RUNNING GAME (A SECOND CHANCE SPORTS ROMANCE) by Nikki Wild Page B

wasn’t like that at all.
    When Maddy had an asthma attack, it happened totally out of the blue. Usually, when we were having fun, enjoying life, and having half-forgotten about her problems…
    I say half-forgotten because completely forgetting just didn’t happen.
    It was always there. Lingering in the back of my mind.
    Tonight, it happened at the movie theater. That was the worst… Maddy always got embarrassed whenever it happened in public.
    She was such a trooper, though. She always was. So much calmer than I ever was. I mean, I tried, I did, but there was something about your own child gasping for breath that shoots right through every layer of toughness you possess.
    Maybe I didn’t look like it. Maybe if you were watching me when it happened, you would only see a mom moving in practiced motions, doing whatever was necessary to help her child. Maybe you’d think I was the smartest person in the room because I knew what to do, what to reach for, what to look for.
    But I wasn’t.
    I was just the most afraid person in the room. And that momentous fear was like an electric jolt that shocked me into action. There were no choices for me. No fight or flight. Just go. Move. Help.
    Save.
    She was everything to me, and it wrecked me every single time. The attacks happened more times than I cared to count. I didn’t even want to know the number anymore. It was in her records. I couldn’t keep up with all the information, and finally, one kind doctor one night who had seen me struggling to remember everything stopped me, reminded me that every detail was written down meticulously, and that remembering wasn’t my job. Maddy needed me to be her mother, not her doctor. So that’s what I did.
    And every time she had a bad asthma attack, off to the doctors we went so they could document the incident and exam her again. We knew the routine. That part we were used to. That part we could handle. It was the part during the actual attack that was unnerving, because we never knew how bad it was going to be, if this was the one that we needed to call an ambulance for, if this was the one that….well. We tried not to go there.
    We never said those words out loud…
    I’d be lying if I didn’t think about it. How awful it would be if it didn’t stop. If whatever medicine she was on didn’t work. If it quit working…
    Catastrophic thinking , my therapist would call it. I did it all the time. I was supposed to redirect my thoughts, remind myself that right now, in this moment, Maddy was okay, I was okay. Most of the time it worked before I let myself get too far down the rabbit hole.
    A lot of the time, it didn’t.
    Most of all, I made sure not to let Maddy see that. I put on my ‘you’re-going-to-be-fine’ mask and suffered through it. Sometimes, I was sure she saw right through me. If she knew where my thoughts led, she was brave enough not to admit it.
    I just hoped she didn’t go to the worst place in her head, too.
    That was my greatest fear, on top of - well, you know. I was afraid that she’d let fear get in the way of living her life. I wanted her to know that her illness didn’t define her. It didn’t have to get in the way of her enjoying the world and doing whatever made her heart happy.
    She wasn’t like the other kids. She wasn’t sporty, she wasn’t strong. Not physically, anyway. She had the will of a bull, and that’s probably the one thing that kept her going, kept her optimistic, and kept her believing in herself. She wasn’t about to give up. She might cough her way through it, but she was determined to do everything the other kids did in school.
    Honestly, I admired her more than anyone I’d ever known.
    She’d had trouble breathing for a while, and the doctors kept insisting it was asthma. First, it was exercise induced, they said. But after she had an attack while sitting next to me on the sofa watching a movie, they changed her diagnosis and said she must be allergic to the strawberries she was