“I feel terrible.”
Laura didn’t tell me to be brave or insist everything happened for a reason. She simply sat beside me.
“I heard what happened today. And I am so sorry.”
I started crying, and Laura stayed.
Later she returned with crackers and a deck of cards, and we played until almost two in the morning. She told me about her overweight cat named Waffles and explained that her younger brother had survived leukemia years earlier, which was one reason she had chosen nursing.
My parents didn’t return the following day. They didn’t come the following week either, and while chemotherapy took my appetite, strength, and eventually my hair, Laura kept appearing with clean blankets, terrible jokes, medication reminders, and the quiet consistency I had stopped expecting from adults.
Twenty-eight days after my diagnosis, Dr. Lawson told me the treatment was working well enough that outpatient care could soon begin. Social worker Susan Myers arrived shortly afterward and explained that they had found a foster placement for me.
Laura happened to be standing beside my bed, even though she wasn’t supposed to be working that day.
“I want to take her.”
