!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
“Sarah?” Steph’s voice sounded hollow on the phone. I’d come home at three, and lain on the couch for several hours, exhausted by a simple afternoon at the doctor’s. “Can I come over? We need to talk.”
“Why? What about your delivery?” I managed.
“Don’t worry about that, I’m off at five. Someone else’s problem now. Petyr there?”
“Uh, yeah…no, he’ll be here in a little bit, last patient should be done now.” I wondered what she wanted him for, but the buzzing in my ears, the flashes in my eyes, the tingling in my fingers swamped any rational response.
“Good. See you soon.”
She swept in, still in her white coat with that stethoscope dangling around her neck, her face blank, unreadable. She sat down on the edge of the sofa, took my hand, squeezed it, and softly started, “Sarah, the CBC…”
“What?” I mumbled.
“That blood test I wanted you to get, a blood count. They’re still checking it, the pathologist wants to look himself, but…Sarah, I think you might have leukemia.”
My mind went blank, the hum in my ears reverberating in my skull, almost in time with the throb between my eyes. “Wha…how…” was all I could could get out.
“Sarah, I’ve already talked with med onc, and if what I think is there, we’re going to get you to Dana-Farber to start induction therapy this Friday.”
She must have noticed the glazed look in my eyes, reflecting my utter rejection of what she was saying. “I know, I’m sure, this is a shock, and there are ten thousand questions you’ll have. I’ll walk you through it, and make sure Petyr understands, but the one thing – the only thing – I want you to hear is this: you are in the best place in the world to treat this. I’ll walk every step with you, help you understand, fight for everything you need. All you have to do is stay strong, be yourself, don’t despair. We’ll get through this.”
Just then Petyr walked in, shook a bit of rain off his overcoat, and looked with alarm at me on the couch, Stephanie by my side.
“What happened? Is everything all right?” he asked.
Steph patted my hand and stood up, saying, “Petyr. Hi. Let’s pull up those chairs from the dining room, sit here and talk with Sarah, OK?
For the next half hour, she reviewed with Petyr the profound anemia, low platelets, and crazed white cells they’d found on the CBC. Chemotherapy, survival rates. Their talk drifted into that special medical language I only partially understood. Since it didn’t involve Ob, Peds, and high school Latin, at times they could have been speaking Aramaic. Words like thioguanine, cytarabine, adriamycin. Acronyms like DFS, IT. Chance of this, risk of that. I realised I was going to have to trust these two with my life, to know much better than I ever could, what this sudden shock meant, and how it could be thwarted. As they talked, I repeated over and over to myself like a mantra: “Not here, not now. I will live today, and I will see tomorrow.”
From some hidden cove deep inside, I finally gasped, “Will you please stop talking about me?” I looked pleadingly at Petyr. “Someone tell me, what’s going on? What’s going to happen?”
Steph’s eyes welled up as she said, “Petyr, I… can you…?”
His familiar formal tones, at times almost comical, now served to reassure, to guide me towards understanding. My red blood count, the shockingly low at 11 percent, explained my paleness, the profound exhaustion, the strange sensations. “Oxygen, the fundamental source of all our energy, can only travel on those red cells. Without them, it’s as if you are slowly suffocating, slowly starving. The white cells, the ones who’ve turned rogue, where the cancer is, are what keep you free of infection. But that’s not the immediate risk. Their mad drive to reproduce is crowding out the other immature blood cells in your bone marrow, where they all are made. That’s where we have to take the fight.” He leaned down, gently hugged my head, my neck, then went on. “First they will blast your body with powerful poisons – I’m sorry, that’s the only word for it – which breaks the DNA links in dividing cells.”
“In all dividing cells, Sarah,” Steph added.
“Yes, that’s what makes it hard. Once a week, for nine weeks, in a chair, through an IV, you’ll get those drugs, stop those bastards from taking over. It works, it works, it’s going to work.” His confidence was real, I knew. He was not going to lose me, not now, not because of this.
The next morning, Petyr called Wellesley, to cancel my work there through the end of the year. He spent the morning, time he should have spent seeing his own patients, finding emergency replacements for my own small clientele. He was about to call the Institute, to cancel my classes there, when I hoarsely shouted “No!” I was not going to drop out now. “It’s not as if I’m going into the hospital. It’s only one day a week, Thursdays, won’t I be at my best the day before each treatment?”
He knew me well enough not to argue.
Two days later, the cards started coming. From Jeanne, in England. From Howard, inIsrael. From Lizzie, now in Brazil with her husband, an oil engineer. And almost every other person in my date book. While I’d been sleeping away the exhaustion, he had been calling, then writing, seemingly everyone knew for the last fifteen years. The only person I managed on my own was Mother.
“Hi, sweetie!” she brightly answered when I called that first night. “What did the doctor say?”
“Oh, mom!” was all I could come out with. Before I broke down, Petyr reached over, calmly took the phone, and proceeded to describe the diagnosis, the treatment plan, by the end probably convincing her I was well on the way to recovery. He also arranged for her return the next day.
She accompanied me that Friday to my first chemo treatment. In the waiting room, it seemed as if every other person wore a bandana on their head. Young children sat in chairs too large for them, their legs dangling, kicking languidly as they waited to be called. Older women, immobile with dark circles under sunken eyes sat next to sad-looking men with days’ old stubble. The air smelled of disinfectant, stirred by a slowly rotating ceiling fan. A poster of a kitten, eyes wide while she clung to a branch, urged us to “Hang in there!”
We each were called back in turn, some slowly shuffling, others pushed in wheelchairs. I whispered to my mother, “Is it me, or does this place feel sad to you?”
“Honey, you’re not them. You still have so much to do, so much to give, a life to live.” She took my hand, rubbed my arm, and said, “You’ve got to get the first punch in, put this thing on the defensive.”
I looked at the slender bald boy of about 8 across from me. He dropped his chin, and through crinkled eyes, smiled back conspiratorially. I had an inspiration. “Mom, on the way home, there’s something I want to pick up.”
“What do you need, honey?”
“You’re right, I have to get the first blow in, take this on my own terms, not by those damn drugs’ and white cells’ rules.”
Back at home, my vein still burning from the chemo, the nausea building inside like a steam shovel carving out a quarry, I unwrapped the package from Gary Drug, fiercely grabbed a chunk of hair from off my shoulder, and began to shave my head.
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