A Threat of Life: a Personal Narrative

A Threat of Life
In the early morning of a sunny day, when the blue sky of Koubba was covered with a gray cloud of toxic gases rising from surrounding factories, my relative Dolla woke up and as usual headed to the kitchen to have breakfast. Dolla was an aged woman about sixty years old with some health problems. On that dusty morning, she picked up the jar of jam and as she was weltering the jam on a piece of bread, she felt a little dizzy and sick. She felt the ground moving and that she was going to fall down any moment. She headed with her sister Leila toward the car and drove to the hospital in Batroun. I had last seen her a few weeks earlier. She looked exhausted and there was just a sad thing about her face, even when she flashed the biggest smile her eyes still looked sad. She thought that these symptoms can be normally felt by anyone at her age suffering from blood pressure problems and troubles in the respiratory tract.
By the time she checked in, and has taken a series of medical tests, the results came back. The doctor felt uncomfortable after having checked the horrible results, and couldn’t find a way of explaining her case. The bad news knocked her like a thunderstorm! She was shocked and upset. Leukemia began to break through her body.   Her facial expressions reflected misery and despair; she was in a pathetic situation. After she returned home, all she could be able to do is to take her medications, pray and keep her faith high.
After a week had passed, her situation had not improved. On the contrary, it kept going through the worst. I mean one can tell from looking at her. She lost a lot of weight, her skin changed color to yellow, she barely has the urge to talk and walk. Again she directly went to the hospital for another checkup. It seemed like the tumor has spread, infecting her whole body. This was a really unpleasant surprise for this family. Due to her severe case, it was urgent to transfer her to an advanced hospital. She was sent by...