Meghan’s Journey: The Story of Meghan Redenbach: The Teenage Girl Who Showed a Community How to “Man Up” in the Face of Cancer (3 page)

Brother and sister on bikes

At the beach

A Barbie cake for Meghan’s 3rd birthday

Topsail Island, North Carolina

With the bike Dad called “Whoopty”

Helping Dad at the wood splitter

Meg and Dad building a stall for her toy horses

The finished product!

With Nick, Mom, and Chloe

Meghan in her cheerleading uniform at age 11

Making footprints

Part Two: Meghan’s Book

Chapter I

Learning I Have Cancer

“M
om! I can’t do it. It hurts way too much.” I tried to calmly say this as I sat down on the couch. I could feel the pain getting worse. That awful pain in my stomach; it was getting worse. I couldn’t even begin to describe the agony I was in.

“Okay, that’s fine. Where does it hurt?” my mother asked.

Before I could even answer, I ran into the bathroom. I started to throw-up. Just when I thought the pain couldn’t get any worse, it did. The flexing of my stomach muscles and tightening of my whole body made me scream. It was awful. Just imagine twenty knives stabbing your stomach and then someone ripping them through the other side of you from where they entered. I think that may even be underestimating how it felt. Tears started coming down my face. I was breathing heavily, and my head was spinning.

“Call the doctor,” I pleaded.

“I am right now! All I got was the answering service. They said they will have the doctor call me back in fifteen minutes,” my mom said, as she tried to remain calm.

I could see the look on her face; it was pure fear. She looked like she didn’t know what to do. That never happens; she always knows what to do. It was so hard for her to see me curled up on the floor crying and screaming in pain, but all I could think about was that there was going to be at least fifteen minutes more of this agony. Just a single minute felt like a lifetime of pain, so this meant about fifteen lifetimes of pain.

“Great,” I thought, “this is just lovely.”

I heard my mom on the phone with my dad. It was 7:05 in the morning, and I was sure he had just gotten to work.“Mike, you have to come home,” my mom was now shouting into the phone in the next room. “It’s Meghan, I…I don’t know what to do! I think we have to take her to the hospital.” She paused.

The only thing I could hear at that moment was my own screaming; I was so loud that I didn’t even catch the last part of the conversation between my parents. My mom came back in the bathroom. She put a damp wash cloth on my forehead and told me to try to stay calm and breathe normally. Then the phone rang.

“Please be the doctor. Please be the doctor,” I whispered to myself.

I had never seen my mom run to the phone as fast as she did. I could tell by how she was talking that it was the doctor. “Okay…okay. Yes, she is. Okay, thank you doctor.” Her voice was a little shaky.

The next thing I knew she was back in the bathroom standing over me. “The doctor said we need to get you to a hospital as soon as we can. We can’t leave until dad gets here though. I can’t go alone.” She knew I wouldn’t like to hear that, and she pleaded with me to hold on just a little longer so she didn’t have to go alone.

“How long is that going to take?” I choked out. It was hard to talk through my tears and the pain.

“About ten more minutes,” she said. “Just hang in there.”

”Mom, please tell him to hurry up!” I was sobbing now. “Please do something!”

My mom was helpless. There was nothing she could do to take away the pain. I could tell by the look on her face she wanted to just take my agony away and put it upon herself. She started to cry. That’s when I knew I had to keep my mouth shut, rather than screaming and making it worse for her. Finally I heard a car pull in the drive way. I was praying as hard as I could that it was my dad.

“Dad’s here. Come on, try to get up,” she said softly.

“I can’t. It hurts too much!” I started to cry more as I kept pushing myself to get up, but failed.

Thenext thing I heard was my dad running into the house. The door flew open, the alarm on the door went off, and the door slammed.

“Meghan? Nancy? Where are you guys?” he yelled.

I could tell by his voice he was panicking. He came in the bathroom, and my mom and dad helped me off the floor. I tried walking as soon as I got up, but the pain was unbearable. Any sort of pressure was agonizing. My dad picked me up and carried me to the car. He carefully put me down in the backseat. Finally we were on our way to the emergency room.

Then I remembered how far away the hospital was. It was at least a good fifty-minute drive. I know for a fact we were speeding. I didn’t care though; I needed to get to the hospital. Every bump, or pothole, or rockiness in the road shot a sharp pain in my stomach. It was excruciating pain. I couldn’t find a comfortable place to sit as it was, and the drive just made it that much worse.

“We’re almost there Meg; just hold on. We are almost there,” my dad said in a surprisingly soothing voice.

We kept driving and hitting these little bumps here and there, but these little bumps felt like we were driving through craters. I didn’t say anything about the bumps almost the whole ride until he hit a giant one. I screamed again.

“Careful dad! You almost missed one,” I said sarcastically. Normally I would have laughed at my own joke, but not today.

“I’m trying the best I can,” he said quickly.

Finally we pulled into the emergency room entrance at the hospital. I was so relieved. Hospitals are not one of my favorite places to be, but today I was more than overjoyed to be there. We walked into the emergency room. Well my parents did, and I just put most of my weight on them. I sat down in the waiting room and waited, and waited.

Finally they called me in. I thought to myself, “I’m gonna be okay now. The pain is going to go away.” I had no idea what was in store for me. That thought sent a chill through my whole body.

Mom, Dad, and I were now in the exam room. The nurse did nothing but ask questions. I swear there was about a million questions to answer. The nurse’s name was Pam; it said so on her name tag. She was shorter and heavier set, and had real short brunette hair. She was extremely nice.

“How long have you been experiencing this pain?” she asked.

“About three days now. I thought it was the flu, because the whole basketball team has it,” I said.

“Okay, now on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst, what would you rate the pain at?”

“I would say twenty; it’s really bad!” I flinched a little and squeezed my eyes a bit from the pain. She must have noticed, because she looked at me blankly to see if I said anything else.

Then there were a series of other questions. I wanted to just scream, because while they were asking all forty-two thousand questions I was at my breaking point of pain. When the nurse finally got all the answers and information she needed, she left and said a doctor would be right in. Well, I don’t know what their definition of “right in” is, but an hour later is not “right in” in my book.

Finally, when a doctor saw me they said I had to go down and get an x-ray of my abdomen. Thankfully, they brought me a wheelchair. I was a little bit nervous. It was just me and this older nurse. When we got to the room where they take the x-rays the technician had me sign something. I didn’t know what it was, but I figured if the doctor is giving it to me it’s okay to sign it so, I signed it. Then I got up on the x-ray table. It only took about fifteen minutes. The next thing I knew I was on my way back to the exam room. Of course my mom and dad asked a million more questions in about thirty seconds, one after another. I didn’t even get a chance to answer half of them because they were talking so fast.

“How did it go? What did they do? How long were you actually in there? Did they say anything?” Dad just kept rattling off questions.

All I said was “They had me sign something; I’m not sure what it was though.”

They looked at each other and then back at me. I knew what they were thinking. Then they said exactly what I thought they were going to say. “You didn’t ask what it was for. You could have just signed away your bank account, or your left leg!” they said with all seriousness.

“Well I figured it was safe. I mean that doctor or nurse, or whatever he is gave it to me, so I just signed it.”

Now that they mentioned what I could have just signed, I kind of realized I needed to ask questions when I didn’t know what things were or what they meant.

My dad teased me, “Do you ever use your head? You are book-smart but definitely not common-sense smart.”

Nurse Pam came back in to ask my parents a couple other questions. I was still thinking about that paper I signed. Then I had a sharper than normal pain that hit me. I clenched my stomach, but it didn’t help. I tried not to make it noticeable, because my parents were already really tense. I could tell by how they were talking and by their body language.

“Now Meghan mentioned that she signed some paper when she went to get her x-ray?” My mom sort of added a giggle to lighten up the mood, she does that a lot.

“Oh yes, that was the paper saying that she isn’t pregnant.” Pam sounded like we should have known that. “We also have the results of her x-ray; we just need to get some other tests done to get some more answers.” She looked at me and said, “I need you to drink these three glasses of apple juice with dye in it for a CAT scan. The faster you drink it, the faster you get the scan, because we have to wait two hours for it to kick in.”

“I’m sorry, did you just say two hours?” I said it meaner than I meant to, but I couldn’t imagine two more hours of pure pain. “I can’t wait that long for something to be done.”

“I understand you’re in a lot of pain, but there isn’t anything we can do until we get these tests done,” she said quietly.

I got very aggravated very fast.

“Okay, fine.” I blurted out. The nurse left and I looked at the three glasses of apple juice and grimaced. I looked at my parents and said, “This should be tasty.”

“The faster you drink it, the faster you get rid of the pain.” Mom always said that when it came to medicine. Even with cough medicine and pills. I guess she was right, though. She usually is right. Like the time when I had to take my first pill. I had a mouthful of water and a pill, and I wouldn’t swallow. She plugged my nose so I couldn’t breathe and had to swallow. Except I didn’t swallow; I just spit it out everywhere. We laughed so hard we were crying; I was on the floor crying. I won’t ever forget that.

“Man this is nasty. I’m never drinking apple juice ever again.” I slammed the second cup down on the table like a big drinker does with a shot glass after his fifth one.

My dad laughed really hard for about two minutes and finally choked out, “Good job, two down; only one more to go.” He was right; there was a whole other glass to drink. It was a little plastic cup, but it looked like so much after the last two cups.

I looked at the clock; it was 2:30 pm. For almost seven hours we had been at the hospital. All that time gone, but no pain lost. That motivated me to slug down the last cup. I chugged it all in one breath. It was nasty, and I really wanted to throw it up, but then I would have to do it all over again. The nurse came back a little later in to check on us.

“When did you finish the last drink?” she asked.

“About two thirty,” I said quickly. Then I looked at the clock; it was only four o’clock. I would have to wait another half an hour. I couldn’t believe how slow the time was going. It was like every minute was an hour.

“I’m sorry but we have to wait another half hour. I know you’re still in a lot of pain, but we can’t go any faster. Just hang in there, okay?” Her eyes looked like she meant what she said. I knew she was trying her best and trying to move things along, but two hours is two hours.