“My… n… no... te… book… see.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
So Many Regrets
Theo
Four and a half hours.
That’s how long it’d been since the ambulance brought her to Mercy Hospital. One moment we had been fighting, the next she was in my arms, convulsing. I should have never left that room. I should have—
There were a thousand things I wished I had done differently that night. They had pumped her stomach when she first came in and now they wanted to run some initial test. I honestly wasn’t sure what they were saying. I just nodded to the nurses and waited…and waited. It felt like all I was good for was waiting at this point.
“Mr. Darcy?” I stood up when a young black female doctor no more than five feet tall approached.
“Yes, that’s me.”
“I’m Dr. Knight. You came in with Ms. Ford? Are you partners?”
“Yes. Is she all right?”
“We put her to sleep.”
I exhaled a breath I hadn’t realized I was holding, falling back in the chair. Thank god.
“We noticed on her chart that she’s listed as being schizophrenic. Do you know when she was diagnosed?”
“She was sixteen, I believe.”
The woman frowned, taking a seat in front of me.
“Is something wrong?”
“When did she start taking the Clozaril?”
I shrugged. “Three weeks. She started again when she went to Crossroads.”
“Did she have nausea before that or headaches maybe?”
“I don’t know about the nausea, but she complains about headaches. I’m sorry, what are you getting at here?”
“Mr. Darcy,” she sighed. “Felicity doesn’t have schizophrenia. I’m afraid she’s been misdiagnosed.”
“What?” I gaped. “Maybe you’re mistaken. Three weeks ago, she thought she had spent six years living with two roommates that don’t exist. Now you’re telling me she’s fine.”
“She’s not fine. She has a brain tumor. We believe we can operate, and my guess is she’s been living with this since she was sixteen. The Clozaril wasn’t helping but actually further disturbing the chemical imbalance in her head.”
Confusion and anger. That’s all I felt.
“Let me get this straight. No one realized this? How is that possible? She’s been suffering for years from a tumor that could have been taken out?”
“I understand you’re frustrated—”
“I’m not frustrated. I’m pissed off! How did this happen!”
She shook her head, clasping her hands together. “Her medical history states her mother was schizophrenic. We called in any of her labs, but I can only presume her tumor was nowhere as big then as it is now. She didn’t have a doctor to go see. It was a series of unfortunate events that led to the wrong dots being connected. Like I said, we can start treatment, but since she tried to commit suicide, we needed to talk to family first.”
“Have you told her?”
“Yes, her heart rate spiked, and she couldn’t calm down, which is why we put her to sleep.”
I nodded, trying not to imagine how she’d felt at that moment.
“I’ll wait until she wakes up and talk to her.” I put a hand over my mouth, closing my eyes. I could still see her screaming in my room, saying over and over how Crossroads wasn’t the place for her. She was right and I, like everyone else, hadn’t listened to her.
“If she hadn’t tried to kill herself….” I trailed off, not wanting to say it.
“If she hadn’t tried to kill herself, she wouldn’t have had the seizures which made us do the MRI, and yes, she still might have been labeled a schizophrenic,” she finished for me.
“This whole time she’s been crying out for help, and because no one bothered to be around her long enough, she suffered in every way. Her mother died, her father left her to fend for herself, her doctors couldn’t even get her sickness right, and on top of that, she was humiliated time and time again by people who thought that because she had a mental illness, she was somehow less than a person. She’s been alone….”
“She had you.” Dr. Knight smiled sadly. “She isn’t alone because you stayed, because you cared. You were the first person she asked for when she woke up. That isn’t nothing. Yes, the fact that this happened to her is horrible. But things can only improve from here, right?”
Part of me wanted to tell her to take her positivity and shove it, but I clung to the hope in her words anyway. What else could I really do? Before she could say anything else, her beeper went off.