Rolling the Dice

I have been running from fear since I was fifteen years old.

Five times past Cardinal Road, I looped the roundabout with nothing in my pockets but a frivolous mind bored in with bullets. It was soft inside, red crimson pried open with iron ligaments. I had screamed and prayed for a miracle to fix it somehow. But miracles weren’t guaranteed. The stitches were kicking in, a flashing swing-set, a boy who lived for far too short.

When my mother woke me up the next day, she placed a damp paper on my chest. My clumsy hands crushed it into pieces, furious with what I knew. Then the tears came. I cried for uncountable days. Days where I had taken it for granted. My body was convulsing within and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

I waited in the cold room for fifty minutes and seven seconds. I told myself I’d oscillate between these walls until fate clasped my body in vegetable hands. When they finally came out, I saw numbers and symbols bleeding out in chicken scratch, a river of black and white pulp. When the doctor caught me looking, he tucked his board behind his coat. I simply glanced away with relief—it was a passable number.

I remember coming home one day with my nails etched in dirt and a face bruised to bits. I had played football with some of my friends in the neighborhood. When my mother saw me in the kitchen, a purple-ridden mouth full of leftover tangerine, she put her hand to her mouth and burst into tears. She told me to pray. She told me to pray with every ounce of my being, to pray every time the clock struck twelve, a prayer too forlorn to seal.

I was never one to keep my schedule in check. I relied on fridge magnets and school bus murmurs to keep me accountable. But one day, in the kitchen, I ripped apart the fridge magnet, the souvenir my mother and I picked up in France five years ago, and came across yet another damp paper. More alien numbers and symbols. A signature signed in blue pen. Experi-mental treat-ment. I read it again.

The next month, my mother read to me a story about a praying mantis. The praying mantises mate until the male collapses. The female feeds on him, his heartstrings pulverizing to the rhythm of her bite. I criticized the male for his actions despite knowing the consequences. My mother looked at me solemnly. Only later did I realize what she meant.

It had been eighty-one days and thirty-five hours until I started sleeping in a hospital bed. I spent my mornings being drilled in with liquids and needles and evenings tracing footnotes on the fiberglass ceiling until I saw the young nurse pass by the checkered window. Those nights I wrapped my eyes shut and enveloped a six-sided dice in my cold-sweat palms.

ONE: 20%
TWO: 40%
THREE: 60%
FOUR: 80%
FIVE: 100%
SIX: 0%

If my mother saw my antics she would tell me to stop. But despite the triviality, I pushed further. I tossed the dice, the blood burning against my neck, biting back my voice as I screamed and writhed desperately for a number, a symbol, a sign that would catapult my fate into the hands of a higher being that would dissolve my uncertainty into nothingness.

The next morning, I woke up in a cold sweat. I pried open the ghost-white sheets, searching for the six-sided dice, but was left with nothing. The young nurse burst into the room as I tore at my worn body; punctured with treatment needles, a boy who feared naught yet all at once, a dying wildfire. She held me in her arms and told me they were doing everything they could to stop it from spreading.

The young nurse began coming to my room more often than she did before. She brought me coloring books for children. They weren’t meant for my age group but I filled them in anyway, covering up each crevice with sanguine colors—bright red, yellow, blue, everything of the sort. The young nurse looked at my art and asked me why I covered up the corners. I told her that I couldn’t risk the chances. She smiled at me so softly that I wanted to cry.

That night, I found my six-sided dice. It was lying under my bed and laced with dust. When I picked up the dice, I threw it up again and prayed for the highest odds, the highest chance, the highest number—but when I looked down at my palm, I saw nothing but a boy who had lived for far too long.

—-

It has been nine-hundred-and-one days and eighty-one hours since I stopped running from fear. I still loop the roundabout by Cardinal Street, though now there’s a car key in my pocket and a mind brimming with anatomy acronyms. I still hold my breath when I enter a waiting room and bite my tongue when the needles puncture my arm, but I no longer toss the dice in the air praying for the right moment, the right time to guess.

My medical school professor had once told me, “Medicine is a science of uncertainty and an art of probability. We don’t always have the answers to fulfill our patients’ wishes, but we’ll do our best to try.” If I had gone back in time to my younger self, anxiety-ridden palms cradling the six-sided dice, I would’ve craved the final, solidified answer that would erase my doubts. But now, I understand that medicine isn’t guaranteed–it’s beautifully unpredictable. No one knows what will happen when the clock strikes twelve and when the roundabout collapses, but all I know is that I’ve stopped living for certainty, stopped living for a percentage. And perhaps, just perhaps, I can simply exist, balancing imperfectly between the black and white numbers.