Free Dying to Be Me by Anita Moorjani Page B

could tell something wasn’t right. At that point, he’d barely been going to work, but from the day of that doctor’s visit, he stopped going in altogether. He seemed reluctant to ever leave my side.
    One day, I asked him, “Am I going to die?”
    “We’re all going to die sometime,” he said.
    “I know that, silly,” I countered. “I mean now, because of the cancer. What if I die?”
    “Then I’m going to come and get you, and bring you back,” he responded gently, stroking my head as I lay on the bed.
    This was about six weeks after the last meeting with the doctor. By now, breathing had become a labored task, and an oxygen tank was my permanent companion. I couldn’t lie down, needing to be propped up at all times to keep from drowning in my own fluids. Every time I tried to lie flat, I started choking and had difficulty breathing, so changing my position in bed became an impossible task. My body broke out in lesions all over. So many toxins had invaded my system that my skin was forced to open and release the poisons within.
    Many times I woke up in a heavy sweat, my clothes soaked through—night sweats being a common symptom of lymphoma. Often, my skin itched all over, as though ants were crawling all over me. I recall one night when the itching was so strong that no matter how much I scratched myself, it wouldn’t subside. Danny got ice cubes from the freezer and put them into ziplock bags, and we rubbed these ice packs all over my legs, arms, and body in order to soothe my inflamed skin. It took a long time, but the itchiness finally subsided.
    Most of our nights were sleepless, and by this point I was completely dependent on Danny to care for me. He anticipated my every need before it arose. He dressed my wounds and helped me wash my hair. Although I felt guilty about him having to spend his days caring for me in this way, I knew that he never, ever acted out of obligation, duty, or responsibility. Everything he did sprang from pure love for me.
    My digestive system eventually stopped absorbing nutrients from the food I was eating, so I became malnourished. Danny bought my favorite chocolates, and my mother prepared some of my favorite foods to try to get me to eat, but I had no appetite. I wasn’t absorbing whatever I did manage to choke down, and I watched my muscles disintegrate until I could no longer walk. My mobility then came in the form of a wheelchair. My body started to consume the protein from my own flesh to survive, until I looked like a poster child from a famine-struck nation. I became a skeleton of my old self, and my head felt like a 300-pound barbell that I could barely lift from the pillow.
    I was still going in and out of the hospital, but every time I was there, I always wanted to leave as quickly as possible and be home. I felt those institutions were cold, clinical, and depressing, and they seemed to make me feel even sicker than I already was. So we hired a nurse to stay with me during the day.
    Both my mother and my husband never left my side during those days, and Danny sat up with me through the night. He wanted to make sure that I continued to breathe, and to be there just in case I was taking my last breath. Many nights I wasn’t able to sleep for coughing, so I was always grateful for his comforting presence. But I was also acutely aware of his pain, and that made it so much harder for me to endure my situation. Even through all of this, I continued to put on a brave front, and kept assuring everyone that I wasn’t in pain. I told them that I was feeling fine even though that was so far from the truth!
    At the same time, I was also aware of my mother’s anguish. I knew that no mother should watch her child go before her, let alone witness her child’s slow and painful disintegration.
    O N THE MORNING OF F EBRUARY 1, 2006, I was feeling more positive than usual. I actually started to notice things around me. The sky looked bluer than normal, and the world seemed like a