001 Shitty Memory

Aurora’s POV

“Lewy Body Dementia?” I blink at my doctor, so shocked that I almost laughed, “...I mean, what?”

It’s a type of brain disorder that usually occurs at old age. Very, old age.

“It’s a type of brain disorder caused by Lewy bodies--well,” The doctor explains patiently, “You know what Alzheimer is, right? It’s like that--”

“No! They are two VERY different diseases!” I couldn’t keep my voice calm, “I’m a doctor, too! And I know I can’t have LBD because I’m only 29!”

My outburst pauses the whole room.

I try to apologize, but the old doctor is very kind. He waves his hand with an understanding look. Pitiful, almost. That moment I realize, that’s how everyone would look at me from now on, once they know.

He keeps on his lecture about LBD, but I can’t hear him through the buzzing in my head, just like those verbose pathology classes in medical school.

LBD!

It’s a horrifying disease that gulps at your memory and mind, then your movement before basic body functions. It slowly rips open every part of you that’s human, until you are nothing but a body acting on mutilated instincts.

I guess my memory has been bad recently, and that’s part of why I came for this body check, but I thought it was just fatigue. Not illness.

Not this.

“...Mrs. Dunn?”

“Yes, Dr. Cooper?” I answer his tenth call. I blink, furrowing my eyebrows to try hard to focus on his words under the loud buzzing in my head.

“You need to contact your family. Your condition requires attentive care, and I have an obligation to notify your next of kin.”

“Ohh, ughh...” I stutter, “I-I’m an orphan. Sorry.”

He gives me a doubtful stare from the top of his half glasses over my file.

“It says here that you are married,” He puts down that thin paper carrying the traces of my whole, short, yet-to-start life, “What about Mr. Dunn?”

Mr. Dunn. I let out a bitter laugh.

The doctor has no idea how right he was. Mr. Dunn. That’s precisely how I call Damien. Not dear husband, but Mr. Dunn.

He is the man who I pursued for years; the man who I followed to medical school; the man who has been cold to me in these whole three years of our marriage and colder in recent months, who shouted at me just this morning, pushing me to come and check my “shitty memory” today.

I can’t imagine telling him about this.

He might have once felt something for me, if you ask me. But if you ask him? Our whole marriage was a mistake from the start. There was this girl who owns his whole heart, and I made her watch us exchanging our wedding vows on the altar.

I usurped the place he reserved for her, and he hates me to the guts for that.

Maybe I should tell him then. To give him the justified excuse for a divorce that he has been looking for all this time.

“He...he is busy,” I try to escape the doctor’s eagle eyes with a polite smile, “I can handle this.”

“Too busy to take care of his own wife?” The kind old man frowns for the first time since we met.

I don’t know how I got home, shocked numb. In the end, the doctor refused to give me the full report. He did give me the page of his diagnosis, and he told me to “Come back for the rest of them with someone who can take care of you”.

I am not going back for them. There is no point.

I might not know what I got or how I got it, but my M.D. is solid enough to tell me that there is no cure for LBD, not for the stage I’m in. The doctor said that my brain is at least twenty years older than me, leaving me with two years, tops.

Two years of normal life.

Years of orphanage. Years of medical school. Years of chasing after him. All just for an unenthusiastic “I do” on the altar, and then this.

I haven’t even started living, and now I’m going to die. In one of the most horrifying way. Alone.

Thud!

Damien pushes open our door, the metallic sound of his keys hitting the table gives me a start. I blink with a racing heart, realizing I have been sitting in the dark by the huge French window this whole day.

The huge French window in HIS house.

He got the house and everything in it. Well, I meant, he owed them even before he became the successful doctor he is. They are his birthright. That’s why when I, a farm girl, went after him for “love”, everyone laughed at me.

I didn’t see, but now I do -- what a joke I made myself.

I look up at him, and I see our fight this morning – well, his one-sided scolding – still in his eyes. I stare at the eyes that have possessed me for years, and I wait.

Even if he just shows the slightest shred of care, I would throw myself into him, and tell him everything in tears. I’ll lie and say how happy he had made me these years, and I’ll tell him that he can finally have his girl, after my limited little time ran out.

He opens his mouth: “Did you take out the steak?”

What?

He looks at me silently with a dark look, his eyes dimming a grade visibly: “I guess you have forgotten the one thing I told you to do, again?”