Gary had seen David’s last call come in, but for the first time he hadn’t picked up.
Because for the first time, he hadn’t known what he would say.
Sarah had collapsed the day before, keeling over in the laundry room, and now she was back in intensive care. Dr. Ross had been called, a whole host of new tests had been done, her condition had eventually been stabilized; but Gary had the impression that they had turned a terrible, and possibly final, corner. Until he was sure it was true, he didn’t want to burden David with that news (even though David had always insisted on being told the truth, whatever it was).
Dr. Ross came into the waiting area, with a sheaf of papers and lab reports stuffed in a folder, and hard as Gary searched his face for any glimmer of hope, he saw none.
The doctor sat beside him, and for several telltale seconds, continued to burrow into the paperwork … as if even he was trying to postpone the inevitable.
“How’s she doing?” Gary asked. “Can I go in and see her now?”
“I would wait a bit,” Dr. Ross replied. “The nurse is still with her.”
Gary nodded, watching the TV mounted from a ceiling bracket. In barely audible tones, a weatherman was announcing yet another storm on its way. Little white icicles on the map pointed down at Chicago like daggers.
“I wish I had better news for you,” the doctor finally said.
It didn’t matter that Gary had seen it coming; he still felt like he’d been punched in the gut.
“The new regimen isn’t working. In fact, it’s made the situation worse.”
“But I thought she was rallying.”
The doctor shrugged, and said, “That can happen, initially. But then the systems can’t sustain it—her blood counts have been so bad for so long, her lymph nodes are all gone or lethally compromised—and one thing after another starts crashing. It becomes a cascade, and even when we’re able to stop one organ failure, it’s usually at the expense of another. At this point, the cancer has simply spread too far, too wide, and too deeply. The disease, I’m afraid, is in control, and all we can do is try our best to ameliorate its more painful effects.”
Gary took some time to digest what the doctor had just said. In the background, he could hear someone on the TV offering advice about avoiding heart attacks while shoveling snow.
“At this point in time,” the doctor said—and Gary, his mind battening on anything but what was about to come, thought, Can time have a point?—“it would probably be best to think about moving her to our Hospice and Palliative Care Center. We could make her a lot more comfortable there, for as long as necessary.”
Gary certainly knew what this meant; it meant Sarah had reached the end of the line. But he still found it nearly impossible to make his mind go there. “I can’t just take her home?”
Lowering his head and pursing his lips, the doctor said, “I wouldn’t recommend it. It’s going to be very hard at this stage, and right now, the hospice unit has room available. It’s very tranquil, very quiet, and I can arrange to have her transferred there in a couple of hours.”
“Does Sarah know about this?”
“She does. She’s the one who first brought it up. No one ever wants to be in the ICU five minutes more than they have to, and I don’t blame them.”
Neither did Gary. It depressed the hell out of him just to visit there, and when he had brought Emme the day before, the old lady in the next cubicle had suddenly expired, and much as he had tried to disguise what was going on from his daughter, Emme knew. Gary and his mom, who had flown up from Florida the day before, had ushered her out into the waiting area, but Emme had broken down in terrified sobs. All that night, Gary had slept in the bed with his daughter cradled in his arms, and Gary’s mom was back at the house right now, just trying to hold things together.
“Why don’t you go on in now and talk it over with your wife? The nurse has given her a mild sedative, but she should still be fairly lucid. Decide what you’d like to do.”
What he’d like to do? What he’d like to do was yank Sarah out of that damn bed and run for their lives.
“I know this is hard,” Dr. Ross was saying, “the hardest thing you’ll ever have to do in your life. But it’s the right thing, for you, for your wife, and for your daughter. At least Emme can see her mother there in a much less frightening, and less clinical, setting. We have found it’s a lot less traumatic this way.”