The Two Years They Were Given

Chapter 1: Two Years

The doctors gave him two years.

He accepted the news with the exhausted calm of someone who had already spent too much of his life negotiating with death.

As a child, polio had taken away the simple, thoughtless act of breathing. While other children ran through open fields, climbed trees, and returned home with dirt on their knees, he learned the measurements of a machine. He knew the curved walls above him, the mechanical rise and fall of its pressure, and the narrow view available through a mirror positioned near his face.

The iron lung breathed because his body could not.

For two years, he lived inside it.

Two years of metal surrounding him from the neck down. Two years of hearing life happen beyond the machine: footsteps passing through corridors, doors opening and closing, conversations beginning where he could not follow. Nurses adjusted his blankets and checked the equipment. Visitors stood near his head and tried to smile as though everything were normal.

But nothing about it felt normal.

The machine kept him alive, yet it also made him feel as if his life had been placed on hold.

Eventually, he made a decision that frightened everyone who cared about him.

He would leave the iron lung.