A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You Read Online Free PDF

new ending will either mimic the first or make you long for it.
    Mai prays that Ginger will stay to do the IV stick. She is the only one who can get it right, and when she walks out, without washing her hands, Mai turns her face to the wall. She can feel Ellie rise from the visitor’s chair, ready to run down the hall, and the mental image of her Ellie, brown curls and horn-rims flying behind her as she chases showgirl Ginger, cheers Mai up. She puts her hand on Ellie.
    “It’ll be fine,” she says.
    “It better be. If you get that cow again, she gets two tries and she’s out of here.”
    It is the cow, and she sticks Mai four times, all over her hand. As she tries again, Mai can feel her perspiration, and she looks down to see that tiny hives have broken out along the nurse’s slick hairline. Flop sweat, Mai thinks, and wonders how she knows that phrase. It must be from Ellie’stheater days. Mai closes her eyes tightly, willing the stupid bitch to find a vein.
    The stupid bitch leaves and returns with Ginger, who does it right, slapping and massaging the back of the left hand until a small vein lifts up, offering itself. The anonymous nurse slumps out, gratifyingly ashamed, and Ellie forgives her; at least she cares enough to feel bad. Mai forgets her as soon as the saline starts, the fat little bag hung on the curling candelabrum that holds all the drugs, each pouch attached with nursery-blue clips and clamps, clear tubing leading to the pump. Ellie has memorized everything on the machine, including the fact that it is made by the Baxter Manufacturing Company of Dearborn, Michigan. There’s a column of four black buttons—Back Light, Silence, Time, Stop—and next to them the red digital letters flash on and off. Most of the time they just say Normal. When the nurses have to unplug the machine so Mai can pee, it beeps like crazy.
    “Oh, Jesus, the hot packs,” Mai says. This is the only thing that eases the burning of the Taxol. Once they have been through the saline and the Benadryl and the Zoloft, its time to get down to business, and the business of Taxol is a small well of fire at the point of entry, shooting up Mai’s arm like a gasoline trail. The instant hot packs are godsends, and Ellie collects them, along with lightweight blankets from all the other patient corners, so that when Mai lies down there is a small mountain of plastic on her night-stand and a pile of thermal-weave cotton at the foot of herbed. The hot packs release their heat immediately, after one hard squeeze on their thin plastic edges. It’s exactly like cracking an egg one-handed, which Ellie also likes to do for her own pleasure. Mai smiles like a junkie as soon as she hears the pop of the inner casing, and Ellie tucks three blankets up around her.
    They have made a list of everything that makes Corner C in Room T4 the best bed for chemo. First, the privacy curtain pulls smoothly on its track. It’s terrible to pull on the curtain, making it clear that you do not wish to watch someone else’s unspeakable anguish or let them gaze upon yours, only to find yourself unable to close it fully, leaving both parties stuck with eye contact and insult. Also, all the gloves used in Barcelona seemed to be stored in T4: Chemo Plus, the Rubbermaid of latex gloves, thick-cuffed and a matte pale blue; Sensicor, sheer as muslin, ghost fingers spilling out of a dozen cardboard boxes. Mai and Ellie even like the battered plastic hospital trays filled with three kinds of tape, tongue depressors, and test tubes with lavender, red, blue, and lime green rubber stoppers. The trays are not hospital clean; they could be holding dirty silver in the kitchen of any inner-city diner. There are pastel water-colors of lopsided seaside cottages, saccharine prints produced by Posters International of Toronto. Ellie had a lavender-and-white gingerbread cottage right in front of her the whole summer she had chemo. In Corner A, under three small rowboats permanently