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The rain is beating down, lashing angrily against Samira’s window panes on a crisp day in September when the coughing starts.
She tells herself that it might just be that she caught something from someone on The T when she was on her way to work, or maybe she’d been smoking too many cigs lately. It was a bad habit and Heather had been gently urging her to give it up, but more often than not she found herself reaching for them after shift change for some reason.
She knew why, and Heather likely did too—Dr Abbot was that reason.
They’d had fleeting encounters under the context of procedures she had absolutely no business taking the lead on, but Jack would go out of his way to step in, mentor her and bolster her confidence, even going so far once as to create a barrier with his body between Samira and a protesting Dr Walsh. She hadn’t thought much of it at the time because the high of getting it right first time was clouding her system like she was drunk, but it was when it happened enough for it to stop being a coincidence that she really started to take notice of it.
Of him.
Other residents would shoot them knowing looks whenever he stuck his neck out for her sake, the fact of the matter becoming known even though the moments their shifts overlapped enough for it to happen were few and far between.
But the looks started to get under her skin, and she found her mind lingering on him a little longer each time, then eventually she had to come to terms with the fact that she might be developing a crush on an attending on the inverse shift.
Were crushes supposed to feel this painful?
The coughing quickly nosedived, getting far worse than a common cold or flu within a matter of days. Samira is nothing if not circumspect, so once it reached a certain point on shift she’d slipped away into an empty West 14 to do a quick self-exam which came up… totally clear. Nothing. What the hell? The results—or lack thereof—are baffling, but she has patients to get back to tending to, and getting labelled as Slo-Mo again is the last thing she wants right now. So she shoves the thought into the back of her mind, brushing it off as the cigs, and gets back to work.
Shift change comes and goes; where she’d usually at least stop off for a while to chat with Jack on her way out of the ER, the scraping pain in her chest is only getting worse. Much to his dismay, Samira settles for a brief wave and passing farewell before disappearing on her way.
This is how it carries on for a while. A few weeks, maybe? Samira isn’t sure. She’d lost count, but all she knows is that the cough isn’t improving and her chest is aching so damn much it’s making her irritable. Even after asking her colleagues there doesn’t seem to be any real cause they can pinpoint, but when she shows up to every shift with bags under her eyes and a face like rolling thunderclouds before she’d even started working, it’s undeniable that something isn’t right.
Against her better judgement she ends up on the phone to Jack late one night that he isn’t working, and he’s just as kind and patient as always even when he isn’t on the clock as an attending.
“I don’t really know how to describe it,” she sighs in frustration. “I mean, it hurts, obviously, but there’s something different about it. It’s like my lungs are getting… tighter? Smaller. Kind of like a panic attack, but it just keeps getting worse and never stops, no matter what you do.”
Jack lets out an exasperated chuckle at the way she chose to describe it, the sound of which only makes her chest squeeze even more painfully—which then launches her into another fit of coughs, violent and unrelenting.
Except this time, it doesn’t just stop at the coughs.
Jack is left in silence for so long he starts to wonder if the line went dead. “… Samira? You okay? Still there?”
Fuck. A shellshocked Samira sits on the other end, face gaunt and eyes wide as if she’d seen a ghost, when really she’s just staring at a thick white petal, its delicate edges curled into itself as it sits on her floor.
“Jack, you’re—” Cough. “You’re not going to believe this.”
“What? … What is it, Samira? You’re worrying me, and you know I don’t like worrying.”
His concern should put her at ease, but it only makes her chest constrict that bit tighter.
“A… a flower. No, a petal. A petal came out.” She’s struggling to keep her breaths steady, knowing if he keeps worrying it’ll only make things worse. “What the fuck is happening to me? Cigarettes don’t make flowers grow in your lungs, right?”
“… I’d hope not.” Samira can so clearly hear the frown in Jack’s voice. “Didn’t realise you still smoked. Thought you were quitting.” That’s probably what Heather told him, at least.
“Can we just. Maybe, just maybe focus on the matter at hand?” Samira snaps before she can catch herself, and just like she heard that frown a moment before, now she’s picking up on the fact she hurt his feelings a little too well. “Fuck, I— I’m sorry. I need to figure this shit out, deal with it… I’ll call you back.”
“Samira—” Jack is halfway through trying to stop her before the line disconnects, those beeps sounding hollower than ever. He wonders whether he should call her back, but opts for sending her a text instead, reading: You should look into an X-ray. Feel better soon, Samira. I’m sorry.
One glance at the notification is all Samira needs to see before that agonising clenching in her chest takes hold again, letting out a cry of desperation and throwing her phone away to bury her face into her arms as hot tears sting at the corners of her eyes. She’ll go to an emergency specialist tomorrow, she tells herself, but she needs some time to come to terms with whatever the fuck this is first.
The next day Samira ends up in a cold exam room, exhaustion seeping through her usually bright features and hands curled around her own figure in an attempt to retain some semblance of warmth in her scrubs.
Minutes feel like they drag out into hours as she waits for the results of her chest X-ray. Working in an emergency room feels like a blessing and a curse at times, because she knows how long an X-ray typically should take—which means she knows that this X-ray is taking far too long—in other words, when the radiographer finally shuffles back into the room with her diagnostics, she’d long come to terms with the fact that she’d be receiving some terrible news.
Hanahaki disease, they call it. A disease characterised by the growth of flowers inside your body, and hers is an unusual case. She’d collected up the petal she coughed out the night before just in case the doctors needed to examine it, and they swiftly confirmed that the petal belonged to the flower of a monstera plant.
That was… growing in her lungs.
It made sense now, the reason why she was coughing so much. A plant with leaves this large growing in her chest was bound to steal at least a little oxygen away from her, and those huge perforate leaves offered an apt enough explanation of their own as to what was giving her that horrid scraping pain. And not only that, the monstera was influencing her emotions, so much so that her personality careened into a complete 180 in a matter of weeks.
Things didn’t seem like they could possibly get any worse, not really, but that was before the radiographer continued on in his droning tone that the disease is typically brought on by unrequited love.
“What?” Samira questions harshly, brows knitted together and bags beneath her eyes when she stares back at him.
“It’s hard to tell exactly how far along this is, since it’s usually a… much smaller plant than this, but you heard me correctly,” he explains. “The disease hasn’t been extensively studied as of yet, but the primary symptom is what you’ve been experiencing—the coughing, which quickly progresses to coughing up the petals. It will progress, of course, and…”
“Can it be cured? Reversed?”
“Well, the symptoms should resolve if the feelings are reciprocated. But of course, that’s not an outcome anyone can guarantee.” The radiographer continues. “However, it’s important to note that the condition can be fatal… if it goes untreated for too long, it’s quite likely you’ll suffocate.”
Samira’s eye twitches. Right. Okay. So in other words, she’s fucked. Her mind plays back all of the moments she’d spent stealing away Jack’s time for a chat, the occasions where he’d call her after a particularly tough shift to check on her, or share a research journal he thought she’d like. All that time she’d thought maybe things were getting somewhere, but as the days and weeks progressed, so did her disease. Her chest felt rawer, the coughing got worse, the pain would linger far longer before it went away, until it stopped going away—and her attitude had soured so much she’d essentially became a completely different person.
“… I get it.” she mumbles from where she’d leaned over, burying her face into her hands as she tries to grapple with it all.
“There is an experimental treatment… a procedure to surgically remove the plant at the roots and the feelings along with it, but… to be completely honest with you, it’s risky. There’s no guarantee it won’t also risk fatality, especially if the monstera has already done irreversible damage.”
“No.” she tails immediately, shaking her head. “No, no. I’m not doing that. I don’t want to risk that. I think… there might just be some tough decisions I need to make, that’s all.”
The radiographer frowns. “I see. Well… I wish I could offer you more assistance, Ms Mohan, but it truly is unfortunate that you’ve contracted such a rare case.”
Samira offers a diffident smile, doing her best to try and distract from the feeling of her life crumbling apart right underneath her. “Hey, look on the bright side. At least if I die they’ll be able to get some useful research out of me, right?”
Back at her apartment she studies her haggard face in the mirror, shining her phone flashlight down the back of her throat to try and see if she can spot… well, anything. It’s no use, but she can tell she’s sick because she looks like shit.
She glances at her phone when she turns the screen around to face her again and notices a couple of texts and a miscall from Jack. Her chest aches just seeing them. With a sigh she taps through to call Jack and turns on the speakerphone, the answer on how to deal with this hurdle settling in her mind as she scrapes her hair up into a loose, messy bun.
The dial tone is only halfway through its second ring when he picks up. “Samira? Oh, thank god I’m hearing from you. You haven’t messaged once since last night,” he says, sounding relieved.
“Yeah, I know. Sorry. I was, um… I went to get an X-ray, like you said.” she answers meekly.
“Well? How’d it go?”
“I think we should stop seeing each other. Spending time together. Whatever this is. I’ll talk to Robby, make sure our shift changes don’t overlap, and—”
“Samira, what the fuck are you saying? You can’t be serious. You’re serious?”
Samira nervously worries her bottom lip between her teeth, not sure what to say for a moment. It’s hard to keep your thoughts in one place when your lungs feel like they’re about to tear themselves out of her chest. “I’m serious, Jack. I’m sick, and I keep smoking, and I don’t think it’s good for me to spread myself too thin like this, and… it’s definitely not good for you, either.”
Jack doesn’t answer right away, so she continues. “I-I know I’m not doing a very good job of explaining shit right now, but you just have to trust me. If things carry on like this it’s just not going to end well, I know it won’t, and even Heather has told me so.” A white lie, but he’s more likely to believe the reasoning if he thinks it’s from someone else. “I really need to take some time, actually look after myself, finally put myself first for once in my goddamn life, y’know?”
He lets out a heavy breath before he starts to talk. “Listen, Mira,” Mira. He’d never called her Mira before. She has to mute her microphone for a moment to let out a whine of agony at just how much that makes her feel—and it solidifies in her mind that she’s doing the right thing. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, and I wish you’d just tell me… but I understand if it’s something too private. Heather seems to be in the loop and I won’t pry, but I trust her, and more than anything I trust you. This… this hurts, it really does, but… it’s more important to me that you’re doing what’s best for you, even if it means I never get to see that face of yours again.”
Tears are rolling down Samira’s cheeks by now, doing everything in her power to stifle her sobs and not let it slip that it’s breaking her to have to do this—moving on, shutting out the man that could have been her light and not letting him back in for her own sake.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” she finally whispers. “I’ll make sure Heather explains. Fuck, maybe—maybe I’ll be able to explain myself soon. But I just can’t right now. I can’t. I’m sorry.”
Jack opens his mouth, about to remind her that he still thinks she’s the future of medicine no matter what happens, but then the line goes dead. She doesn’t want to hear him say goodbye. She knows she won’t be able to handle it.
Time stretches on, and Jack goes longer and longer without hearing a word of Samira or how she's doing. He doesn't know if he's allowed to check. He’d devoted some time to looking into the symptoms she mentioned, the coughing up petals, and had soon come to the same conclusion himself that the radiologist did.
Samira had caught hanahaki disease, and the only way she felt she could survive it was to cut herself out of his life completely.
It's ironic, really. He’d spend sleepless nights gathering any research he could find on the topic, papers that before he would have paid to access just to let her read for free, but the ones she needed the most would never reach her. He fell harder while she was out there somewhere getting better, two ships passing in the night only to go their separate ways.
Jack would never be satisfied knowing what could have been, and Samira would heal never knowing that it was actually her feelings for him becoming requited that made her better.
She would just keep dancing with her eyes closed, blissfully unaware, believing that she was never supposed to get what she wanted.