Overview

As Trista lay in the hospital bed, her mind was filled with pain as it had been since she was first diagnosed with bone cancer four short years ago. It was on her fourteenth birthday that she got the awful news. The pain she had then only grew worse over those four years. She had been through so many different treatments, some of which helped in the short run while others only made her feel worse. Each time she thought that she had the cancer on the run it would come back stronger and harder to defeat. But with her mother's help and her families help, she kept on fighting because that was her nature. She always wanted to win every race that she ran and this was no different, it was a race to the finish and she was determined to win like she had almost all of her other races.

However on this dark rainy night, she felt like she was lagging behind all the other runners and she was having a hard time catching up. She was having trouble getting her breath; it was like it was taking everything that she had within her just to draw a breath. As she lay there, her mind went to that place that her mom and she had talked about since she had gotten sick. Her mom would sit with her on those nights that she was in real pain and couldn't sleep and they would talk about how they would go there when she got better. Her mother promised her that they would stay there for as long as she liked. They would even pack up the whole family and move there if that was what she wanted. This always made her feel better in the past and she hoped that it would do so this night. She could feel her will weakening but she just knew that if she could get through the night then she would make it and become better again.

Once she had her mind fixed on that place, she began to feel the pain begin to ebb away. Slowly her breathing became easier and she got to feeling better than she had in such a long time. This wasn't uncommon, when she thought of her special place, but this time the pain was going completely away. There was no pain; Trista then knew that everything was going to be okay. She opened her eyes a crack and through that crack, she saw her mother weeping and she could see that her mother was holding her hand next to her heart yet for some reason she couldn't feel her mother's hand. She looked at her father who was standing next to her mom and he too had tears in his eyes. The only other time that she had seen her father crying was the day that they were told that she had cancer.

She moved her eyes to the foot of her bed and she saw her little brother who wasn't so little anymore as he was a star linebacker for his high school football team. He was holding onto her little sister, the sweetest sister a girl could ever hope to have. Her sister looked so scared and Trista so wanted to comfort her, tell her that it was going to be okay. She was feeling better, she was getting well, the pain was gone. She wanted to tell them all to be happy for her and that there was no need to cry. She was better, the medicine was finally working. She wanted to shout her joy but she couldn't get her mouth to work, all she could do was to give her loving family a faint smile. She heard her mother let out a sob that Trista couldn't understand, and then she closed her eyes...