Part 1 — The Life I Thought Was Running Out
For ten years, I lived as though an invisible clock were ticking down somewhere above my head.
I was thirty-eight, sitting in Exam Room 3, watching Dr. Weller study my chart with an expression I couldn’t quite place.
The fluorescent light overhead buzzed without stopping.
I sat on the paper-covered table, wearing one of those absurd gowns that somehow makes every patient feel twelve years old, while my doctor flipped through pages he’d already seen a hundred times.
His hands were trembling.
“Everything all right, Doc?” I asked. “You look more nervous than I do.”
Dr. Weller looked up too fast.
“Just tired, Daniel. Long week.”
I smiled.
“Maybe you need a doctor.”
Normally that would’ve gotten a laugh out of him.
Not that day.
At thirty-eight, I didn’t much resemble someone who’d supposedly been dying for a decade.
I was tall, broad-shouldered, still strong enough that the younger guys at the hardware store occasionally challenged me to lifting contests.
They usually lost.
None of them knew my nightstand was lined with prescription bottles.
Morning pills.
Afternoon pills.
Night pills.
Medication for symptoms.
Medication for the side effects caused by the other medication.
It had been that way since I was twenty-eight.
That’s when a specialty clinic handed me a diagnosis that reshaped the rest of my life.
Dr. Weller had been young then, working under an older specialist.
His mentor delivered the terrible news.
Weller had mostly stood by the wall, listening.
Eventually he became the doctor who handled everything for me.
Prescriptions.
Referrals.
Blood tests.
Follow-ups.
Every question I had about the disease supposedly eating away at me went through him.
I trusted him completely.
Why wouldn’t I?
He knew my history better than anyone alive.
He even called me every year on my birthday.
My older sister Meredith never trusted my ability to take care of myself quite as much as Dr. Weller did.
She called every Sunday.
Nearly every call opened the same way.
“Are you drinking those protein shakes?”
“Meredith, I work in a hardware store with a snack aisle.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“It’s the answer you’re getting.”
She’d sigh dramatically.
Then, usually, ask if I needed groceries.
Meredith had been trying to keep me alive long before I supposedly started dying.
Our mother had never been much good at mothering, so my sister took over the role unofficially when we were kids.
I complained about it endlessly.
I secretly loved her for it.
For years, that was my life.
Work.
Doctor appointments.
Medication.
Sunday phone calls.
And the quiet understanding that I probably didn’t have the future everyone else assumed was theirs.
Then I met Natalie.
And for the first time, I wanted more time than I’d been promised.
