Woman on Top (14 page)

Jake and I lingered in the house for a few minutes. As we were about to leave, he gave me a long, warm hug. His arms felt so strong around me. I closed my eyes and tried to forget what he looked like now.

Tears started to roll down my face and Jake quickly let go of me. We had been married long enough that we could communicate with a look, and in Jake’s glance, I saw that he wanted no tears shed now, when there appeared hope for him now. The tears were willed away while I closed the door once again on my fears, and walked out to the car with my husband.

My mother and kids went to the hotel and Jake and I went to the transplant unit. In time this floor would be as familiar to me as the rooms of my house. Inside each room, behind the heavy wooden doors and tiny windows, was a bed, shelves stocked with medical equipment, a bathroom, a television, VCR, chair and a nightstand.

In front of the door to Jake’s room, we kissed a sort of goodbye. For six weeks we would not sleep in the same bed, he would not see Chloe and Ben. Adults could visit Jake with scrubbed hands, sterilized gloves, mask and gown. He kissed me again and stepped into the room. A transplant was the cure so bring it on. He removed his clothes, put on hospital pajamas, and began serving his sentence on the cancer ward.

The transplant began with two days of chemotherapy. Then radiation treatments. The next day was called Day Zero. Jake received his cleansed bone marrow back and the nurses sang “Happy Birthday”. Then began the countdown until his marrow was engrafted, his platelets and bloods stabilized and his discharge from the hospital.

The siege had begun. When I sat in Jake’s room for long periods of time my hands grew hot in the gloves, it became hard to breathe behind the mask, and the room seemed smaller and more confining by the hour. Yet, I could leave at will.

One evening I began to reread articles we had taken out of the medical library on transplants. This time I read the actual words on the page rather than reading what I wanted to believe. Jake had only a fifty-fifty chance of being a transplant success. No matter how positive Martin was, the statistics just didn’t back him up.

I pictured the faces of the patients on Jake’s ward. Statistically, half of them would be dead in a year. Which ones? Certainly not Jake. Maybe this group would live and it would be people whose faces I would never see. Imagining myself a Nazi soldier standing at the head of a long line of people, I divided them into who should live and who should die. Jake would definitely live.

Jake sailed through transplant. He never got a fever. Yet another sign that Jake would clearly be one of those cured. Martin flew into the room one day and said just that.

“Jake, I’m not God, but you’re cured.”

When Martin left the room, Jake laughed. “I bet after one beer, he thinks he is God!”

Since Jake was doing so well, we decided to let Chloe take a peek at her father through the small window in the door to his room.

“Let’s go visit your Dad today,” my mother said to her.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“That’s why you should go. You’ll see there’s nothing to be scared about. And he misses you. Come on.”

Whatever Chloe had pictured in her mind kept bothering her until the moment she stood on a chair, looked in the window to Jake’s room and saw her daddy again. Jake smiled and threw kisses at her. She waved and threw her kisses back. Her imagination could stop now, there was her precious daddy and he looked well. She smiled and skipped down the hall on her way out.

On Day 26, Jake left the hospital. He got dressed, put on a mask to protect his very fragile immune system, and walked out. He was to stay for a short time at a condo near the hospital that belonged to friends of ours. Martin did not want Jake to leave the area just yet. And I was going to stay with him.

I sobbed all the way to the hospital. I cried for our kids and the revolving door life they were forced to lead; Daddy is sick, Daddy is cured, now he’s not - Mommy’s leaving again. And I wept out of relief - that the transplant had gone flawlessly, that it was over, that now Jake would be cured.

When Jake and I got into bed at the condo that night, it was snowing out and the room felt very cozy. A simple, sparsely decorated room, but not a hospital room. And so for us it could well have been a room at The Four Seasons Hotel. We cuddled under a warm comforter, and then I knew why we had endured the transplant. For the first time in months, we felt at peace.

Nervous about the cuddling, I wondered if one of my germs would attack Jake’s compromised immune system. Then he reached for me. He had 70,000 platelets, over 500 polys - and Hickman lines coming out of his chest that were used to administer medications and withdraw bloods. The hospital instructions said ‘No kissing or sexual intercourse until 50,000 platelets and over 500 polys’. They explained that polys were part of the white blood cells that fight infection. Very tenderly, very gently we made love. We both slept that night like babies, catching up on the closeness and sleep we had lost for months.

Four days later Martin let Jake go home to Connecticut. We surprised the kids who then made ‘Welcome Home Daddy!’ signs. Jake went into the den where he kept his medical books and journals. He was drinking in his surroundings and all the trappings of his career. All of it had been taken away, but now he could do what he loved to do most, practice medicine. He looked stronger just sitting there at his desk.

CHAPTER 17

January

T
he days flew by. Martin told Jake he could go back to work on February 1. One afternoon in mid-January I noticed that Jake seemed unusually sleepy, which surprised me because he had seemed almost back to his pretransplant level of energy.

The next morning Jake was taking a shower and I was cleaning up the breakfast dishes when I heard the water in the shower in our bedroom go off only a few minutes after it went on.

Jake was downstairs in no time.

“I found a lump in my testicle.”

I froze.

Jake paged Martin who responded immediately.

“Stop playing with yourself,” he told Jake. “It’s probably nothing.”

But it wasn’t nothing. That night in bed Jake found a lump on the side of his neck. I grasped the bed with both hands. We were falling back down the black hole of cancer and I didn’t want us to go there. We called Martin again.

“This is nothing,” he said. “It’s much too soon after transplant for a recurrence. It just doesn’t happen that way. The radiation likely caused the glands in your neck to block up. Calm down. Believe me, you’re fine.”

That night Jake got into bed and stared at the ceiling. I tried to reassure him that Martin had seen loads of transplant patients and if he didn’t think it was a recurrence, then it wasn’t.

As we went to sleep that night, I knew that the post transplant honeymoon we had been enjoying for the past few weeks was over.

The next morning the lump in Jake’s neck was not only still there but bigger.

Jake called Martin.

“Jake, I told you, it’s too early for you to recur. I’m an immunologist and I know that people’s immune systems are responsive to their emotions. If you’re going to panic like this all the time, you won’t do well! You have to stop this Jake. You’re asking for a recurrence!”

We were stunned.

“Martin’s ego is on the line here -he said you were cured so many times I think he’s denying the possibility that the great one could be wrong,” I said.

“I’ve never in my life talked to a patient the way Martin talked to me. I wouldn’t play with their emotions that way.”

We both felt angry and helpless. Over the next few days Jake seemed to be tired all the time. Staring at his neck over dinner one night, I knew the lump was getting bigger. Jake took the kids upstairs for their bath and left me to clean up the kitchen. Instead I started to cry while running the water so they wouldn’t hear my sobs. The cancer was back. I knew it, Jake must know it - and we couldn’t say it to each other.

Two days later Jake noticed some spots on his leg that looked like herpes zoster, a form of chicken pox posttransplant patients often get. We headed back to the hospital and Jake was re-admitted after a month at home. A biopsy would be done and at least we would find out what was going on.

The results of the biopsy were due back Friday morning at nine a.m. On Thursday evening I left Jake’s room around eight and went down the block to stay in The Morris Motel. I hated the place. The lobby was always deserted, and the hallways stretched as far as the eye could see with an alcove between each room door. To avoid walking down the long tunnel like floor, I asked for a room near the elevator.

The room was tiny and depressing with a faded brown plaid bedspread on a thin mattress that had seen better days, a brown dresser and brown carpeting that had worn out long ago. It had a connecting door, and the couple in the next room waged all-out warfare for hours. I began to make phone calls.

First Tim, a close friend of Jake’s from medical school, one of his brightest classmates.

“Couldn’t the lump in the neck be from the radiation?” I asked. “And the lump in the testicle just an inflammation?”

“It could be.”

“So you think this isn’t a recurrence?”

“Might not be.”

“There are explanations that would cover these lumps other than cancer, right?”

“Right.”

Next I tried Alan, a pediatrician who had worked with Jake for years. When he answered the phone I could hear his kids preparing for bed, family noises that made my throat ache.

“You think it’s a recurrence?”

“I don’t know, Kate.”

“There could be reasons for the lumps other than cancer. Right?”

“Yes.”

I hung up, wishing I hadn’t been subjected to the sounds of his household, the kids laughing and yelling. Wishing I didn’t feel so alone.

Finally, I called Jake’s brother.

“This doesn’t look good, Kate.” Greg began to choke up, which threw me completely. He had always been so calm, so controlled.

“I can’t bear it if Jake has recurred,” I said. “What will we do?”

“I don’t know.”

We were both sobbing.

“He could die. Can you believe that? Jake saying goodbye to Chloe and Ben? To me? I want out of this nightmare!”

“I can’t believe it.”

“I wish the people in the next room would stop fighting already, they’re giving me a headache.”

“Why don’t you call the desk and complain.”

“Because the quiet might be worse than the fighting. At least I feel I’m not the only person on the planet. It’s almost comforting to hear their voices, no matter what they’re saying.”

“I’m going to call Martin and see if he had any news, Kate.”

“Call me right back.”

Now I was in a state of panic. In the drawer of the nightstand there was a Bible. Not having looked at one for years, I didn’t even know what to look for. There was Job -hadn’t he gone through this kind of thing? Reading some passages, I knew I wouldn’t be hearing from Job’s God that night and that there wouldn’t be any miracles. We had prayed so much - and now this. What kind of God was this anyway?

But I prayed anyway. Down on the floor on my knees, I begged God for one last chance. Please save Jake. Help him. He’s suffered so much already -

The phone rang.

“Martin says he can’t tell us anything until he gets the results,” Greg said.

“I’ll have gone out of my mind by then.”

We talked on and on for another half-hour; just hearing the sound of his voice soothed me.

“I’m getting tired,” I said finally. “I may even be ready to get some rest. I’ll call you in the morning - and thanks.”

It was 10:30 p.m. One more call to the hospital to check on Jake.

“It’s a good thing you called,” the nurse at the desk said. “Jake is being worked on right now. His calcium is up to fifteen. That’s very elevated.”

Tumor cells could cause the bone to give off calcium. If the calcium got too high, there was the risk of kidney failure.

“They’re putting in an additional line right now.”

“Why didn’t anyone call me?”

“Your husband said he didn’t want to worry you.” Grabbing my overnight bag, I ran out of the motel and down the street to the hospital. The lights were horribly bright in Jake’s room, his bed surrounded by interns and residents who had just succeeded in putting in a line near his groin. Jake was very groggy.

My heart broke at the sight of him. What more, God, what more? The cancer was back with a vengeance.

Sitting in the chair next to his bed until midnight, I was too overwhelmed with dread to stay in that room another minute. I called my mother, who was home with the kids. Her enormous strength had always been evident in her career but now it was my crutch. And her complete devotion to my children was the only reason I could handle my bifurcated life of Jake and my kids.

“I can’t take this by myself any more!”

“Do you want me to come up? I’ll come right now.”

“What about the kids?”

“Aunt Nancy and Uncle Harold are here.”