Friday, March 28, 2014
“Did you take some ibuprofen?” Kyle pulled the car into the hospital parking lot, casting worried glances my direction.
“Yeah, this morning.” I pushed my sunglasses against my face, hoping the pressure and darkness would ease my headache. “But it didn’t help much.”
“Maybe you should get checked out by a doctor, Tessa. There has to be something they can do to get rid of them. They’ve been getting worse.”
“No more doctors right now. I’ll be fine.” I shrugged it off and climbed out of the car. After tucking away my journal, I hung my purse over my shoulder and tilted my chin down, allowing my hair to cascade past my cheeks and block out the sun.
Kyle locked the car and wrapped his arm around my shoulder as we walked through the glass doors and into the lobby. The hospital was huge—a campus of buildings adjoining or separated with only a small walkway. Dr. Hill’s office was on the west side and by the time we’d walked all the way there from the parking garage, I was exhausted.
When was the last time I’d made it to the gym? I made a mental note to get my ass back there immediately because clearly I was getting out of shape.
Kyle kissed my temple, as he always did, and I swear that alone made the pain in my head subside and exhaustion in my body dissipate. Sometimes I wondered if love had magic powers. Like if you love someone hard enough, you could do anything. You could manipulate time and space, or live outside the boundaries of reality. Maybe love wasn’t enough to change the world, but it could change one person’s world, and Kyle had changed mine.
When I was six years old, my mother passed away from breast cancer. I don’t remember much from before her illness, but my father always told me she’d loved me and would always be with me. Some days, I think I can feel her—a hand on my shoulder wanting me to know I’m not alone. Only loving hard with everything you have can do that, and when I go one day many, many years from now, I hope to do the same for the people I leave behind.
“Hi, we have an appointment,” Kyle stated to the receptionist when we entered Dr. Hill’s waiting room.
“Name?”
“Kyle and Tessa Falls.”
The receptionist cast a furtive glance in my direction and cleared her throat. Her face quickly went neutral and she shuffled a few papers around before coming out from behind the desk and motioning for us to follow. “Come with me, Mr. and Mrs. Falls. I’ll get you guys set up in Dr. Hill’s office and she will join you in a minute.”
Something felt off, as if she knew something I didn’t, and I wasn’t a fan.
“Kyle, I don’t know about this,” I whispered. When I glanced up at him, I saw he had the same suspicious look on his face.
He wrapped his fingers around mine and brought my hand to his lips, kissing my knuckles softly. “Don’t worry, beautiful. I’ve got you.”
His smile warmed me, and I relaxed as we were guided to the office.
“Can I get either of you something to drink?” the receptionist asked while opening the office door.
We both shook our heads.
“Okay. Dr. Hill and her colleague will be here in a moment.”
“Her colleague?” Kyle asked what I was thinking, but the receptionist had already left.
I took a seat, keeping my hand wrapped in his. Something didn’t feel right.
“Tessa, Kyle, how wonderful to see you again.” A too-cheery version of Dr. Hill walked in and greeted us with soft handshakes, the kind where the second hand covered our joined hands. It felt too friendly for the grumpy doctor I’d come to know from our last visit.
“Dr. Hill.” Kyle stuck with a curt greeting.
“Let me introduce you to Dr. Spencer Page.” Dr. Hill moved aside, revealing an older man in a white coat who reminded me of Santa Claus. If it wasn’t March, I would’ve thought he was here to hand out candy canes or give me a gift. Despite my current unease, I instinctively trusted this man.
“Mr. and Mrs. Falls, it’s lovely to meet you both.” He shook our hands—a softer handshake than Dr. Hill, almost limp—then perched on the edge of Dr. Hill’s desk.
Dr. Hill walked around to sit behind her desk “This is difficult to say, so I’m just going to dive right in.” Still oddly cheery for whatever grim news she was about to deliver.
I said a silent prayer—which was newsworthy on its own—that my teasing hadn’t jinxed my husband’s swimmers. I turned to look at Kyle, pledging then and there that I was going to love him even if he couldn’t give me children. We could adopt or foster or whatever. I’d love our children whether we conceived them ourselves or not. This wasn’t the end of the word.
We’d face whatever the doctor was about to tell us.
“Tessa, I found something worrisome on your scans, so I asked Dr. Page to consult.”
“What?” Kyle and I asked at the same time. He squeezed my hand harder.
“Dr. Page?” Dr. Hill said, deferring to him, her cheery appearance dissolving into nervousness that increased mine tenfold.
Dr. Page cleared his throat. “Mrs. Falls—”
“Tessa, please,” I corrected him, mostly trying to delay whatever he was about to say.
“Very well, Tessa.” He unfolded a file in his hands that I hadn’t noticed before. “Dr. Hill consulted me about your scans because I’m a neurosurgeon, specializing in oncology. I examined your scans thoroughly.” He paused, taking a deep breath that seemed to be stealing my own. “The results reveal what appears to be a tumor in your brain.”
My mouth fell. “A tumor? In my brain?”
I honestly couldn’t understand what he was telling me. I’m not sure he was even speaking English. It was only late March, but I was suddenly looking around the room for signs of an April Fool’s joke.
“We will need to do a biopsy to confirm the exact nature of the mass. There’s a lot we don’t know yet,” Dr. Page continued.
I looked past him to Dr. Hill, who dodged my gaze and fiddled with a pen on her desk. The air in my chest was stagnant, but if I could have, I would have screamed for her to drop the damn pen and look at me. Tell me to my face what was happening. Instead, she sent in some Santa-lookalike to deliver the worst gift possible.
There had to be a mistake.
“Biopsy? As in cut into her brain?” Kyle finally spoke.
When I saw his eyes were wide with fear, I began to feel it, too.
“Technically, yes, but biopsies are small, and we try to be as non-invasive as possible. If during the procedure it looks like I can remove the entire mass, I will. But in all likelihood, it will just be a small piece.”
“Non-invasive, but in my brain,” I repeated, not sure if he understood he made no sense.
Clearly, the man had no idea what he was talking about. I was twenty-eight years old. I was short, athletic, and petite, barely weighing more than Kyle’s massively muscular legs combined. He had to be looking at the wrong scans—this kind of thing didn’t happen to people like me.
I’d done everything I was supposed to do.
I eat organic. We shop at the farmer’s market and source local products. We rarely eat sweets or drink pop, except for special occasions. The worst thing I’ve ever done is drink alcohol, but these days it’s mostly red wine, which is good for my heart, or so I’ve chosen to believe. I run at least five mornings a week with Kyle by my side, and I drink the recommended eight cups of water a day. I even use an app on my phone to keep track of it, where every glass I drink waters an imaginary little plant. I have a freaking forest by now.
I am doing everything right.
“When can we do it?” Kyle’s voice was firm, his jaw set in a hard line as if he was biting down. The corners of his lips pointed south, and the soft stubble from his beard somehow had gone from a sexy disheveled look to tired and worn.
“Ideally, today. This should be done as soon as possible,” Dr. Page said.
“You want to cut into my brain today? Today?!” I reiterated, completely aware of how shrill my voice sounded. “Wait a minute, you said you specialize in oncology. Does this mean I have cancer? Is the tumor cancerous?”
“That’s what the biopsy will tell us,” he said, but there was a flash of sorrow on his face that made me think he already had an awful guess.
I sat back in my chair, now clutching Kyle’s hand with both of mine.
Dr. Page continued talking, explaining how the biopsy worked, and the procedure’s intricate details, but I could only watch his lips move. His beard bounced and jiggled with each word, the room silent around him.
He knew. I could see it in his eyes and the way he shook his head. He knew it was cancer. But he was wrong. This is wrong. I am not sick.
I do not have cancer.
I do not have a tumor.
I just want to have a baby. We’re only here to talk about babies.
“If it is cancer, what then?” Kyle’s words cut through my silence.
“It’s hard to project that before the biopsy. Every tumor is different. However, it doesn’t look very large yet, meaning with treatment, the outcome could potentially be optimistic. We’d need to do the biopsy long before we could make that call though.”
Optimistic about cancer—the irony.
“I’m going to give you guys a few minutes to talk in private,” Dr. Page said.
“And, uh, fertility treatments?” Kyle rubbed his hand on the base of his neck.
Dr. Hill looked up at Kyle’s question. “We’re going to wait until this is resolved before we continue.”
I wanted to punch her in her scrunched up, stupid face.
She wanted to wait until this was resolved. My tumor, some sort of pending transaction. I snorted, an awkward inward chuckle at the thought. Like I’d accidentally overdrafted my bank account and was cut off until I was back in the black. My denial skittered me to the edges of hysteria, and to be honest, I wasn’t convinced they knew the first thing about fiscal responsibility.
“Oh.” Kyle’s voice dripped with sadness.
“I’ll wait for you in the hallway to take you for prep and blood work,” Dr. Page told me, before summoning Dr. Hill to follow him, which she reluctantly did.
“I’m so sorry about this, Tessa.” Dr. Hill put a hand on my shoulder as she walked past me.
I wanted to shrink from her touch, but I thought it too dramatic. None of this was her fault—I knew that—but it didn’t make me any less angry and ready to find someone to blame. Tag, Dr. Hill is it.
The door clicked closed behind them. There was a lump forming in my throat, making it difficult to talk, but it didn’t matter. What was there to say? I had a tumor in my brain. Or this was the cruelest early April Fool’s joke ever, and I’d be murdering everyone soon.
I bit down on the inside of my cheek in an attempt to keep from screaming.
Leaning over the desk, I grabbed the pen Dr. Hill had been fiddling with. In one quick motion, I snapped it in half. Staring at the two ends dripping with ink, I dropped them on her desk, watching black liquid pool into a puddle on her large desk calendar.
When the puddle grew larger—which didn’t take long as there was a surprising amount of black ink in such a small pen—I reached into my purse and pulled out my journal. In less than a week, I’d managed to add four entries and had been feeling pretty confident about the start of my book.
I pressed the book open to an empty page and laid it over the puddle of ink, paper side down, and let it soak through the blank pages. After a few moments, I picked it up and closed it, allowing the wet pages to stick together. I didn’t know how to write about today. So instead, today’s entry would be black. Sticky. Dark.
Exactly what I was feeling inside.
I wanted to run. I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted to tell the doctors they were wrong—they were making a huge mistake. I wanted their medical licenses hanging on my wall of people who had once wronged me. If I had a wall like that.
I should definitely get a wall like that.
Kyle didn’t move, staring at the chaotic, widening puddle of ink. It was probably less than a minute, but it seemed hours passed before he exhaled loudly and rotated his chair to face mine.
I did the same, our knees bumping against each other.
He grabbed both my hands, sandwiching them between his and rubbed them together, as if to warm me.
“I guess your swimmers are fine,” I said, breaking the silence.
He chuckled lightly. “Not necessarily. We never got to that.”
“True.” I angled my head toward the pen. “Did you want to break something, too?”
“I think I already have.” He pressed my hands to his chest over his heart, his face twisting in pain.
I leaned into him, dropping my forehead in the shallow dip between his neck and shoulder. I exhaled slowly, feeling his heart pumping fast beneath my palm. I tried to restrain myself, but a rebellious tear slid down my cheek and dropped to his forearm.
“I have cancer in my brain,” I whispered, tasting the concept on my tongue to see if I could say it aloud.
“You don’t know that,” he corrected, but I heard the hesitation in his tone.
He leaned back to look at me and wiped my escalating tears with the pads of his thumb, his cheeks as stained as mine.
I sniffed. “But what if I do?”
“Then we’ll follow whatever the doctor tells us…and beat it.”
“What if I don’t beat it?” I was surprised to hear the thought from my own mouth. I was generally a very positive person despite my sarcasm, or the creeping sadness that had been overtaking me since the miscarriage. But I’d committed pen homicide, inked up a doctor’s desk, and was assuming the worst possible scenario. Quite the roll for a perpetual optimist, but, I figure when someone tells me potential life-ending news, I’m allowed a moment of doubt and fear. Probably a little insanity, too.
I planned to treat myself to every bitter spoonful.
“You’re unstoppable, Tessa. You know that, I know that, and the world knows that. There’s never been anything to keep you down.” His jaw set firm, he looked more confident than I did, and I wanted to believe him. “I love you, Tessa. We’ll get through this.” He ignored my joking as he wiped at my wet cheeks again. He knew me too well and wasn’t letting me mask my nerves.
“I love you, too, Kyle.” I bit the inside of my cheek again, tasting blood this time. I liked it. Something about the metallic flavor reminded me I was still here. I wasn’t dead yet.
I’m still here.
“Do you want me to call your dad or sister? Have them come meet us here?” he asked, his cheeks pulled down in a frown that seemed to be taking up permanent residence.
“No, but you probably should anyway. They’d kill me before this tumor does if they found out I hid this from them. Oh, and find someone to feed Beast.”
Kyle’s eyes flashed anger, but not at me. “This isn’t going to kill you, Tessa. I won’t let it. It’s just one step on our way to becoming parents. We need to fix this, then we’ll have our baby. One step at a time.”
He stared at me hard, and I could see he was willing himself not to cry, but tears were falling anyway and had been since we started talking. Tiny, beautiful tears cascading down his chiseled, rough features. The dichotomy was breathtaking on him, and I couldn’t think of the last time I’d seen him cry.
“You think we’ll still have a baby?”
Kyle nodded firmly, turning to rub his cheek against his shoulder to wipe his tears. “I know we will. We almost did once, and we will again.”
Nothing inside me believed him, but I didn’t tell him that. My head ached again, but the throbbing in my heart overshadowed it. The idea of leaving behind the man I loved, never having a family—Kyle never being a father—the thought was unbearable.
My body trembled and tears pooled on my lower lashes.
Kyle pulled me into his arms, and I curled into his chest.
My voice dropped to a whisper. “Kyle, I’m afraid.”
I was afraid I would never be a mother. I was afraid it was cancer.
And I was afraid it would kill me.
“I’m here, babe,” he spoke softly into my hair, his arms wrapped around me.
I wanted him to squeeze me tighter, so I pressed farther into him. He obliged, holding me together to keep me from falling apart.
“I need all the love. Every last drop,” I said, repeating our cherished phrase. I wanted our love to be strong enough for this moment, and strong enough to fix this. Love can do anything and I only had one request.
“You’ve got my everything, Tessa.”