, half a second before she answered her own question. “Oh hang on, you had your appointment today didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Just got turned loose a few minutes ago. It…it’s not great, Shan.”

“What did they say?”

“Without treatment, or if I stop it at any time, up to three months.” I pulled the left sleeve of my shirt down over my hand and swiped it over my eyes. “But even with treatment, unless I have a stem cell transplant she’s only giving me between twelve and eighteen months.” As I said this the reality of what Dr. Peterson had told me finally hit, slamming into me like a tonne of bricks, and I dropped my phone as I broke down. Barely seconds later Mum was pulling me close and slipping an arm around me, and I immediately buried my face in her shoulder and allowed the tears to come.

It felt like forever before I managed to finish crying myself out. “I know you’re scared,” Mum said. I didn’t bother responding to this – I didn’t need to. “You’re allowed to be scared. Anyone who says otherwise isn’t worth listening to.” I drew back a little, enough so that I could see the worry in Mum’s eyes. Even despite that, she gave me a smile. “Come on, let’s get you home.”

Dad was sitting on one of the benches that lined the wall next to the lifts when Mum and I emerged from the waiting room, the door snicking shut behind us. His head was bowed, hands clasped in his lap, and I was almost certain I could hear him praying. My phone lay screen down beside him, the design of a bright red, yellow and orange phoenix on its case standing out against the case’s black background.

“Shanna said that she’ll text you later,” Dad said as he rose to his feet. He picked my phone up and handed it over, and I slipped it into one of my pockets. “Are you okay?”

I shook my head, deciding I was better off telling the truth. Now that Dr. Peterson had laid everything about what I was facing out in front of me, I was pretty sure I was never going to be okay again. Thankfully Dad didn’t push the matter any further, instead pulling me close for a brief hug before pressing one of the nearby lift call buttons.

The house was mercifully quiet when we returned home. “I’m gonna go upstairs,” I said quietly as the front door closed. “I…” I closed my eyes and let out a quiet sigh. “I need to think.”

“We’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything,” Mum said.

As soon as I’d closed my bedroom door behind me, I put my phone on silent and dug my journal out of my backpack. The absolute last thing I’d wanted my journal to become was a record of what was swiftly turning into the worst month of my life, potentially the worst year, but at the same time I knew it was the only way I could make sense of what was happening to me. I sat down at my desk, unwrapped the strap from around my journal and let it fall open, and flicked through to a new page.


Just as I finished writing, I heard raised voices downstairs – one of which I could immediately tell belonged to Avery. It didn’t take me long to figure out that she was angry at someone – anger that I quickly figured out was directed at me.

“He made you cry, Mum! How can you let him do that to you?”

“Ave, sweetheart, it wasn’t anything he did-”

“Bullshit. You weren’t upset when you all left this morning.”

“Avery, your brother is sick right now,” I could hear Dad saying. “Your mum’s just worried about him, that’s all.”

“So he’s got the flu or something, big deal.”

“It…” There was quiet for a moment. “It’s not that simple, Ave.”

“And how come you both know what’s going on, but the rest of us don’t? Don’t we deserve to know what’s happening?”

“You’re going to have to talk to Taylor about that,” Mum said.

“I’m pretty sure he thinks I hate him, Mum. He’s not going to tell me shit.” I could very distantly hear the sound of a chair being pushed across the floor as Avery said this. “I’m going upstairs.”

Not even a minute later, there was a tentative-sounding knock at my bedroom door, and I eased myself out of my desk chair. The same dizziness I’d felt that morning threatened to topple me over as I straightened up. I closed my eyes against it and held onto the back of my chair, waiting for it to pass before I moved again.

When I finally managed to get to my bedroom door and open it, it was to find Avery standing in the hallway, hands shoved in her pockets and head bowed.

“I don’t hate you,” she said without looking at me.

“I never thought you hated me, Ave,” I replied, a little taken aback. “But honestly, I wouldn’t blame you if you did. I basically abandoned you.” I raked my hands back through my hair and let out a quiet, shuddery sigh. “I abandoned everyone. You have no idea how much I regret that.”

“At least you’re home now,” she said, finally raising her gaze. The dark brown eyes she’d inherited from Dad hesitantly met my blue. “Can we talk?”

“Yeah, of course.”

Rather than sit back down at my desk, I sat down on my bed and braced my hands against the mattress to keep myself upright. Avery for her part wheeled my desk chair over so that it was adjacent to my knees and sat down, perching on its seat like a bird might. “Dad said you’re sick,” she said, getting straight to the point – something that nearly made me laugh out loud. My sister was twenty-seven now, no longer the almost-teenager she’d been when I’d left, but she’d barely changed. She was still just as straightforward as she’d been all those years ago.

“That’s a serious understatement, Ave,” I said. “I…” My voice faltered, and I scrubbed a hand over my face. “You know what leukaemia is, right?”

“Yeah, but what does that have to-” She suddenly broke off, and I knew she’d realised why I’d asked her that. One of her hands went to her mouth, and her eyes started to fill with tears. “Oh God, Taylor, no…”

“I wish I was kidding,” I said quietly.

“But they can treat it, right? That was why you and Mum and Dad went out this morning – you went and saw a doctor, yeah?”

“A…a haematologist, yeah – I have to have chemotherapy starting on Monday.” I could feel tears pricking at my own eyes, and I pulled my left shirtsleeve down over my hand and swiped at them. “It just…it might not be enough.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m probably going to die from this, Ave.” I dropped my gaze, not wanting Avery to see the tears in my eyes or how scared I was. “If I don’t have a stem cell transplant done, at most I’ve probably got about eighteen months left.”

I didn’t miss the shocked gasp that Avery let out at this. “Y-you’re not dying, Taylor,” she said, her voice shaking. “Y-you can’t…”

“C’mere,” I said softly, not expecting my sister to let me hug her, but she did anyway. I stroked her hair as she cried into my shoulder, much like Mum had done for me the previous morning. “I’m sorry, Ave. I really am.”

“Promise me you’ll fight this,” she said, her voice a little muffled by my shirt.

“With everything that I’ve got,” I promised, and I pressed a kiss to the crown of her head. “I’m not letting it beat me that easily.”

That night, right before I went to bed, I checked my phone to see if Shanna had texted me yet – and sure enough, she had.

Flight booked for the 31st – virgin australia 556 leaving perth 10:25am local time, due into sydney 5:35pm. The next message after the one with her flight details almost seemed like an afterthought. You like your name, right?

I like my middle name a bit more than i do my first name, but yeah, I typed into a new reply. Why?

So you wouldn’t object to a hypothetical kid of ours having your first name, then?

Shan, what are you saying?

Almost as soon as I’d sent that message my phone started ringing, the caller ID reading Shan. I didn’t even hesitate in answering. “Okay Shan, spit it out,” I said. “What exactly are you saying?”

“I’m late,” Shanna replied.

“What?”

“Taylor, I’m late,” she repeated, putting particular emphasis on that last word. “I was supposed to start my period a week and a half ago – I thought I might have been late because I’ve been worried about you being sick and all that, but-” She broke off and took a deep breath. “When you called me this morning, I was on my way to see Dr. Martin. I already took a test at home yesterday and it was positive – Dr. Martin confirmed it.” She let out a slightly hysterical giggle. “I’m pregnant, Tay.”

“Holy shit,” I whispered. “That’s why you wanted to know if I like my name?”

“Yep.” She was quiet for a moment. “Are you okay with this? I know we haven’t really talked about it that much, and with everything you said this morning about how you might not have much time left…” She trailed off, and I almost thought I could hear her start to cry. “We don’t have to do this.”

“Don’t you dare,” I said. “Shan, I want this. Okay?” I scrubbed a hand over my eyes. “I’m going to fight even harder now, because I want to be around to see my kid grow up.”

“You promise you’ll fight?”

I nodded, even though I knew Shanna couldn’t see it. “I promise.”

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