10
Linda Mitchell stirred, nudged from sleep by the squeak of the back door. She’d gotten used to the sounds of the old house, the way the wind rattled the chains on the porch swing and the occasional creaking whisper of what her husband called “settling noise.”
But this was different. The squeak followed by the rattle of the door had a human component. She poked her husband, who snored blissfully at her side. Her whisper was urgent. “Dan.”
He moaned.
“Dan, I hear someone.”
He sat up, rubbing his eyes.
The noise continued.
She followed her husband down the stairs. A light was on in the kitchen.
There, a shirtless Christian sat at the kitchen table. He leaned forward, his attention on his right leg where he had pulled his pants leg up to reveal a jagged gash.
Dan rushed to kneel in front of his son, who looked up with tears in his eyes.
“Chris, what happened?”
“Dad, I really screwed up.”
When Tori opened her eyes, her chairman’s face seemed to float above hers. She heard the voice of his secretary. “Should I call 911?”
Dr. Evans chuckled. “We’re in the largest referral hospital in Virginia already. What do you think?”
“Oh,” she said. “I could call a code.”
“Don’t do that either. She has a pulse.” Tori felt his fingers on her neck. “Call the ER. Ask them to send up a nurse with a stretcher.”
Tori tried to concentrate. How did I end up on the floor? She coughed.
“Oh my,” the secretary said. “I think she’s coming around.”
“Tori?” Dr. Evans touched her forehead.
“What … what happened?”
“You fainted. I think you have a fever.”
She struggled to sit.
“Stay down. I think your blood pressure is low. When’s the last time you had fluids?”
“This morning. I had coffee.”
Dr. Evans frowned. “Hmm. Coffee is a diuretic, probably not the best choice for a heart patient.” He spoke as if she were an idiot child.
He stood and picked up his phone. “Operator? Page Dr. Parrish.”
Thirty minutes later, Tori found herself the center of her transplant surgeon’s attention. He held up his index finger. “Low-grade fever.” He held up a second finger. “Fainting episode.”
Tori raised her hand and inspected her IV line. “So what’s the differential diagnosis?”
“Could be any number of things. The big two are acute transplant rejection and infection. Your immunosuppressive drug regimen puts you at risk for that.”
This Tori knew. “My throat is dry.”
“Sore?”
“A little.”
He pulled a small flashlight from his pocket. “Say ‘ah.’”
She obeyed.
“Wow. You’ve got a candida infection.”
“And here I’ve never been across the northern border.”
“Funny. If it’s this bad in your throat, I’ll bet you have it all the way down your esophagus. Very common in immunosuppressed patients.”
“So give me some nystatin swish-and-swallow and send me home.”
“Not a chance.”
“But I didn’t pack. I’ll come right back if I have problems.”
“Do you want me to spell it out? An acute rejection could mean sudden death. An infection while taking immunosuppressive drugs can be quickly fatal.”
“I’m a doctor, okay? I get it. I’ll be careful. Let me go.”
“Not before we do a heart biopsy.”
“But if we know the source of the fever—”
“You may still be in rejection. Too risky not to know. You’re due for a biopsy in a few more days anyway.”
Tori groaned. “This wasn’t on my day planner.”
Dr. Parrish folded his arms across his chest. “Is there anything you aren’t telling me?”
“Am I that transparent?”
“I don’t know. You just seem … to be somewhere else.” He paused. “How are the nightmares?”
“In a word? Vivid.”
“I’m going to order a head CT.”
“Looking for?”
“Central nervous system fungal balls.”
“You won’t find anything. The memories are real. They just aren’t mine.”
“If the CT is normal, I’m going to look into changing your drug regimen.”
“It’s not the drugs.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“The nightmares preceded my first dose.” She gathered the sheet under her chin. “And it just seems like something I know.”
“Like it happened to you.”
“Exactly.”
He stood over her, his silence confirming her fears. He didn’t believe her. And because she was also a scientist, she felt his disdain for her falling under the spell of such emotion.
She shook her head. “I can’t imagine that you could understand.”
“Look, I need you to be honest with me about these things. Just because I’m having a hard time with your theory doesn’t mean I don’t need to know about it. But I will look for another source for the problem.”
She shrugged. “Sure.”
He stepped to the doorway. “I’ll be ordering your tests and some antifungal medication.” He pulled open the doorway and then halted. “Say, I wouldn’t mention these dreams to Dr. Evans. He certainly won’t hear it from my lips.”
Tori nodded. His unspoken message was clear. The boss will think you’re as crazy as I do.
The next evening, Phin stopped by Tori’s hospital room. They quickly covered her present situation: she’d undergone a cardiac cath and biopsy and the results were pending. In the meantime, she was being treated for an “opportunistic” infection, one that doesn’t routinely cause problems in the healthy patient but, in a patient on immunosuppressive drugs, takes advantage of the lowered defenses to attack and cause illness. In her case, it was the common fungus known as candida, and it had attacked her mouth and esophagus with a vengeance.
After reviewing the present, Phin naturally steered the conversation to Tori’s past. He seemed truly interested. He wanted to know everything about how she ended up in her chosen career of cancer surgery.
“I was a teenager when my mother developed breast cancer,” she began.
Tori thought back over her mother’s pitiful struggle and how a surgeon had made mistakes, reassuring her mother that she didn’t need to worry about her mammogram findings.
She remembered the afternoon her mother came home from her first surgical consultation. “He said I’m okay. I don’t need a biopsy after all.”
Tori squeezed her mother tightly. “So all that worry was for nothing. Let’s celebrate.”
“How about Cold Mountain Creamery?”
The memory warmed her.
Three months later, Tori’s mother started bleeding from her right nipple. She ignored it. “The doctor reassured me that it was okay, remember?”
By the time she presented back to her primary doctor, she had palpable lymph nodes under her arm and a chest X-ray showing lung metastasis.
Tori vowed she would become a surgeon and never make the same mistakes. She would dedicate her life to an aggressive surgical attack on cancer without regards to flim-flam emotions.
The memories tumbled down the mountain and picked up speed.
Chemo.
Surgery. The loss of a breast.
Her mother didn’t feel sexy anymore.
And it mattered to Tori.
There were other losses.
Her mother’s auburn hair.
A continuous dropping of weight. The fat fell from her hips. Yes, even from the butt she’d always complained was impossible to downsize, but in the end, she looked like a boy. Gangly. All knuckles and knobs. Bones sticking up under a thin tent of skin like moles poking up in a backyard.
More surgery. Cutting away a chest recurrence.
Dianne Taylor was sexless. No breast. No curves. No sexy auburn hair.
Tori cursed her mother’s cancer every day.
And every other day: the God who allowed it to steal her away. In the end, when she found out that the surgeon had erred, warm fuzzy emotions became suspect to Tori because she feared another false hope. She grew into a skeptical, closed adult, suspect of any real hope, knowing the hammer of truth may lurk just around the bend.
By the time she finished telling her mother’s story, Tori was glad she hadn’t bothered with mascara. She blew her nose and looked up through watery eyes. “I’m a mess.”
“Far from it,” Phin said.
He stayed quiet throughout her story. Once, he reached his hand out and simply let it rest on hers for a moment.
She didn’t mind the rough calluses.
“You still blame God?”
Tori stared off, above and beyond the social worker. “I don’t think about it much anymore. But I never went to church after that either.” She hesitated, then added, “I guess I’m mad because he didn’t answer my prayers to take away the pain.”
“God had an interesting answer to human suffering.”
Tori didn’t respond. When Phin stayed quiet, she shifted in her hospital bed. “Well, aren’t you going to continue?”
“If you want,” he said, with the corners of his mouth hinting at a smile. “God doesn’t always deliver us from pain. God joined us in human suffering by coming as a man and experiencing pain and death for himself.”
“You sound like Charlotte.”
“She must be a good friend.”
“She’s gullible. Believes in fairy tales.” Tori dabbed her eyes again. “I take a scientific approach. Pain is an important message, our body’s way of telling us something is wrong. It’s my job to figure out what is wrong and offer a solution.” She smiled. “Fortunately, it’s something I’m good at.”
“Would you have become a surgeon if it wasn’t for your mother’s story?”
“Probably not. Until she got sick, I was planning on an Air Force career like my father. I wanted to be a helicopter pilot.”
“Ever thought that God may have allowed some of this because he wanted you to do the good work that you do?”
“Okay, that’s too Pollyanna for me. He could have just had me read an article in a magazine about cancer research or something. Why’d he have to take my mother away?”
“I doubt you’d have listened. As it was, he had your attention.” He reached for her hand. “You’ll probably never have an answer to the why questions until you get to heaven. For now, we have to comfort ourselves that while God doesn’t always deliver us from pain, he joined us in it by taking on human flesh.”
She let his words settle. Water filtering slowly into the sand of her mind. For some reason, she didn’t fight. For the first time in a long time, she allowed herself to consider that Phin might be right. And if not right, at least his sincerity was touching.
After a minute, she turned her hand over in his so that they could rest palm to palm. “Can I change the subject?”
“Sure.” He smiled. “I think we’re making progress.”
“Oh, great. Here it seemed like we were just two friends talking about life and I almost forgot that I’m in counseling.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. We can be friends.”
She nodded. “Okay. I think I know where my heart came from.”