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We've been best friends since meeting in high school our sophomore year when she transferred to my private school (where I was courtesy of a grandfather's trust fund).
I spent weekends at her house during high school to escape my own not-so-idyllic family life (my stepdad was an alcoholic at the time, verbally and physically abusive, and I was an only child), and her family always treated me like I was one of their own.
She was there for me when my stepbrother was killed in a car accident in '88, and I was with her constantly after her father's sudden death in '93. No matter what, she's always been there. When I got pregnant unexpectedly and my fiance threw me out of the house and I had nowhere else to go but home, she was there throughout the whole remaining very lonely six months and after my son was born, unlike other "friends." Our friendship has even survived her attempts to get me to vote for Bush in '92 and Dole in '96 (she has since, thankfully, come around to see the error of her ways and is ABB).
I was a bridesmaid in her wedding in '94 and one of the first people she turned to in '97 when her marriage fell apart and she moved back in with her mother. I was also one of the few she trusted enough to confide in when she was first diagnosed with lymphoma, the same disease her father succumbed to, later that year and was there during her subsequent four-year battle with the beast, including her near-death in the summer of '01, when the strongest chemo wasn't working and we honest to God thought it was the end.
Watching her in the hospital bed, white as a ghost, weak and frail, no hair at all, had to be one of the worst experiences of my life. But she had an experimental treatment, rallied, and is now about to complete her Master of Library Science degree (of course, there's a measure of jealousy on my part when it comes to that, she's single and childless and her mother has tons of money so she could attend graduate school full-time and be done in less than two years, whereas I, as a single mother without many resources, am desperate to attend graduate or law school, but I have no such luxury). She's really the closest friend I have and have ever had. I can't imagine life without her in it.
So she just calls me today in the middle of studying, and casually drops the bomb on me that she was just hospitalized for a week due to her platelet count being far too low, and now there are some other "suspicious" test results. That's all she would say, "suspicious." But, having been through this with her for the past seven years, I know exactly what that can possibly mean. I was casual back, knowing that's the way she wants it, but inside was a different story.
It makes me sick just thinking that the beast may be coming back, what if she can't fight it off this time like she did before? She wasn't even supposed to have survived the last bout. And why in the fuck do things like this always have to happen? She doesn't deserve this!!!!!!!!!:cry:
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