You Only Live Once

by Jess Vallance

  And then I realised it was coming from me.

  Coming from my bag, anyway. I reached inside and immediately felt how damp everything was. I took out my sample bottle and saw there was a tiny crack in the plastic. The bottle wasn’t full of wee – I’m not a camel, for heaven’s sake – but there was certainly enough in there that if I let it carry on leaking into my bag it was going to seriously ruin the lining. Not to mention the broccoli. And more worrying than that was the loss of the important sample. I was very anxious that nothing should delay my formal diagnosis.

  I didn’t have any choice. I had to hold the bottle in my lap, take off one of my socks and wrap it tightly around the plastic to try to stem the flow seeping out. I couldn’t risk putting it back in my bag, even with the crack sealed, so I just had to sit there with one bare foot, holding a bottle of my own wee wrapped in a sock, like some kind of conceptual art exhibit.

  The woman next to me got up and moved seats. I couldn’t really blame her. I found myself looking forward to getting to the hospital – at least there I knew bodily fluids were better appreciated.

  Planning

  I’ve always been a fan of a plan. The future, after all, wasn’t just going to take care of itself. Without a bit of planning, you were quite likely to rock up in a few years’ time and be rather irritated that past-you hadn’t bothered sorting things out properly.

  My approach had always worked out quite well and had brought with it some not insignificant benefits.

  For example, when we went camping at Clatterbury Ring in Year Nine, I was the only person who thought to carry a miniature fire extinguisher in my rucksack at all times. Gregory Short and a few of the others thought it was completely hilarious when they saw it, and called me Fireman Sam for the whole week, but it turned out not to be so silly when sparks from James Handley’s campfire landed on Lily Colter’s hair extensions and the whole lot went up like a flare. I was able to put my hand on my extinguisher at once and have the whole situation dealt with in a matter of seconds. It would have been a very different story if I hadn’t brought it. It would also have been a very different story if Lily had been wearing her hair extensions at the time, as she spent the rest of the evening tearfully telling us.

  My future focus meant that I’d always got on quite well at school, despite being, as Mr Murray, my Year Seven maths teacher, put it, ‘prone to neuroticism and lapses in logic’. This is because schools, as you might have noticed, are quite futurey places. I don’t mean futuristic – Our Lady of Fatima High School probably hadn’t had so much as a new netball bib since the 1970s – I just mean that the whole set-up is geared around what’s coming up. You’re probably familiar with the kind of thing:

  Do your homework and do well in the lesson next week.

  Do your revision and get a good grade in your exams next summer.

  Do well in your exams and get a good life.

  All that.

  Schools, when you think about it, are just great big future-planning factories, and I had my future plan all worked out.

  I would get good GCSEs – mostly As and 8s or 9s if all went as it should. Then I’d start A levels, and do my best with those too. I probably wouldn’t get As but I’d try really hard for Bs. After this, I would go to university. I wouldn’t get in to Oxford or Cambridge, I’m not unrealistic, but I’d aim as high as I could. Bristol, maybe if I put the work in, or maybe one of the London ones. After that, I would get an entry-level job, probably in London. Or perhaps I’d do an internship or a training scheme. If I had to, I could work in a bar in the evening to earn enough money for rent and everything. I would wear a smart pencil skirt and shoes with a not-too-high heel and people would know they could rely on me to get the job done and they’d call me a rising star of the business world and I’d appear on lists on business blogs called things like ‘Thirty under thirty: ones to watch’. I wasn’t sure what business I would be in exactly but that hardly seemed to matter. I would start drinking coffee out of cardboard cups and walk briskly though busy stations tutting at tourists and I would go for after-work cocktails on a Friday.

  I had it all worked out.

  Don’t get me wrong, my meticulous planning didn’t mean I always had an easy time of things. Years of intense focus meant I only really had one friend to speak of – Matilda ‘Til’ Romero – and even she would tell me I was annoying her at least nine times a day.

  I also didn’t always find the work easy. The last six months of Year Eleven had just about broken me, but as my form tutor Mrs Palmer liked to say, what I lacked in ability I made up for in organisation. Mum was outraged when she heard about that but I took it as the highest compliment. Anyway, I hadn’t minded the extra maths study sessions, the early-morning revision club, spending every weekday night locked in my room with index cards and coloured highlighters and every Saturday afternoon in the library, because I had my eyes on the prize. The prize being a dazzling future of smart shoes and corporate networking.

  But the uncomfortable truth was that, as I wheezed and coughed and dragged my luminous arms and legs through the wheelchair-sunbathers of the hospital car park, I suddenly didn’t know if I had a future at all.

  There I was, forced to confront the possibility that every minute of it – every underlined paragraph in my history text book, every French verb list stuck to the back of the toilet door, every text I’d sent saying I couldn’t do something because I had to revise – could have been for nothing. I’d spent most of the last sixteen years setting myself up for a sparkling, successful life but maybe it was about to turn out that those sixteen years were it.

  They were the life.

  Immoral Support

  ‘Oh god!’ I found myself saying it out loud and making an old woman with one leg jump and nearly topple off her crutches.

  I’d thought I’d had forever. Well, not forever and ever, obviously, but more time than I could imagine. I’d honestly believed if there was somewhere I wanted to see, I could see it. If there was something I wanted to learn, I had all the time in the world. There were billions of people out there and I assumed that by the time I was done on this planet, I would’ve met a good chunk of them. I’d always thought there was plenty of time for all of it.

  But I’d been wrong.

  I stopped outside the hospital entrance and leant against the wall. The summer sun was warm on my face but I was cold inside. Would this be my last summer, I wondered.

  I suddenly needed someone to talk to. I’d wanted to be fearless and independent but I just wasn’t sure I was up to the role.

  I took out my phone and dialled Til’s number.

  ‘Yeah?’

  That was how Til always answered the phone. I don’t think I’d ever actually heard her use the word ‘hello’.

  ‘Til, it’s bad news.’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It’s rubbish, ain’t it.’

  That threw me. How could she already know? ‘But I haven’t told you what it is yet.’

  ‘Yeah, but you said it was bad so I was trying to be sympathetic. You’re always telling me I’m not sensitive enough. I’m trying my best.’

  ‘Right, yeah. But, Til, listen. I might be dying.’

  ‘How’s that, then?’

  ‘I have a disease. It’s tropical. I’ve turned yellow. I’m at the hospital.’

  ‘Are you wearing one of those paper dresses that shows your bum?’

  ‘What? No. I haven’t gone in yet. I’m going to have some tests. And then they might tell me I’m dying. I wanted you to know. As my best friend.’

  ‘As your only friend.’

  Why had I thought phoning Til was a good idea?

  Til and I had been best friends – of sorts – since Year Eight. We’d been sat on neighbouring desks in science and as we both found the subject at once mind-numbing and incomprehensible, we spent most of each lesson having whispered conversations and sharing bags of Maltesers from the vending machine while Til sketched cartoons of our classmates and teachers on the
inside of her folder.

  I thought she’d hated me at first but after a year or so of her withering looks and weary sighs I realised that was just how she was.

  ‘I don’t hate anyone,’ she told me once. ‘I mean, they annoy me, sure. You annoy me, defo. But hate? It’s just too much effort for someone like me.’

  ‘What do you mean, someone like you?’

  ‘I’m apathetic,’ she said.

  ‘A pathetic what?’

  ‘No, apathetic. Chronically unenthusiastic. It means I just don’t care, basically.’

  Til might not have cared about me, but she did at least hang around with me every lunchtime and most weekends when I wasn’t studying so she at least found me bearable. And I could be quite annoying so I was happy to settle for that for now.

  ‘You’re not actually dying, right?’ To be honest, I thought Til sounded more irritated than concerned, but maybe I was doing her a disservice.

  ‘I’m holding a bottle of wee and it’s leaked on me.’

  She laughed. ‘Rank.’

  ‘I’m going in now. I’ll phone you after.’

  ‘Cool, sure thing.’ She hung up. I’d never heard Til say goodbye either.

  Diagnosis

  I went through the big glass doors and headed over to reception. On the bus on the way there, I had reasoned that as my main symptoms – my disintegrating face and my radioactive arms – were clearly on show, the receptionist would be quite likely to realise the urgency of the situation at once and fast-track me to some kind of tropical disease isolation chamber.

  Once again though, I was let down.

  ‘How can I help you?’ the man on reception said with a smile.

  I thought it was perfectly obvious that my body was seizing up before his very eyes, but I supposed he’d been trained that it wasn’t polite to comment on people’s afflictions, no matter how disturbing the scene.

  ‘I’m seriously ill,’ I told him.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, as if he was a waiter and I’d complained about a hair in my soufflé. ‘What are the symptoms?’

  I resisted the temptation to say, ‘Are you blind?’ and kept my voice calm and composed as I listed everything clearly.

  ‘My airways are mutilated, which is giving me a painful throat and persistent cough. My skin is ulcerated – as you can see – and my limbs are jaundiced – as you can also see.’ I indicated both ulcerations and jaundice in the manner of an air stewardess pointing out emergency exits. ‘I suspect the disease is tropical in origin.’

  The receptionist frowned slightly. ‘Have you travelled recently?’

  ‘Yes.’ I told him. ‘Only two days ago I was in Alicante, Spain.’ Then I added, ‘Southern Europe,’ just to help him make the connection with the sand-flies, et cetera.

  ‘Yep,’ he said. ‘I know where Alicante is.’ He was being breezy, that’s what it was. Pleasant and smiley and breezy. I thought it was most inappropriate.

  And then I was completely taken aback when, instead of paging the tropical specialist at once, he handed me a form and a pen and said, ‘You’ll need to register, then I’ll get someone to assess you.’

  The form was completely mundane with all sorts of irrelevant, trivial questions that really did not seem like a good use of my remaining hours on this planet.

  What’s my name, what’s my address, do I smoke, how many units of alcohol do I drink a week – all this. I was there about a serious medical matter, not to sign up for internet dating, for goodness’ sake. Yet another sign the NHS was falling apart, I thought to myself.

  Once I’d filled in the form, the receptionist told me to take a seat as there would be a short wait. To my mind, a short wait is what you have while the kettle boils or while an unwanted visitor gives up waiting for you to come to the front door and you can stop hiding behind the sofa. A short wait is minutes, not hours. And definitely not three hours and forty-seven minutes, which is the exact amount of time I spent sitting in a blue plastic chair trying not to pick my ulcerated face and clasping a sock that smelt of wee.

  Anyway, I shan’t go into the details of all the times I asked the receptionist how much longer it would be, only for him to say (i.e. lie) ‘not long now’, or the number of times I had to glare at the small child who kept rudely staring at my afflictions while I was minding my own business nibbling on my raw broccoli. What matters is that eventually, a nurse who introduced herself as Claudette, took me behind a curtain, sat me on a wheelie bed and told me she was going to do something called triage on me.

  ‘Is that like mouth-to-mouth resuscitation?’ I asked. I didn’t really fancy the idea of getting so intimate with Claudette so soon after we’d met but part of me was pleased that some drastic action was finally being taken.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she laughed. ‘It’s basically medical speak for “find out what’s going on’’.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you, if you like,’ I said. ‘I mean, if it would speed things up. They do say that patients know their own bodies best, after all.’

  ‘OK, sure,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you’re worried about.’

  I don’t know if it was the way she sat back in her chair looking all peaceful and ready to listen or if it was just the stress of the day finally getting on top of me but I suddenly came over like I was in therapy. I lay down on the wheelie bed like it was a psychiatrist’s couch and told her all about our family trip to Spain and the bins and the flies and my ulcerated face, my mutilated airways and my jaundiced skin that was undoubtedly a sign of my malfunctioning liver. Although I knew it was going slightly beyond her remit as a doctor of the body (and not of the mind) I told her what horrendous bad luck it was that I should be dying after my exams and not before.

  ‘The most infuriating part of it is that I don’t think I can even say for certain that I enjoyed the holiday! It’s very hard to just relax on demand, isn’t it? I’m sure you find the same, being an incredibly busy medical professional and everything. People like us can’t just flick a switch! I was lying on the lounger and looking at the sparkly sea and saying, “Aaaaah” and “Oh yes, this is the life” and doing all the things you’re supposed to do to relax but I just couldn’t get into it properly. I kept thinking of what I was going to do next or what I was going to do when I got home or trying to work out what I was going to say when the man with the gold teeth from up the beach tried to sell me a pair of fake Ray-Bans. In fact, I spent quite a lot of time trying to take the perfect photo of myself relaxing on the lounger so I could put it on Instagram and Snapchat to show everyone at home just how comprehensively I was relaxing, but by the time you’ve factored in showing them that you’re wearing a bikini but not showing them all your half-naked flesh, and demonstrating that the weather is glorious and tropical but without looking like a pink, sweaty mess, you can spend half a day just getting that one shot! Anyway, I digress. My point is that, relaxing or not, I went on the holiday and that’s how I’ve contracted this disease. I can’t exactly pronounce the name of it but it begins with L and has lots of Ss in it. Probably if you just put sand-flies and mutilated airways and death into Google it will come right up.’

  ‘Leishmaniasis,’ Claudette said suddenly.

  ‘Leash your what?’

  ‘Leishmaniasis,’ she said. ‘What you’re describing. You don’t have it.’

  ‘What? I – what? I do.’ This was all moving too quickly for me. I had put a lot of time into researching my condition and I wasn’t sure it was really this ‘Claudette’ character’s place to be making sweeping statements like ‘You don’t have it’. Not without some careful examination, anyway.

  She was shaking her head. ‘Nope. You definitely don’t. I’ve seen it a couple of times and that irritation on your face is not it.’

  Suddenly I remembered the sample I was clutching. I felt she should at least test that.

  ‘I brought urine,’ I said, and thrust the bottle towards her, sodden sock and all.

  ‘Goodness. How organised.�
� Claudette’s nose crinkled very slightly as she took it from me and placed it on the desk in front her. Frankly I expected a higher tolerance from a nurse. Surely one of the reasons a person gets into medicine in the first place is because they have an insatiable curiosity about unsavoury substances.

  ‘You should test it,’ I prompted, although to be honest I thought that should be perfectly obvious.

  ‘I don’t need to,’ she said. She was still wearing that smile. Someone should tell her that smiling isn’t always polite, I thought. Maybe it was her idea of a good bedside manner but sometimes a bit of gravity is called for.

  Then she took a little torch out of her pocket and said, ‘I’d just like to take a look at your throat, if you can open wide for me.’

  Sure, I thought, as she went in. I hope you’re prepared to see some serious mutilation.

  She had a little poke about with her torch and a metal stick thing and then she sat back in her chair.

  ‘OK,’ she said, typing a few things into her computer. ‘I’d say there are a few things going on here.’

  Oh god, I thought. A few things. More than one tropical disease? Surely not.

  ‘You’ve got a little bit of inflammation in your throat. No more than a cold, I shouldn’t think. Drink lots of fluid and take paracetamol. The blistered area on your face is the herpes simplex virus. A cold sore, in other words.’

  ‘Herpes!’

  If anything this was worse than a tropical disease.

  I had a sex disease!

  On my face!

  People would think I had been … I don’t know. Rubbing my face in sex.

  ‘Herpes simplex,’ she said again. ‘A cold sore. It’s quite common. It’ll clear up on its own soon enough, or you can get some cream from the chemist.’

  ‘But, I haven’t been …’ I wasn’t sure how to put this. ‘Herpes is from sex and –’

  Claudette laughed. ‘This is HSV-1. It’s different from genital herpes.’