I Only Followed Your Advice

Summary

I had always been famous for doing exactly what I was told.

When I was seven, I came down with a fever so hot my skin radiated like an open oven. My grandmother, begrudgingly eyeing the cost of an urgent care co-pay, pressed her dry palm to my forehead and said, "Kids get fevers all the time, Wren. Tough it out. Don't be so dramatic."

So I lay in bed for three days without a peep. I drifted into a severe bout of pneumonia and woke up in the pediatric intensive care unit with tubes running down my throat.