Page 39 of Take Me Away, Cowboy

“You’re not leaving?” her mom asked.

Paige admired her for trying to hide her delight, but really, it was the best news her mother could have asked for. Which explained why she didn’t hide it worth a damn.

“It’s not advisable,” Metcalf told them both. “Now, I’m going to need you all to clear out so I can talk to the patient.” He saw Paige’s frown and added, “Er, Dr. Connors.”

“Not a chance,” Paige said at the same time her father said the same thing under his breath, but less kindly. “This is my family, and they stay. Anything you need to tell me is going to go straight to them anyway. Might as well save me my breath.”

“Fine. Paige,” he said, ignoring her frown this time. “When you came in, we ran a full panel of tests. An MRI for your head since you were in and out of consciousness, a blood screen, X-ray and ultrasound for your ribs.” Paige nodded along. It was all standard procedure. “We found some irregularities in your blood and with the ultrasound.”

Paige closed her eyes. He meant beyond the ribs and internal bleeding. He found something else.

“Okay,” she said, biting the inside of her cheek to keep the heat that formed behind her eyelids from spilling over onto her cheeks in front of her family, in front of Owen. This was the moment she was familiar with, but never from the seated, vulnerable position she found herself in now.

The doctor would pass on the diagnosis and the patient—her—would have moments to cope with the irrevocable changes to her life. The family, though, they wouldn’t know it was coming. They still clung to hope. Paige felt this in her soul. The bubble would burst sooner rather than later.

Marge held her hand, squeezing tightly. Paige didn’t have the heart to tell her how much it hurt. Her heart hurt more, knowing that what came next would most likely crush her mother.

“Continue,” she told Dr. Metcalf.

He cleared his throat, adjusted the chart in his hands.

“There is an ovarian stromal tumor on your left ovary. Malignant.” He’d answered the next question before she could ask it.

Shit.Cancer.She fell off a horse and got diagnosed with cancer. Her luck was going to hell pretty quick.

The energy in the room came to a standstill, stopping time with it.

Paige took in every person’s face, etched it in her memories. She never wanted to forget the way she hurt them beyond repair in that single moment.

Marge stood frozen in place. She was a mannequin, stoic and opaque, unable to read. Only her hair blew in the light breeze from the vent directly above her. She was alive, but looked eerily otherwise, like the diagnosis had taken her life, not her daughter’s as was more likely to happen.

Her father, Alan, paced back and forth in the two square feet of free space in the small room that felt more confining by the minute. His lips pursed, anger causing his cheeks to tremble.

Brad and Owen stood resolute, looking like brothers in their identical statuesque poses, arms crossed over their chests, feet wide, jaws set, eyes forward.

She wished she could hide her emotions so well.

“You’re actually pretty lucky,” Dr. Metcalf started. With that, time sped up and crashed into Paige.

Brad and Owen both snorted, huffed out four lungs worth of air in a single blow. She could hear their gears turning, her brother wanting to pummel the doctor for his callousness. He wasn’t the best at bedside manner, that was for sure, but he was right.

Owen was less transparent. He went from resolute to hurt, physically and emotionally. His face looked pale, but his eyebrows pulled together so the lines on his forehead made deep, cavernous creases. His bottom lip trembled.

“Shhh,” she told her family when her dad start mumbling “what does he know” under his breath and her brother started walking towards the doctor. “Let him speak,” she commanded.

Dr. Metcalf coughed. He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else than in that room full of people who wanted him gone until he could come back with good news.

Paige understood. She’d never been more helpless than when she delivered the news that a parent’s joy and light was going to go dim with a terminal diagnosis. It was the worst thing a doctor could go through, but it was nothing compared to what the families had to endure.

“The trauma landed you on that side, aggravating the tumor. It’s what’s causing the internal bleeding, and part of how we found it in the first place. We followed the blood to the source and there it was, small and otherwise invisible. That’s the good news,” he said, looking pointedly at Alan and Brad, an ill-timed smile on his face. “The tumor is small, stage one. If it weren’t for the fall, we wouldn’t have found it until much later, and that would have been worse.”

Paige nodded, agreeing completely. Owen had inadvertently saved her life twice in one day.

“We want to go in, remove it, do a round of radiation to be sure, but we don’t anticipate needing chemo, nor do we think a bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy will be necessary.”

“A what?” Alan asked, his face scrunched up in confusion. Marge shook her head while silent tears streamed down her cheeks. Her foot tapped against Paige’s bed, the reverberations sending shocks of pain up Paige’s back. “Could you please talk to us in a way that we can fucking understand?” Alan hollered.

Paige gaped. She’d never heard her dad so much as say “damn” unless he was completely out of sorts. She’d never heard him use “fucking” in her life, nor had he ever raised his voice, even when she or Brad were in trouble. That was almost more jarring than the diagnosis she’d just received.

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