The Cost of Hope (7 page)

Six days later, he is sent home, still in pain, but at least able to stand upright. Let’s see if the severity of the attack subsides, they say. It’s the best we can do. Terence forces himself back to work; I drop him on the corner right outside the door of Portland State, where he is teaching a class on imperialism. When we drive, he cries out at every turn, almost shrieking at potholes. The pain is just barely to the side of endurable.

Just barely.

After several weeks of this, he is in bed one night, his teeth clenched from the agony in his gut. He starts a conversation with me that begins in the middle.

“I won’t leave a mess for you or the children to find,” he says. He gives me no room to answer. He is planning. “I can’t take this much longer,” he says. “I’ll go out into the woods. I’ll leave directions so you can send someone.” I know he has guns, locked somewhere safely away from the children—and from me. I don’t know where they are or how to find them.

The steroids aren’t working. Withholding food isn’t working. Time isn’t healing. All along there has been another choice, a drastic one. Now it is clear it is time to make it. On December 13, 2000, Dr. David Luallin removes Terence’s entire colon.

Emerging from the operation, Dr. Luallin has two things to say. The first is that the operation has been successful. The colon—damaged mysteriously beyond any help, he says—is gone now, and with it the pain. Terence will face several more operations to restore his digestive functions, but there will be no more pain. Second, there is definitely something on the kidney. He saw it while he was inside. A “cyst” he calls it. Of those two sentences, I ignore one, focusing instead on the other, thanking God we ended Terence’s pain before he was tempted again to do so himself.

Of all the things we fight about, the big three of most couples’ contention—sex, money, and child rearing—play no role in our lives. On all three we seem to have a deep, visceral alignment. We
arrive at our view of money from different poles. He grew up with plenty of it; my childhood was always panicked lest there not be enough. Somehow we have arrived at the same utilitarian view of it. We think about it like we think about plumbing. It’s got to be there. It’s got to work. Otherwise, we ignore it. I often ignore it to the point of chaos. It’s never unusual to find me paying the same bill twice, or three times, or not at all. I set up systems and promptly ignore them. I get overwhelmed by details and paper. Every couple of months, Terence sits me down and slowly works with me to unravel the latest disaster I have created.

So I pay no attention whatsoever to the cost of the surgery. I’m not even sure who is paying for it. Because I have a good job, I have good health insurance courtesy of my employer,
The Oregonian
. In this I am typical—one of the more than 80 percent of Americans covered by either private or government insurance. Still, I confess to being a bit hazy about who is actually paying the bills. The sheets of paper we get every time we go to a doctor say “Blue Cross/Blue Shield,” so in some vague way I think it’s “insurance” covering the cost, even though I will come to learn that it is really my employer paying all along. Blue Cross just handles the details.

We had just had an example of how a minor slip-up in that system could cost us a lot. Georgia, who had arrived in our family from China with a mouthful of rotten baby teeth, is so terrified of the dentist that he can’t keep her still long enough even to give her anesthetic. Terence calls me at work: The dentist wants to run her over to the local community hospital, where he can put her under for the few minutes it will take to pull the teeth. A few weeks later, we receive a $1,500 bill for the dentist’s fifteen-minute use of the operating room. The hospital has no agreement with the insurance company. The bill is ours.

When it comes to Terence’s colon surgery, Dr. Campbell, the soft-spoken family doctor who practices out of a modest strip mall, has obviously had experience with this insurance situation. When
he orders us to the emergency room, he says, almost as an aside, “Be sure to go to one of the Providence Hospitals. They’ll take your insurance.” A patient he had just sent by ambulance to the nearest hospital is now facing tens of thousands of dollars of uncovered bills. That patient happened to have the same insurance coverage as we do, he explains—Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon—so Dr. Campbell remembers what to tell us to do.

I also wonder if I would have been so careless had I seen the actual bills. I’m sure they came to the house after Terence’s hospitalization. I paid what little part was our share and threw away the rest. The bills for the first stay totaled $10,595, including $661 a day for the bed. For the second stay, which includes the hours-long surgery, the hospital bills totaled $44,626.32; the surgeon, Dr. David Luallin, billed $3,503; and the anesthesiologists $1,595.

That Christmas, in the year 2000, the children and I buy the biggest, bushiest, fattest Christmas tree that the Oregon forest can give us. Terry and Georgia and I drive out to a farm in the wispy Oregon mist to pick it out. The children select a huge Douglas fir. I think it cost about seventy-five dollars, which is way more expensive than the ones Terence and I usually would buy. Yet it is tall and perfectly conical with lush full needles and the smell of the woods still on it. It is so big that the three of us can’t handle it ourselves. Sandy, my boss, sends her husband and a friend over to set it up and help us string lights.

We move the piano and set the tree up in a corner of the living room, where two banks of windows meet, looking straight down at the Willamette River. It is an offering of sorts.

Back when we were moving here more than two years ago, Terence and I fought over those windows. Or rather, over the house that encased them. On a house-hunting trip in June 1998, we looked at fifty or sixty houses. They were all too plain. Or too
small. Or too big. One lemon yellow center-hall colonial with black shutters was beautiful in the photo; it turned out to be the lone house sitting in a narrow triangle between a gas station and a highway. Terence returned discouraged to Atlanta to close out our house there; I stayed at work and continued the hunt.

One evening the agent called, excited. Just as twilight began to fall she and I pulled up a nondescript driveway leading up to a garage door and a long cedar walkway. We opened the door and found ourselves suddenly looking out into Oregon itself. Soaring cedar trees framed the view straight down into the Willamette Valley and the river below. Off to the left, flat-topped Mount St. Helens, which had twenty years earlier covered the neighborhood with volcanic ash; off in the distance, the peak of Mount Baker. And there, filling up every window in every room in the house, looking like Mount Fuji, was white-capped Mount Hood. The house was cleverly built into the side of a mountain; the entire front of the house was glass. I called Terence, breathless. “We have to buy this. Now.”

The following weekend he flew out to sign the papers. Excited, I walked him through the house. The big bedrooms. The playroom. The cedar decks hanging out into sheer nothingness over the valley. As we stood, the sun went down behind us, turning the mountain in front of us orange, and then pink, and then a misty gray. The lights below us reflected on the river. He was quiet. His body language was noncommittal. He turned away from me. He walked through the rooms, saying almost nothing.

What’s wrong?

Nothing.

What’s wrong?

Nothing.

He was silent. Not hostile. Just gone.

I was frightened. I didn’t understand what was going on. I was racking my brains. What did I do? What did I say?

Have I said something wrong? Talk to me.

Nothing.

He was silent through dinner. Finally the truth dawned on me. He had been in Atlanta alone for a month while I was working here in Oregon. He didn’t want to tell me he didn’t want to move into this house with me.

“You’re having an affair!” I was close to tears.

His mouth opened into a large O.

“It’s Alison, isn’t it?”

“What are you TALKING about?”

“You won’t talk to me. You won’t look at me. There’s something wrong and you won’t tell me. You’re having an affair and you don’t want to tell me, right?”

“Are you out of your
MIND
? You think I’m having an
AFFAIR
? Are you
CRAZY
?” He spoke in super italics. “It’s the
CHRISTMAS TREE
, you dumb broad. The
CHRISTMAS TREE
!”

The Christmas tree?

“There’s no front window. This house faces
BACKWARD
. Where am I going to put the Christmas tree? You have to see the Christmas tree from the street. How am I going to live in this house?” His despair was palpable.

The mountain. The eagles. The decks. The sunset. The lights on the river. They all meant nothing. The picture of home in his head was all Jimmy Stewart and
It’s a Wonderful Life
. A bay window. A twinkling tree. A fireplace beyond.

“Don’t you know anything? The Christmas tree
HAS TO
go in the front window.”

Besides, he said, Alison is a dingbat.

Perhaps, I now reason nearly two years later, when he comes home from the hospital we can drive out to the bridge, look across the river and up at our house hanging off the ridge, and see our
tree blazing down from a distance. Maybe it will feel like a front window on the world, and Daddy will be cheered.

Together the children and I try to figure out everything we can to make Daddy happy. Terry gets a fuzzy blanket. Georgia finds his slippers. The three of us go to the local animal shelter and pick out the softest, fluffiest, purringest kitten we can find. Terence has wanted a cat for years. Time now for me to give in. On Christmas morning, we put the yowling box under the tree.

Perhaps we are lulled for a time by the gentle terminology the doctors use before they know for sure what they are seeing. When my dad was diagnosed with colon cancer four years earlier, the doctors carefully explained about the “lesion.” Although he dutifully went to every appointment and every scan, my mother later reported that it was weeks before my Harvard-educated mathematician father even realized that “lesion” meant cancer, and that he had it.

Terence and I are the same. It is hard for us to get too worked up about a “shadow” or a “cyst” after what we have been through. Everything we have, and our friends and family have, is going toward getting Daddy fixed and getting the children through Christmas. My sister shops for presents and mails them from New York. I buy a sun lamp to make up for the Oregon gloom. Colleagues deliver meals to our door, every day a different dish. Lasagna. Chili. Chicken salad. My mother ships off huge boxes of vitamins. I shower the children with showy and distracting gifts—a Barbie house for Georgia, edgy CDs with previously forbidden lyrics for Terry—and we all shamelessly abuse the terrified cat with affection. On Christmas morning Terence sits immobile in the Daddy wing chair, wrapped in layers of quilts. We bring him Christmas dinner on a tray and, as we do at the end of every day, hold hands and thank God we are together again.

Years later when Terence talks about those weeks, he will barely focus on Christmas, or the cat (who instantly takes a dislike to him) or the dinner, or the view or the tree. What he will remember is the dieffenbachia by his chair.

It is a plant he bought and cared for. In the melee, I have forgotten about it. Terence will recall sitting and watching the plant parch and die, knowing that he needed to get up and water it, or tell someone else to water it, but unable to muster the resources to do so.

If Dr. Turner’s office hadn’t called on December 26, I am sure we would never have thought about the cancer again.

Three days later, on Friday, December 29, four days after Christmas, two weeks and two days after Terence’s colon surgery, we appear in Dr. Craig Turner’s office, summoned there by that phone call.

Dr. Turner is young—we guess thirty (he’s actually thirty-nine). We later joke about letting children do such important work. Sturdy and handsome, he could be anyone’s idea of a TV doctor—a kind of a Dr. Kildare with a surgeon’s swagger. It’s rather endearing. It’s just enough to tell us that this is a man who is confident of his own abilities.

Terence tacitly makes his usual naming bargain: You can be Dr. Turner to me, but I’m MR. FOLEY to you. Even in pain, totally dependent, he doesn’t bend his formal, Midwestern 1950s principles. He doesn’t have any truck with informality—this whole first-name-on-first-meeting nonsense. MISTER Foley. DOCTOR Turner. The way it is supposed to be.

Yet without any discussion, it is clear that both Terence and I place total trust in this young man. Do we have a choice? What do we know about kidneys or cancer or centimeters or scans or surgery?

He talks about the “cyst,” which he tells us the scan has shown to be 7 centimeters in size, about the size of a large garden slug. His notes from the time use the words “very concerning” and “worrisome” and say that he will likely recommend that the kidney be removed.

Another scan on the second day of the new year (“suspicious for carcinoma” reports Anna Gail, M.D., who charges $695 for the scan, and another $100 to read it). A second opinion from a Dr. Kaempf. It is a punishing three weeks for Terence, as debilitated as he is from the removal of his colon.

As for me, those weeks blur into a haze of work, kids, and doctors. My family is nearly three thousand miles away. We have almost no close friends nearby. Sandy, my boss, hovers, motherly. Her husband, Gerard, takes the kids for McDonald’s; a colleague’s wife picks them up for a movie; a family down the street with four children absorbs Georgia into their midst. I even remember making one desperate phone call. “You and I have never met. Our sons are friends. My husband is ill. Can Terry spend the night?” I am so busy holding things together that I’m barely anxious at all. We have just solved one of Terence’s major health problems. Now we are going to solve another.

When I was in high school, a friend was in a severe car crash on the way to a birthday party. As the emergency workers and ambulance techs carried off the injured amid blood and glass and police and noise, she was frantic about the cake. “Don’t let the frosting slide off,” she kept repeating. January 2001 is a car wreck, and I’m focusing on the cake.