Woman on Top (19 page)

That day my in-laws and my mother left the hospital to take the kids back home. Watching them drive away in our station wagon was devastating. I saw their two little heads in the back seat as the car pulled away and wanted to scream. Jake and I were no longer in the picture in that wagon.

I went up to Jake’s room. It was just Jake and me now.

Now the race was on. As Martin explained it, a lot depended on which came back first, the tumor or the counts. If the tumor did, they would treat it and that would knock his counts down all the more.

In the meantime Jake and I settled into our home away from home, a small hospital room. At first there was only a chair in his room to sleep on every night. I was told to speak to the nursing supervisor in charge of cots.

“This hospital has a policy,” she said. “No cots for visitors unless the patient is DNR - Do Not Resuscitate.”

“I know what DNR means. I also know this is a cancer hospital. My husband is dying of cancer and I’m staying with him. If you want me to sleep on a chair every night, I will.”

“It’s difficult for the staff to have family staying in the room, Mrs. Newman.”

“The nurses have told me many times how helpful it is to have me there.”

“I’m sorry. This is hospital policy.”

“The nights are long and hellish for my husband. I’m going to be in that room with him.”

She glared at me.

When it became clear I would be there for the duration, night after night, a cot finally appeared in Jake’s room. It is not as if we ever had a night’s sleep anyway, the nurses checked on Jake constantly.

But Jake and I talked. We were together. And somehow that enabled us to give each other the strength to go on.

It’s amazing how you can live anywhere if you have to. For five weeks Jake and I lived in this world of bright lights, shiny linoleum floors and nonstop activity.

We were used to living in a house on a dead end street. When snow blanketed the many trees surrounding our house and closed off our road, we felt like we lived alone in our world. Now we were in Grand Central Station with a steady stream of nurses, doctors, interns, residents, lab technicians, janitors, and other patients coming in and out of our room. There was no sense of privacy, of home.

Jake and I established a routine that helped us survive the exhausting weight of another day spent in that institution. There was a rhythm to the day that enabled us to keep our sanity. It felt like we were living on death row, and in some sense we were, and I admired Jake’s courage for enduring his sentence, having committed no offense. He, in my eyes the kindest of all people, didn’t deserve to be on death row.

Each morning Jake took a warm bath. The two of us would sit in that tiny bathroom for the longest time, not caring how much time passed, and talk while he soaked. I looked at Jake’s body in the tub and wondered how it had all gone so wrong. After the bath we would walk the halls, read, watch television, or talk to other patients and their families. Martin would dash in and out so quickly that you only could tell him the headline: Jake’s counts were the same.

The interns and residents made their rounds, also running in and out of Jake’s room as rapidly as possible. They were kind to him but he was very much a contemporary of theirs and he was dying of cancer. The reflection in the mirror made them run.

Every day it was the sorry task of Jake’s nurse to walk in the room and tell us that his counts, taken that morning, were not back yet. No counts, no experimental treatment. No counts, no going home. No counts, no cure.

We began to wonder whether his counts would ever come back. We watched patients get discharged, we watched new ones get admitted, always curious to see who else was entering our world.

The weight of time ticking by was enormous. We wanted nothing more but time, time to be together, at home, with our children. Not time spent like this. And so we would daydream and nap and watch some more daytime television, anything that was on, and wait for results.

The evenings were quieter. You knew you weren’t going home for another night; there was a sense of lock-up time for the night on death row. Everyone had a television on, for hours. Whatever people may say or write about television, it is essential to survival in a hospital.

Around eleven o’clock each evening I would climb into my cot. We went to sleep every night with the hope that tomorrow would be different, and every morning we woke up to the same day.

Martin was not promising an early end to our siege. Our house and everything in it, everything we had acquired over the years, was left behind.

We were back in the state when we were first married. No money, no children. Chloe and Ben were in Connecticut with my mother and my in-laws. It was just Jake and me in this room.

It was unimaginable that we had worked so hard to purchase a couch in our newlywed years. We had been in such a hurry all the time. There had been so many things to worry about back then - careers, money, houses, furniture, vacations. The days had flown by while we did all the things young couples do. That is, young couples who know they’ll live forever. Now the days were endless, even as they drew to an end, and we were no longer doing what a still young couple should be doing. We were facing the end of life and all those things we had worried about, no longer mattered. Now it was just us, a bed and cot, a bathroom, a television, and the angel of death hovering over us waiting for the grab.

Hardest of all, of course, was not having Chloe and Ben with us. We saw them only on weekends when my in-laws and my mother drove them up after school on Fridays. We couldn’t wait to see them running out of the elevator, down the hall and into Jake’s room. We couldn’t hold them tight enough or stare at their faces long enough.

Chloe and Ben felt very at home in the hospital. Maybe because Mommy and Daddy were living there, they never seemed to focus on just how awful a place it was. If Jake wasn’t in his bed, they’d press the buttons that made his bed move up and down and then put on rubber gloves and face masks and pretend they were doctors. When they got restless, they rode the elevators, played games they had brought in the waiting room and ate snacks.

Jake loved seeing the kids but he could only take their exuberance for so long when he wasn’t feeling well. It hurt us to know that their lives were going on without us.

But nighttime was a problem at home for the kids. No more Daddy in Chloe’s room and Mommy reading to Ben while he fell asleep. If they were upset, we would often get a call around eleven.

“Mommy, when are you coming home? I need you. I can’t go to sleep without you,” Ben sobbed.

“We’ll be home as soon as we can. We love you very much.”

“I need you Mommy.”

“But Daddy needs me too right now.”

“I need you more.”

“Oh, Ben, I miss you so much. If I tell you a story, will you try to go to sleep?”

Ben always agreed.

Chloe would take Ben’s hand and say, “Don’t worry, Mommy and Daddy will come home one day and we’ll be a family again.” She would rub his hand and softly sing, “Don’t worry Ben” and finally he would fall asleep.

Then in the middle of the night, Ben yelling for her would awaken my mother.

“Please sit in here until I fall back asleep. I’m scared.”

My seventy-three year old mother would wrap herself in a blanket and sit on a chair until he was asleep. She got little rest those days. Jake’s cancer was exacting an enormous toll on all of us.

The rest of February passed in a numbing haze. Jake’s best hand had already been played. We groped for a reason to slog through each day, and that reason was to make it to Martin’s experimental drug.

Then one day both of the nurses who cared for Jake walked into the room beaming.

“They’re back. Your counts are back!”

Jake had a smile on his face for the first time in weeks.

“We’re out of here, Jake!” I was joyous.

CHAPTER 24

Early April

F
rom the protocol Martin gave us, we learned that the purpose of giving Jake this experimental drug, the potentially toxin ricin, was to determine the maximum dose a patient could tolerate. Jake would be a guinea pig. Everyone made that very clear. Only one human being had ever received any benefit from the drug Jake was about to receive. What did we focus on? We focused on that one man. We narrowed our world down to one man, a one in a billion chance.

The tests revealed that cancer was rampant in Jake’s entire body. We were both wrung out at this point, at the end of our wits. He looked awful - thin, pale, bald, sitting hunched over in the wheelchair. He could no longer walk even a few yards without feeling dizzy or having pain. This thirty-eight-year-old had two children, a wife and a career he loved. It was all slipping away. Where the hell had he gotten this cancer? Was it the water? The food? Something in the air? I looked at Jake slumped in his wheelchair and clenched my fists for a long, long time. Then I held the rage in for another day.

The news from Martin was good, Jake would qualify for ricin. On our way once again.

The week Jake received the experimental drug was a welcome and wonderful hiatus in a miserable string of months. We both were convinced that this would do the trick. Each day was the same. The drug flowed in, and I held my breath knowing how toxic ricin could be. As the week progressed Jake managed walking a few steps. For the first time in months, flashes of his personality, the personality that had been buried under all the apprehension and sickness, appeared.

We left the hospital at week’s end ready to get the next dose the following month. All Jake had to do was not recur in the three weeks at home.

Once home, we tried to act as if our lives were about something other than cancer. But there was no getting away from it. I was walking along the front walk when Ben yelled to me “Don’t step on the cracks, Mom!”

As I turned around, he yelled, “Watch it!” I was about to step on one of the cracks.

Ben began to sing-song “Step on a crack, you’ll break your mother’s back.” But his version was “Step on a crack, you’ll get cancer.”

My three-year-old son knew one thing that was worse than breaking your mother’s back.

A few days later Jake was so constipated that he asked me to call the doctor. Martin recommended various laxatives, none of which worked.

“I need you to disimpact me. I can’t take this,” he begged.

“Tell me what to do.”

“Put on rubber gloves. I’ll lie down on my side and you’ll put your finger in my rectum and remove as much stool as you can,” he explained.

Slowly I removed the very hard stool from him. It took a long time and was not a pleasant experience for either of us. Afterwards, he lay down on our bed, exhausted, and I lay down next to him and thought about, of all things, our wedding day. Jake had worn a black tuxedo and looked stunning; I held his hand at the altar so tight it must have hurt.

“How much more?” I whispered to the Rabbi, halfway through.

“Ten minutes.”

“Can you cut it in half? I’m too nervous.”

The ceremony over, I relaxed and thought how lucky I was. All of my girlfriends were there, from nursery school through college, none of them married, all commenting on how lucky I was to have Jake. I was twenty-two, Jake was twenty-six. We had a lifetime of good things ahead of us.

Now I lay next to an exhausted husband whose body was riddled with cancer and I thought of our vows.

“For better or for worse, in sickness and in health,” I had promised him.

WINTER 1996/1997

CHAPTER 25

December

W
e were sitting at a table of ten at yet another gala at The Waldorf. Or was it The Plaza? No, it was The Pierre since I recognized the headwaiter. The parties and dinners were becoming indistinguishable from one another. Crowded rooms, women in beautiful gowns and meaningless conversation. Dinner after dinner, party after party.

I now had a closet full of dresses from Bergdorfs and my party jewelry, thanks to Len, consisting of a gold bracelet with sapphires, two pairs of gold earrings - one with pearls and one with diamonds - and of course my birthday necklace. Before we left for the party that night Len showed me a large gold necklace with diamonds he had bought for Jennifer for her birthday.

“It’s beautiful.”

“You’ve had your share of jewelry this year,” he said.

Len would always point out to me who the major players were at any event, how much they were worth, what interaction, if any, he had with them. For me, the most astounding aspect of every one of these events was how many very rich, very successful people there were in Manhattan.

Four hundred people packed the Grand Ballroom of The Pierre for this party. The party was over the top with two bands, glass centerpieces filled with gardenias, orchids and tulips that reached for the ceiling and endless courses of food covering the tables. One of Len’s investment banker friends, a sixty-year old divorcee was dancing with two beautiful twenty-something women. He was at least thirty pounds overweight and had lost his hair, but these two blondes were grinding their bodies against his.