Finally

They've given me some pills to help bump up my potassium counts.

I can hear Dr. Doug explaining things to the collection of interns in the hallway outside my door. I'd been pretty upset, earlier, when he first told me that they wouldn't release me from the hospital if my counts remained low. It didn't make any sense. I'd beaten the leukemia, right, beaten it twelve ways from Sunday, and I wasn't going to bleed anymore, and I'd be able to fend off any new infections with my new healthy polys, and all the other white and red blood cells, and... and... and everything.

Didn't they understand that I had a birthday coming up? I mean not just any birthday, but the big two-one, legally an adult now? Doesn't that take precedence over any stupid low stupid potassium stupid counts?

He didn't budge.

"It's all or nothing," he'd said, "you don't leave until all of your counts are back."

Now, outside, he's talking just above a whisper, the quick huddle outside my room before the team comes in to let me know where everything stands. He tells them that I was angry about this as he's ever seen me, so close to the finish line, only to have it move back another hundred yards. Just be prepared he says.

So they bring me these potassium pills. Huge fucking pills that are easily the size of a grape. I'm supposed to take them two or three times a day. The team nods wisely. These will help, they say.

I'm so very glad that I've been able to work on my pill-taking technique over the past month or so, because without all that practice, there's absolutely no way I'd be able to force one of these monsters down my throat. But force them down I do, with a cold shotgun glass of apple juice.

Within a matter of days -- running right up against the deadline Dr. Doug had drawn in the sand -- my potassium counts shit ahead.

I'm golden.

It's April 23rd, 1990, exactly one week before my twenty-first birthday, and I'm finally going home.