6
Dany
I’m discharged after three nights in the hospital. My mother holds the wheelchair handles as she confirms the instructions from the nurse.
“Drakes don’t get cancer,” she says for the seventeenth time this morning, and possibly the nine hundredth since the diagnosis. “We just don’t.”
She sends me a look. She made it perfectly clear that cancer is beneath the Drakes.
“I don’t know where Daniella went wrong. Possibly the hamburger phase she had in second grade. I warned her. I told her, Drakes do not eat hamburgers. Or candy bars. There were some candy bars that year too.”
The nurse hums a non-answer. She’s a no-nonsense black woman in blue scrubs. She points back to the printed pages on wound care. There are instructions on how to remove the bandages and care for the drains—thos
