Page 35 of Beside the Rolling Waves
“You can stay seated. I just… I just needed to come talk to you. I was with Rita. Is that your sister?” she said, looking at Becky.
Becky nodded.
“All right. She had you two listed on her consent form as the two people we can share her medical information with.” The doctor closed her eyes and took a breath.
Then, with compassion flowing out of every pore, she opened her eyes and said, “Dr. Melbourne got the babies, and then I took over. We were hoping to remove the cancerous tumor that had wrapped around her intestines. It was intertwined with her liver and pancreas as well. It was much more involved than what we realized. And if you know much about cancer, you know it takes a lot of blood to feed it, and…” She swallowed. “She bled to death on the operating table. I am sorry that I have to give you this news.”
Fifteen
Becky gasped but didn’t say anything.
The doctor continued. “I know it’s probably not much consolation, but from the look of the tumor, we will send it to pathology, but just from my experience with cancer, she was not going to survive that. Whether she was pregnant or not. It’s very, very aggressive and well-integrated into her abdominal cavity. She is very blessed she was able to have the babies delivered when she could. I would say another week, maybe two, and she wouldn’t have been with us anyway.”
Becky couldn’t speak. She tried to swallow and process. Not only was her sister gone, dying on the operating table, but the doctor said even if she had survived the operation, she wouldn’t have survived long.
“What if she had been treated back when she was four or five months along in the pregnancy? In other words, if she had her pregnancy terminated?”
“Well, obviously, I don’t have all the information. Normally I would have scans to look at and to compare and to say, ‘well, it grew this much, and when we first found it, here’s what it looked like.’ But we don’t have those comparisons. So I can’t sayfor sure.” The doctor waited for them to nod, making sure they understood.
“But in my opinion, my professional opinion, seeing these things every day, I would say yes. She might have had a good chance of surviving the cancer if she had chosen to terminate pregnancy and been treated immediately. I can’t say for sure. Again, I don’t know how this cancer would respond to chemo, until we test and see what kind of cancer it is. But with the combination of chemo and radiation to shrink it and surgery to possibly remove the tumor. Yeah. She might have survived.”
She took a breath, and then she tilted her head over. “I probably ought to say that it’s just as possible that she wouldn’t have. With a tumor this big, this aggressive, this integrated into her abdominal cavity, it’s quite possible that there are other places I didn’t see, because I didn’t go looking around for more. It’s possible that she wouldn’t have made it anyway. So, she made a decision. Obviously it didn’t turn out well for her, but we do have two live babies, and had she terminated the pregnancy, we could have ended up with three dead humans.”
The doctor’s lips flattened, and she didn’t look happy about either outcome, but she waited, standing in front of them, almost as though she were preparing herself for an onslaught.
Becky supposed there were people who attacked the messenger. Who accused her of incompetence, of not doing her job, and were angry that she couldn’t save everyone. Becky wasn’t going to do that.
“Thank you for your effort. I know that she was a complicated case, and I appreciate you taking her on, even though the outcome wasn’t what anyone wanted.” Obviously. No one wanted a dead body especially if the dead body belonged to one’s sister. Her beautiful, laughing, happy sister. The sister that had asked her for one last thing.
That was to get along with Rodney so that they could raise her babies in a stable, loving home. The stable, loving home she and her sister hadn’t had.
How could she say no?
Still, even though she’d forgiven Rodney, she didn’t want to live with him. She didn’t want to spend any more time with him than what she had to, because she could tell she was still susceptible to him. He could have her under his spell again in no time at all, and he obviously didn’t really care about her. When he’d gotten out in the world and seen what other women were out there, he realized how Becky really didn’t measure up.
It was something she suspected all along. That she didn’t measure up to other people, other women who were raised in normal homes with good families, who didn’t sneak into boys’ rooms looking for food in the middle of the night when they were ten years old, and who hadn’t run away from their foster home so that they could see their sister.
“I’m sorry,” the doctor said, pulling her lips between her teeth. “I wish the outcome could have been different.”
“I do too. But I appreciate your competence and your willingness, and I’m sorry that you had to tell us such bad news.” Becky didn’t know what else to say. She wanted to go somewhere and cry, but she was holding the baby, and sitting in the middle of the room, and… Maybe it just hadn’t sunk in yet. Her sister wasn’t coming back. Maybe she needed to see a body in order to understand.
“There will be people getting in touch with you so that you can discuss things with them and make arrangements. Someone will come find you. So don’t worry about looking for anyone. You stay here and love on your babies.”
The doctor turned around and walked out of the room, her walk brisk and businesslike, and Becky wondered what else her day held. Were there more surgeries? Did this shake herconfidence? Did this make her question her decision to become a doctor and a surgeon in the first place? Did she wonder why she fought a disease that always seemed to win? Or did it not bother her at all? Was this just a job, just one more person who didn’t make it. And then she was going to move on to the next person with the goal of curing them but detached emotionally from the end result?
Becky didn’t think she could have a job like that without somehow emotionally detaching herself. She couldn’t stand to deliver the sad news to hopeful family members, couldn’t stand to see the blood on the operating table and know that her skills were too little and too late.
“That job would suck.” Rodney somehow managed to encapsulate what she was feeling and thinking into four words.
“Really?”
“You think she has more surgeries today?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I was just thinking that I would have to become emotionally detached in order to do that job.”
“Yeah. How do you lose a patient and then move on to the next one. Without…doubting yourself. Or wondering if you were in the right profession.”
“Yeah. Or wanting to quit your job and go be a burger flipper at McDonald’s. No stress, if you burn the burger, just pitch it, and stick another one on the grill.”
