Chapter 23

New York

November 2011

Dave and I were married exactly two months before I realized that life had completely changed.

Dave had just begun his fourth and final year of medical school, and we were now looking ahead to the next step in his training. Residency would be five years, and he would be training in orthopedic surgery. Dave cast a wide net, applying to programs all over the country.

His first interview was at Duke, a place where he had nearly gone for undergraduate, the place where his parents had met and courted and spent the early years of their marriage. Dave loved Duke, and he called me from his residency interview elated, telling me: “Alli, you’d love it here. Forget our one-bedroom apartment, we could have a house for what we pay in rent.” Next was UCLA, and I got the phone call: “You’d love it out here. It’s seventy degrees in the middle of winter. You’d be far from your family, but think how often they’d want to visit!” He loved most of the places he saw. I went on this roller coaster beside him, Googling apartment rentals in each subsequent city or town, wrapping my head around each possible plunge that we might take together.

Ultimately, though, it came down to two places: Columbia in New York City and Rush in Chicago. Dave, being from Chicago, was predisposed to like the programs there, but he especially loved the program at Rush University Medical Center, which he believed could not be more perfectly suited to him. He had also enjoyed his time at Columbia and had a close relationship with several of the attending orthopedic surgeons and therefore gave serious consideration to continuing there.

Programs aside, in our perfect worlds, Dave wanted to be in Chicago and I wanted to be in New York. I had grown up in New York. Heck, not only had I grown up in New York, I had grown up in “I Love New York” commercials. My family and most of my closest friends were there. I wanted to be a writer, and much of the publishing world and media were headquartered in New York City. But as passionate as I felt about New York, as rooted as I felt there, that was exactly how Dave felt about his hometown near Chicago. So, what were we to do?

This was, without a doubt, the single greatest challenge our relationship had faced to that point. We both loved our families and friends and were both eager to work in the city where we felt most rooted—so who got to win this one?

Dave got the message through the orthopedic grapevine that if he really liked a program much more than all the others, if there was one program that he knew he wanted to rank at the top of his list, it would help significantly to let that program know how serious he was about going there. “Alli, I think I should tell Rush that they are my first choice.”

He told me this one night over the phone as I was wrapping up work and preparing to head to dinner with some girlfriends. I paused, irritated. Dave had not even completed all of his New York interviews yet. There was a big one coming up at a really competitive New York program; couldn’t he at least try to keep an open mind and not shut the door on the idea of New York until he had at least seen all of the options? What if he fell in love with a New York program?

The night before, I had heard Dave in the other room on the phone with his dad, practicing for an upcoming interview. “My greatest achievement? Easy. My greatest achievement is, without a doubt, marrying my wife,” Dave had said. Now I thought: Well, excuse me, if I’m really your greatest achievement, then can’t you please think about my perspective here?

But he was running out of time to let Rush know—he’d already interviewed there and he had heard through the rumor mill that Rush would be ranking their applicants in the next day or so. If he wanted to rank in their top five and thus stand his best chance of getting into his dream program, it made sense for him to at least let them know how much he loved it there. I dug in. I withheld my blessing for such a conversation. It all struck me as premature and unfairly rushed; I felt it was only fair that he finish his interviews and give the New York programs a shot before committing us to a move I was not crazy about, one that I worried could pull me away from my own career opportunities in New York.

We took a few hours apart, both of us tense and frustrated that the other one seemed to be calling the shots over our respective futures. Dave called Louisa and spoke with her. Louisa then called me. It is a testament to my mother-in-law and the remarkable woman she is that she listened to each of us with complete fairness and open-minded understanding. She helped us each to see the other’s perspective, and she urged us to communicate in a respectful and considerate manner.

In the end, I told Dave to have the conversation he had been wanting to have—to let Rush know they were at the top of his list. He answered by telling me that he had decided not to do it, to keep his mind open until he was done with all of his New York interviews. It was like our own version of the O. Henry story. We would hold off on making our rank list…for now. But the big unanswered question loomed, and we still had not sorted out how we would answer it.

Then something happened that was very hard, and that, in turn, made our decision very easy. If the question of Chicago versus New York was some choppy water rocking our marital boat, we soon forgot about that choppy water when we realized that we were smack dab in the middle of a hurricane.

I remember the phone call. It was early February, just a few days before Dave’s birthday and Valentine’s Day and the day Dave had to submit his final rank list for residency.

It was the middle of the day, and I was at work at my father’s consulting group in Midtown Manhattan, where I did work researching and writing. For the past few months, my mother-in-law had been feeling pain in her back. In recent weeks it had gotten worse, and physical therapy was not helping. Her voice was shaky on the phone, entirely unlike her usually chipper tone. “It’s the Big C,” Louisa told me. Cancer. My mother-in-law had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a rare cancer of the blood. They say that “there is cancer, and then there is CANCER.” Well, this was CANCER. No cure exists as of yet for multiple myeloma, and we were told that the life expectancy was just a couple of years.

I called Dave immediately. He was up on the Columbia campus in Washington Heights, and he broke down, sobbing into the phone. He had spoken with his parents right before I had. He adored his mother—everyone who knew her adored Louisa, and Dave was her baby. He was a mess. “I can’t be away from her as she’s going through this, Alli. We’ve got to be in Chicago. I need to be near her.”

I could feel the anguish in his voice—fear, helplessness, the overpowering desire to be near his mother during the coming months of uncertainty and hardship and physical pain. “Of course you do,” I said.

We put Rush University number one and University of Chicago number two, to ensure that we would end up near Dave’s family. In the end, fighting over which city to live in felt like a luxury compared to the news that a loved one might not live.