Gallium scans are simple: you lie on a table while the machine tracks the gallium in your body. You can’t move. Each image takes at least an hour.
I had four. All that time it was either sit and imagine what I would be doing if I were back home—hanging out with Brooke and going somewhere with Jack—or I’m mentally yelling at Team Doctor Boy. It’s easier being angry at him. Trust, have faith. What does he know?
I strip off my gown and shove it hard into the trash. Mom’s waiting for me when I get out and I just keep going before she can even mention the word photo. Blogs are basically obsolete, but it hasn’t stopped Mom. There’s just enough time to grab food before we have to see Darlington. Despite the fact I’ve been lying down all day, I’m starving. My phone goes off while I’m stuffing a sandwich in my face.
Caitlin
He broke up with me
Those words are a punch to the gut, even if it’s not surprising. I’ve been through this dance with Caitlin too many times to count, and each time my anger simmers just below the surface.
Ellie
Shit. Cait.
I’m so sorry.
Ice cream and movies tonight?
Caitlin
Why would he do this to me? Why do they never stick around? What’s wrong with me?
Ellie
Nothing. They’re jerks.
Heading into a doctor’s appt.
Be back soon. Hang in there.
Caitlin
Remember Drs are there to help!
I shake my head; even in the middle of her breakup, she has to remind me of that.
“Everything okay over there?” Mom asks.
“Yup.” Clenching my phone, I can almost feel Caitlin’s last words to me: doctors are there to help. For my other Coffman docs, this is true. I love seeing them once a year just to prove I’m still my own brand of normal. From our first meeting a few days ago, I know Darlington is not like them and this is not going to be like other visits.
“They’re going to find something,” Mom says. She has the absolute faith of Team Doctor Boy. I guess it’s easy when you’re not the one being called a liar by your GP. I’ve never trusted GPs beyond their ability to follow directions from Coffman. When GPs want to play in the big leagues, my body becomes their ground to prove themselves. They stop listening to me, and even Mom has trouble reining them in. At that point the only way to get them back in line is to sic a more powerful doc on them or move GPs, and in a small town there are only so many.
Have faith. If only they had faith in me.
Pulmonology takes us to a new floor, but the waiting room looks the same—as if someone thought they were designing a library and then were like No, make it a medical facility. The familiar hardback wooden chairs and dark wood-paneled desk offer a strange sort of comfort.
We’re called back fairly quickly, shown to an exam room. Mom and I both make sure the nurse flips on the colored lights outside our door, which signals patients are present. One time they forgot and we were stuck in the room for hours until Dad had to go to the bathroom. It was a rare trip when Dad could come with us. The nurses were so startled because they thought the room was empty—turned out the doctor had already gone home because they thought we were no-shows. Now we always make sure the lights go on before the door closes.
“Ready for this?” Mom asks, her voice shaking slightly.
I give her a weak smile.
As if on cue, Dr. Darlington struts in wearing a suit, like every other doctor here, and a look that says I know best mixed with Listen to me, mere mortal that some doctors must pick up somewhere in medical school.
His smile is plastic, all hard and shiny. Absolutely zero feeling. He bypasses me, holding out a hand to Mom, saying, “Mrs. Haycock.” She takes his hand and then grabs her phone, ready to record everything to relay to Dad.
“So, Doc, what’s the diagnosis?” I ask, putting myself out there. Can’t let anyone say I didn’t try. His cheeks pull so hard on his smile I think they might crack, but he says nothing.
A few taps on the computer and he pulls up the gallium scans; my insides are barely there ghosts.
I do not have a medical degree, but those scans make my stomach sink. “Shouldn’t there be bright spots?” I ask, because this test was supposed to find the infection making me sick. I bite the inside of my cheek, trying to quell the panic rising that this has failed again. Maybe I am losing it. As if to prove a point, my body grows a cough that goes until my lungs sting and I cradle my chest because of the pain.
“We were hoping the gallium would show us if there was an infection. But as you can see…” He pauses to click through the different scans, each one as bland as the next. “There are no signs of infection.”
Tears prick against my eyes. I won’t cry. Not in front of Darlington. In no way was I prepared for this outcome. Deep down I had hope—I told people this was pointless, but even further down, buried under loads of fear, I knew it was possible. This is Coffman! And somehow this letdown, this confirmation that I was right all along, just makes me feel worse.
Mom shakes her head, getting back in the game. “So what are the next steps?” she asks, taking control. That’s why we’re a team here: she can have it together and I don’t dare open my mouth, because if I do, some very nasty words will spill out.
Darlington leans back in his chair, and for the first time, he fixes his gaze on me. I sit up straighter because I won’t fold under his scrutiny. Not since the first time I sat in one of these exam rooms and he listened to my lungs has the man even looked at me. I know I can’t trust him, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re in this together.
“Given all the tests we’ve done, and how each comes back looking good, we don’t see anything that would suggest a cause.”
Any hope I had for a diagnosis buckles under those words. This is why I don’t have Caitlin’s or Team Doctor Boy’s faith in the medical profession, because when you need them to do their job, they let you down. They know numerous procedures and the science behind why it all works, but when it fails? They pass the blame and wash their hands of your case.
They’re not the ones who have to live in the fallout of the unknown.
“How school’s going, Eleanor?” Dr. Darlington asks. My skin prickles because this is exactly what my GP started with before pulling out the this is all in your head diagnosis.
Mom looks at me because we both know where this is going and neither of us is on board for it.
“I haven’t been there in, what, two months?” I turn to Mom, looking for confirmation.
“And before that? Maybe something happened last year?”
“Excuse me,” Mom says, butting in, “I’m not sure I’m following this line of questioning.”
Dr. Darlington sighs. “We have to consider all the options with no clear cause, and at this age I think part of this could be psychosomatic.”
I swear the room goes so quiet I can hear the nurses’ gossip down the hall. My blood has to have stopped in my veins because I don’t even feel the pounding of my heart. I can’t think. Dr. Darlington thinks I’m the problem too.
“I’m sorry,” I say, gathering myself enough to spit out words. The world comes back hard and fast, like I’ve stepped on the moving sidewalk at the airport and I’m moving through the world faster than normal. Both Mom and Darlington look at me. “You think this is in my head?” The edge in my voice could crack a rib cage wide-open.
“I think there is a problem, but your mind is making the symptoms worse.”
“So there is a cause?” There’s an edge to my voice that hacks off the last of my patience. Can he keep his story straight?
“As I was saying”—his tone is meant to cut me down to size—“it may be part of the problem. I think we also need to look at this cyst on your bronchial tubes.” He hits a few keys and the images on the screen shift from my gallium scans to a CT scan where the little bubble my body’s decided to grow sticks out among the spray of my lungs. “We were hoping the gallium scans would show us if it was gathering infections, but from what we’ve seen, it’s not. Considering your lung function, I think removing it could be beneficial and will alleviate some of the symptoms.”
He thinks. Doctors all talk like that. Think, maybe, our best guess … Language meant to protect them and give answers to no one. Medicine is a hypothesis.
I sit up straight. Surgery. Absolutely not. Not when he thinks this is the problem. When he speculates that I am the problem.
Mom’s fingers still.
“You want to do surgery,” she says.
“Laparoscopic, yes. It would be a way to go in and remove the cyst.”
“But what about a course of inhaled steroids or a long-term working inhaler. We haven’t tried one of those since I was a kid, but it worked.”
My lungs have never been model organs. Certainly Coffman and Darlington know some hidden med that could work. A medicine that small-town doctors wouldn’t know to pull off the shelf. Or maybe an experimental drug that could do the trick.
“Surgery would be the fastest course of action.”
I desperately want to go home, but surgery in my chest won’t do that. It will take time to heal. Even going in laparoscopically, they still have to puncture my chest wall and dig through muscles to even get to my lungs. And who knows how long recovery will take. It will hurt so much. From my last surgery I remember Dr. Williams telling me it couldn’t be that bad as he pulled cotton from my wound that was stuck to my skin with my own blood. Doctors are excellent at doling out pain, but they have no idea what it feels like.
And on top of that, what will it do for Mom’s blog? Readership has been slowly falling off; she doesn’t pull in the numbers she used to, which means less money to support the charity bringing families together. I know surgery is gonna turn it all around for her, for the cause. Stats always spike when I have surgery.
Mom shoots me a look meant to zip my mouth shut. “What are you suggesting?”
“Here—” He indicates the cyst at the branch of my bronchial tubes with his ring finger. I don’t know why that bothers me, but it does. Why can’t he just use his index finger like a normal person? “Removing this cyst, we hope, would remove pressure on the bronchi and allow for an increase in oxygen flow. And there’s a possibility that some pathogen is being harbored in the cyst that we just can’t see.”
Mom nods. Clearly she’s considering throwing me under the knife. I want to get well. I do.
But when? And when will I actually feel like myself again? Six months? If I’m lucky.
“And will this fix me? I thought you said there were no clusters around the cyst.”
Both adults turn to look at me. I feel like waving my arms in the air and being like Yes, still here, but I resist.
Dr. Darlington takes a deep breath, because he’s about to explain his reasoning in childspeak and that’s beneath him. “There is no infection that we can see in the cyst.”
“So why do surgery?”
He looks to Mom for help. She looks down at me with a tight-lipped smile. I cross my arms. I have a say in this and I am putting my foot down. No way am I trusting Darlington to cut me open on a hope and a prayer. I hate surgery enough as it is. The way you just drop out of the world, remembering nothing, only to wake up baked in pain.
“Can we put a date on the books?” Mom says, not even pretending to consult my feelings on the subject. Mom doesn’t understand the guttural reactions I have to surgery. How the smell of anesthesia is a viselike grip on my heart. The chill of the OR that seeps through even the warm blankets they pile on top of me. The split from my body as I get pulled under, where the only certainty is if I wake up, everything is going to hurt.
And then I go into recovery.