!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
The day after Thanksgiving, Petyr dropped me off for my fourth weekly treatment. For the first time, I met with Dr. Viqueira alone, no mother, friend, or solicitous lover to filter the conversation or deflect my deepest fears.
“You’re doing quite well, Dr. Stein,” he began. “Your hematocrit is returning to normal, your differential, much better balanced, we’re seeing more normal white cells. I just looked at the micro, and I’m seeing far fewer immature forms. How are you feeling? Any new bruising?”
I smiled, straightening the black bandana on my head. “If you mean, am I sleeping less than 12 hours a night, then, yes, I’m feeling better. And no, I’ve stopped seeing those little red spots popping up all over my skin.” He jotted a few notes in my chart, nodding, while I continued. “But I’ve been reading, in the library, trying to make sense of the future…”
“Dr. Stein, I appreciate your desire to know what will, what’s going to happen. I’ve learned though, that statistics are meaningless, when it comes to the individual.”
“Meaningless? When it says, ‘less than 25% four-year survival rate’, that sounds pretty real to me.”
“Right. I could spout off all the numbers…”
Before he could start, I ticked them off myself. “Median survival, 22 months. Median disease-free interval after initial therapy, 40 weeks. And the numbers are even scarier, should I need another course of treatment.”
“But surely you know, from your own experience conducting research, for any individual, there are only two possibilities: either a 0%, or 100%, chance of any particular outcome. And that is a number which we most emphatically can not predict. And so…”
“And so, I am choosing to believe, for me, it will always be 100%. Chance of a positive outcome, I mean. I can’t imagine living any other way.”
I measured my progress by how I felt Thursday nights, attending seminars at the Institute. The first trimester, consisting of “Freud II: 1917-1939”, and “Technique I: The Analytic Stance”, I had completed the week of my first treatment. The next trimester featured “Psychopathology I: Neuroses and the so-called higher functioning patient” and “Dreams”. I made sure to take a nap on Thursday mornings, and learned not to eat before each seminar. The others there studiously avoided any mention of my paisley-flecked bandanas and rapidly shrinking physique. When the clinic closed on Christmas, and New Years, both Fridays that year, and my treatments were moved to Thursday, the Institute was on its “end-of-year hiatus”.
New Years’s Eve, Petyr and I celebrated the successful completion of my initial 9 weeks of treatment. Dr. Viqueira pronounced it a success, so I could switch to monthly maintenance visits for my chemo. The chance of a cure was now at 30%.
“Any resolutions?” Petyr asked.
“I’m going back to work, going to start up again at my practice. And Dr. Goldman asked if I would re-join the team for a new study.”
“Oh? What on?” he asked.
“Another C-L project, this time with radiation therapy and psychiatry. You’ve heard about conservative surgery, for women with breast cancer, using radiation instead of simply cutting everything out?”
“Lumpectomy, I think it’s called?”
“Right. Well, no one’s really studied who is opting for that, why they do, and how they feel about it. They’re going to interview 100 women who had that, 3, 4, 5 years ago. He thinks I could handle reviewing what might already be known there, then devising and piloting the questionnaire to guide the interviewers, and finally work on training them.”
“That doesn’t sound too stressful.”
“No, and it would fill my time on Mondays and Wednesdays.”
Petyr walked over to the audio console, started flipping though the albums. “Anything you want to listen to, tonight? To ‘celebrate’?”
I closed my eyes. Jamie Taylor singing solo at the Menemsha Community Center filled my vision. “James Tayler,” I offered. “Fire and Rain.”
While he warbled, “I walked out this morning and I wrote down this song/I just can’t remember who to send it to/I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain/I’ve seen sunny days that I thought would never end/I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend/But I always thought that I’d see you again”, memories of Michael Harrison, sunny days on Vineyard beaches, walks along the Charles, our whole history, surged like a grass fire though my core. I remembered I’d always meant to return to those days, to write him a “letter” explaining it all. As I wondered if I’d ever get there, Petyr interrupted my reverie.
“Next? Carole King, You’ve Got A Friend?”
Returning to the reality of my current life, I smile up at Petyr and said, “Yeah…no, not that, but Tapestry, for sure. The end of that second side.”
We snuggled as Carole started singing, “Tonight, the light, of love is in your eyes…” Petyr seemed hesitant, almost reluctant to hug, to hold me closer. I tried smiling, caressing; even soft purrs didn’t do the trick. Finally, I said, “Go ahead, I won’t break…” and he got the idea.
It was just like she sang – I felt my soul had been in the lost-and-found, and now he’d come along to claim it. We crescendo’d along with her, “…You make me feel, you make me feel…” and once again, I was complete.
While the needle ticked over and over in the final groove, I asked, “I wonder, what kept you going, those first few years when you lost your parents, your birth parents?”
“I’ve thought about that, now and then. Remember, I was so young, I can’t really say – did I lose hope, did I feel I had no future?” He pulled the covers up above our shoulders, protecting us from the winter’s chill snaking though the single pane windows. “Last year, at one of our talks during the Institute dinner break, you said something which has stuck with me. I think you’ve had the answer all along. Do you remember?”
I puzzled my way back through those conversations, about love, and its often unspoken sub-text, sex. About creating couples, families – the “iron tyranny of DNA”, he’d called it. I closed my eyes, and pulled from deep within, “Life itself is reason enough to be living.”
He nodded. “That’s the secret, that’s what pulls us forward, even though we know what happens in the end. Sarah,” he murmured, “Sarah, you are the strongest person I know.” I frowned, ready to object. “No, I mean it. Watching what you’ve been through, the past two months, your life upended, your body ravaged first by disease, then by treatment, I simply can’t imagine. I don’t know if I could ever be so… your spirit…” Petyr at a loss for words, always humbling.
“I don’t feel that way. I’m just trying to make it through each day, is all. Make it to bed, wake up, and do it all again.”
“Listen. One thing I’ve seen, courage, courage and bravery are in the eyes of the beholders, not the courageous. We can learn, just by sharing your live.”
All that spring, I slowly built my strength, through walks through the narrow outdoor alleys and the sub-basement corridors connecting the medical center’s buildings. With each monthly treatment, I came to relish the roller coaster of, first the sledgehammer to my gut, to my endurance. Then, after a week or two, a rebound, higher than before each time. As I neared my thirty-third birthday, once again, I felt strong enough to pull out that little pink diary, and began at last to discover my story, to understand what had brought me here, so I would know where to go.
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