Huck: The Remarkable True Story of How One Lost Puppy Taught a Family--and a Whole Town--about Hope and Happy Endings (3 page)

I, however, thinking I had an opportunity to add a convincing point to the ongoing debate, did something foolishly daring. I proclaimed, “We wouldn’t be able to take a vacation like this if we had a dog.”

As usual, Michael was prepared. “I’ve already talked to Auntie Babs, and she said anytime we went away, she’d take care of my dog. Please, Mom, please, can we get a dog? I will never ask for anything else. I promise!”

My younger sister, Barbara Clark (Auntie Babs), and her husband, Dave, and their three children live in Ramsey, New Jersey, in a house with a fenced-in yard. The Clarks have owned many dogs. They were in fact what one might call “dog people.” It was too perfect. I was cooked. Backed into a corner of my own making, I actually found myself desperately declaring, “We can talk about it when you’re older.” I now hated myself.

We had a glorious trip—Rome, Florence, and Venice. Michael was now old enough to read the guidebooks, tote his own suitcase, figure out what he wanted to order in a restaurant, and appreciate the more civilized pace of life in a Mediterranean country.

While climbing the 463 steep, narrow, winding steps in Brunelleschi’s Dome in Florence, the family backpack stuffed with water bottles, jackets, books, and souvenirs became too cumbersome for Rich, age fifty-six and the recipient of two artificial hip joints. Michael happily and gallantly offered to carry it on his own back. A line was crossed. Michael was growing up faster than I realized and probably faster than I was ready for. It is a funny thing about parenting: by the time you get used to understanding and dealing with one age, your child has already moved on to the next.

Toward the end of the trip, as we sat at Caffè Quadri, an outdoor café in San Marco Square in Venice, basking in the sun’s warmth, watching Michael tirelessly feeding the pigeons, something happened that made me think more seriously than I ever had about getting Michael a dog.

Michael had spent so much time feeding the pigeons that we had spent $70 on food for them. But it wasn’t the money spent on pigeon feed that made me see the dog situation differently; it was two teenage boys who were making sport of tormenting the birds. The boys had lured the birds with feed, captured them, and started pulling their wings. One of the boys acted as though he was going to twist one of the birds’ heads off. It was a horrible scene. Michael was overwrought. “Dad, make them stop! You have to make them stop!” he cried.

That was the exact moment I secretly started to seriously abandon my long-held position on owning a dog. It was an epiphany. Michael had to have a dog. How could I ignore my son’s love for animals, which had only deepened throughout his childhood? Why wasn’t I listening to him when he said he “needed” a dog? He really was getting older. Maybe he could take on some of the responsibilities. Maybe we could make this work. Why was I so willing to spend money on everything else for him except a dog?

Maybe I wanted to hold on to my son’s childhood, or maybe I had some sixth sense of what I was about to learn was on our family’s road ahead. But I sat there watching Michael with the pigeons and put aside my own limitations to think seriously about Michael’s unquestionable, unabated love of God’s creatures. I vowed to myself I would once again raise the subject with Rich as soon as the time seemed right.

The time came soon.

C
HAPTER 2

I
ARRIVED AT THE
radiologist’s office four days after our return from Italy. There were no other patients in the waiting room. The receptionist called me over and asked a few questions. “No, my address has not changed.” “Yes, my insurance is the same.” “Yes, I understand that I have to pay today for the services rendered today.” “Yes, I have been here before.” “Yes, I do want to actually see the doctor and not have my test results mailed.”

While we were away I had managed to forget about my work, a rarity for me, but I could never manage to fully shake the nagging dread that when we returned home to New York, I had to get a mammogram. I was overdue.

I hated those checkups—the anxiety; the chilly, sterile environment; sitting around braless in a cheap, flimsy gown; the endless, endless waiting. I hated staring at all the other women who were waiting, too—all of them trying to make small talk and avoid it at the same time. I thought if I took the first appointment of the day, there would be less waiting. I was wrong.

I sat there that cold, rainy, Monday morning in March leafing through the well-thumbed magazines. No
Times
or
Newsweeks
here; it was either magazines full of recipes or ones with ideas for reigniting a decades-old marriage. If the magazines aren’t interesting enough, there are the pamphlets about breast cancer. My “favorite” had a picture of a breast with a rainbow going through it. The walls are pink. In fact, there is a lot of pink there, the color of little girls. There is something demeaning about all that pink. Cancer is not pink. Cancer is serious business.

No one thought to pipe in music, so every sound—every clearing of the throat, sneeze, page turn, zip of a handbag—was magnified. It was becoming crowded. Ten women, mostly in their fifties and sixties, were all wearing the same expression: worry.

I thought about how earlier that morning I had hugged Michael, sent him off to school, and watched him walk away.
That’s the last time I’ll hug him without knowing I have breast cancer
, I thought. I instantly scolded myself,
You are really, really crazy
. Some years ago, when I hit forty, a friend told me that we were now at the age when every headache is a brain tumor. I put my paranoia about breast cancer in the “headache is a brain tumor” category and headed toward the doctor’s office. After all, this was just a routine mammogram.

It was always the same. The technician would squeeze one of my breasts between two steel plates, tell me not to breathe, disappear behind a wall, and take the x-ray. Then she would do the same thing to the other breast. I’d be dismissed and sent to another waiting room. Sometimes I would be called back for reasons no clearer than, “We need another picture.”

I sat there at 9:00 that morning, in my pink gown, growing more and more anxious. The technician said they needed another picture. Back again. Don’t breathe. Have a seat outside. Another waiting room. More magazines. There was no source of natural light in the inner waiting room; I felt the walls closing in. The more I tried to persuade myself that the long wait had nothing to do with the results of my mammogram, the more I thought the long wait meant I was that one in seven women who would be handed a diagnosis of breast cancer.

And then, after the endless wait for the new picture to be developed, the doctor saw me.

Her office was dark, lighted mostly by an illuminated screen that held the x-rays of my breasts. My regular doctor was away, so this much younger woman, with a stern and determined demeanor, was filling in. She was thin and had long blond hair. She did not look friendly or approachable in any way. One might call her “plain.” She was probably ten years my junior. Before she spoke a word, I knew something was wrong.

“There is something suspicious on the x-ray,” she said, as she pointed to a mass that looked indistinguishable to me from the other masses on the film.

I didn’t panic. I had a twisted sense of relief in just being out of the waiting room and finally in front of a doctor, someone who could end the unknowing. I’m also pretty good at steeling myself in a moment of crisis. The journalist often takes over and starts asking a lot of questions, listening for the nuance in the answers, trying to detect information not intended to be divulged. As long as I’m still reporting the story, gathering facts and not writing the story, there is no conclusion, no bad ending. Anything is still possible. It is usually later that I fall apart.

“When was your last mammogram?” she asked. Without waiting for the answer, she said, “You should have a sonogram as soon as possible.”

“Can it be done now?” I asked. Fortunately, “now” was possible. I didn’t have to make another appointment for another day and wait some more. Waiting had already become excruciating.

The medical suite had two floors. The sonogram machine was down a narrow, winding staircase. Another waiting room. More magazines. More waiting. More women sitting around braless in cheap, pink gowns trying not to notice one another. No one was there with a husband or a companion of any kind. Each of the women in the waiting room was alone.

I was called to the examining room. I took my place on the cold metal table. I lay there remembering the only other time in my life I had any kind of sonogram. I was pregnant, my husband was holding my hand, and we were ecstatic to see our son, sucking his thumb and floating around in amniotic fluid.

I started thinking, too, about the day Michael was born. It was also a Monday morning. Michael was born at 9:01 on a crystal-clear, perfect, sparkling spring day in early May. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I had always been told that first babies arrived late. Michael was two weeks early. I was fully dilated by the time we got to the hospital. There wasn’t time to fill out admissions papers, and I was way past the point of any discussion of epidural drugs.

Before I knew it, I was whisked to a delivery room and Michael came charging into the world. Rich watched as the doctor cut the umbilical cord and placed Michael in my arms. I kissed his small cheeks, and his nose and the top of his head and then his hands and his feet. I stared into his eyes. To me, he was a miracle and I could not take my eyes off him. I had loved him from the second I knew I was pregnant.

It was a day of unbridled joy. My sister Barbara, having ditched work, arrived with a bouquet of yellow tulips and purple irises. She was the first of my siblings to get to the hospital, the first to hold the newborn nephew.

The cold gel on my breast startled me, ending my reverie. “We’ll look at the left breast first.” The technician was as humorless as the doctor had been. Their inability to make even the most superficial human connection with me made me feel even more alone than I was. I thought they wanted no part of me, as though I had some fatal, communicable disease. There were no niceties, no putting the patient at ease. It was all business. No one seemed to have any sense that psychic relief would go a long way to bringing down the emotional temperature of all those women in the waiting room, not to mention me, lying on the steel table with cold gel on my breast looking for clues in their remote expressions.

It was dark in this room, too. The doctor came in and repeated much of what the technician had already done, looking at a screen while she moved a probe across one breast and then the other. The sonogram confirmed what the mammogram had shown: a mass in my left breast with the distinctive shape of a cancerous breast tumor. The doctor said, “Yes, that’s just what I thought.” She seemed almost self-congratulatory, pleased she had gotten it right. She was oblivious to the forty-eight-year-old woman lying on the table, one step closer to a diagnosis of breast cancer.

I asked what the chances were that the mass was cancer. The doctor answered, “I’m going to be honest” (as if there were another option). “There is a 75 percent chance that it is malignant. We’ll need a biopsy to be sure.”

I said I wanted it done that day. I didn’t care how long I had to wait. Fortunately, whoever had a biopsy scheduled for that dreary morning had canceled. The machinery and the staff were available. I could have the biopsy done right then and there.

The doctor asked if I wanted to call someone. She didn’t say, “You might be a little uncomfortable. Do you want to call someone to pick you up in case you’d like help getting home?” Not even “Do you want to call and let someone know what’s going on?” Just “Do you want to call someone?” I felt like a prisoner making my one allotted phone call.

Rich was so cheerful when he answered the phone. “Hi, sweetie, everything go all right this morning? I was beginning to worry when I hadn’t heard from you.”

Rich and I had been married for twenty years. I knew that no matter what I said next, or what tone of voice I used, he would know that something was seriously wrong. I could have said I was fine and he would have known that I was not.

I wanted to stay on the phone with Rich and hurry him off at the same time. “I’m still in the doctor’s office. They found something,” I managed to say without crying. “I have to have another test. Can you come right over?”

I kept staring down at my shoes, fixing my eyes on something so I would not get dizzy and fall. They were the same shoes I had on just days earlier, sitting at Caffè Quadri, where Rich and I had sat enjoying the sun’s warmth and watching Michael feed pigeons. Our waiter, Nicolai, had spun stories for us about life in Venice and was as content as we were to have us linger for hours over a cappuccino.

“I’ll be right there.” Rich knew to just come and not ask me any questions.

There was a flurry of paper signing, absolving the doctor if anything went wrong. The procedure was called a core biopsy and involved taking five specimens. For the first time all morning, there was no waiting. I did not have a chance to see Rich, to have him hold me before being summoned for the biopsy.

I lay down on the same steel table I had been on for the sonogram. The doctor used the sonogram to guide the needles one after the other into my breast and into the suspicious mass where cells were withdrawn for analysis. There was an instrument that looked like a gun, and it made a popping noise each time the cells were withdrawn. I looked away.

I wasn’t scared. I didn’t feel like crying. I didn’t mind the pain. I was still reporting the story, still fact gathering. I was keeping my emotions at bay. In that moment, I tried not to think about Rich or Michael. I tried not to think about the fact that Michael was only eleven years old. I tried not to think about the devastating effects a parent’s deteriorating health can have on a child, how it can rob them of innocence and make them grow up too soon, something I knew firsthand. Instead, I focused on whom I knew who could help me find the right doctors, the best care. I started making mental lists of the people I could turn to for help.

At the same time, I was growing impatient with the detached, morose mood of the doctor and the technician. These were clearly people who had spent too much time with machines. If I had relied on their demeanor to give me insight into my own situation, I probably would have assumed I was near death. When she was about to insert the fifth needle into my breast, the doctor finally had a rare human moment and asked if I was “all right.”

The biopsy was over quickly. Three hours after I had first put on the shabby pink gown, I was told to get dressed. The doctor said she would know the results of the biopsy in three days and I could call her at four o’clock on Thursday—just what I was hoping for, more waiting.

I got dressed, thinking only about what I could do to get more information. But when I went up the stairs to pay my bill and saw Rich sitting by the desk, my detached journalist mode gave way and I wanted to cry. But I didn’t. I paid my $1,500 bill with Rich standing next to me. He took my hand and we left the office.

Once the elevator doors closed, Rich took me in his arms and said “I love you,” as he held me tight. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. I promise.”

And then, finally, we walked out into the cool, moist afternoon air.

I met Rich Pinsky when I was twenty-three years old and he was thirty-one. I had now known him for more years of my life than I had not known him. We met while working temporary jobs at a social service agency, each of us on our way to writing careers. My memory is that Rich said something to me about my smile; his memory is that I updated him on that day’s political news, that Jimmy Carter had appointed Edmund Muskie secretary of state.

Neither of us had any money then. We spent a lot of time getting to know each other on a tight budget—walking through Central Park, sitting in coffee shops, wandering around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and taking the PATH train to Hoboken, New Jersey, where at night you could sit and look across the Hudson River at the glittering Manhattan skyline.

In the years we had been married, we had our share of trials—my father’s death, Rich’s hip replacement surgery, periods of financial struggle, the death of close friends. But we had never faced a health matter that threatened to take one of us from the other.