Time Is an Enemy

Now comes the hard part. The ticking of a clock in an empty room. The singular glow of each day’s disquieting end. The slow and agonizing passage of time.

The crowds have all gone, and silence settles over the troubled life of Anissa Ayala.

These have been heady days for the girl with leukemia. Her face has graced the pages of newspapers and television screens around the world.

At 17, she has become the symbol of a life worth saving and, by contrast, the insidious nature of a disease worth fighting.

Anissa Ayala is a victim made for the media, a young girl in the prime of life on the tremulous brink of oblivion.

We are transfixed by the unnatural union of youth and death, and watch their slow dance with anguished anticipation.

When will it end? How will it end?

Even more compelling to a story that claws at the heart is the deliberate pregnancy of her mother to conceive a baby that could save Anissa’s life.

A bone marrow transplant with the sibling infant as a donor may be a last hope. A new life to enhance a faltering one.

“A miracle baby,” the father called it.

“A blessing from God,” the mother said.

Then the media went home and the phone stopped ringing. The calamity that had temporarily damped leukemia’s terror itself was damped.

What remains is the hard part. The silence. The waiting. And a whisper at the edge of silence that says Anissa Ayala is a very young girl, and she’s afraid.

Leukemia is a disease one can share only on a peripheral basis. Dying is a walk we take alone.

Anissa knows that. She lies awake at night in an upstairs bedroom, surrounded by shelves of teddy bears, thinking about death.

“I pray for courage to face whatever is ahead,” she told me one day before the media blitz. “If I am meant to die, I’ll die. I’m just sorry it will hurt so many people who care for me. . . .”

We were sitting in the living room of the family home on a hilltop overlooking the suburban community of Walnut.

An afternoon sunlight filtered through vertical blinds, casting the room in gold. A soap opera played silently on a television screen.

I was there not because of Mary Ayala’s “miracle” pregnancy, but because I was touched by the plight of a daughter who needed help.

The mother, seven months pregnant, sat across from me. Anissa, one leg curled up under her, snuggled into the corner of a couch. Their home is a place of warmth and comfort.

My first impression was that this was not the kind of family that courts misfortune.

Anissa was vibrant and animated, even as she took me back to the first signs of leukemia on a spring day two years ago. Bruises and an ache in her side foretold disaster. Blood tests confirmed it.

A week after their daughter’s 16th birthday, Anissa’s parents were told that she had chronic myelogenous leukemia and would die within five years.

“I knew something was wrong,” Anissa said, “but no one would tell me anything until I got mad. When they did tell me, I cried.

“But now. . . . “ She smiled faintly. “. . . now I won’t let myself be sick.”

This isn’t her first ordeal. At 12, she underwent eight hours of surgery to correct a curvature of the spine and spent six months in a back brace. She had to learn to walk all over again.

“This is just something else we’ll have to overcome,” her mother said. “I know in my heart we will.”

But hope is a bubble that can pop in mid-air.

Last October, a donor was found whose bone marrow cells matched Anissa’s. The Ayalas were elated. Two weeks later, they were told the donor had refused to participate.

“He just wasn’t interested,” Mary Ayala said, still stunned by the memory. She glanced at her daughter. “It was like he was killing us.”

There is new hope now that the baby Mrs. Ayala will bear in April will supply the bone marrow to save Anissa’s life. But the baby will have to be at least 6 months old before a transplant can occur.

Time is a factor here. Anissa may not have six months. Her type of leukemia can turn abruptly critical. Death is a shadow away.

“We never wanted all that publicity about the new baby,” Mary Ayala said Friday. “We never wanted anyone to think we don’t need a donor. We live from day to day.”

The search for a donor goes on, with the help of the Covina-based Life-Savers Foundation of America.

“I know I’m not really alone,” Anissa said. “God is with me. But sometimes I can’t help being afraid.”

The clock ticks. Time passes. Anissa waits.