“Would you like some mul ed cider?” Dolores asks her. “It’s organic.”
Vicki notices that the rest of the group have cups, but she demurs. “Maybe after.”
“Very wel ,” Dolores says. “Let’s start by introducing ourselves. Dana? Wil you go first, please?”
The woman in the denim jumper speaks. “My name is Dana. Breast cancer, stage three.”
Vicki’s throat constricts. She is relieved when they go the other way around the circle. Ed, prostate cancer, stage two, Josie, breast cancer, stage three; Francesca is stil there, as is Jeremy. There’s another woman Vicki doesn’t recognize who does not have cancer at al ; she’s there because her seven-year-old daughter has been diagnosed with leukemia.
Vicki is so moved by this declaration that she finds herself lapsing back to her stutter.
“Vicki?” Dolores says.
“I’m V——icki,” she says. “Lung cancer.” She pauses, swal ows, col ects herself. “Survivor.”
Survivor. The other people in the circle stare at her, and Vicki feels self-conscious. Dolores continues to beam. Dolores had cal ed a few days ago and asked Vicki to come back to the support group. Implored her, real y.
“It wil be good for the others to see,” Dolores said. “Especial y at this bleak time of year. It wil deliver a message of hope.”
Except what Vicki sees now in the others’ eyes is envy, resentment even. She recognizes it because she was in their shoes once, listening to Travis, who beat liver cancer, and Janice, who, against al odds, beat ovarian cancer. While Vicki was happy for them, she also hated them. And now here she is. She wants to tel this circle of people the whole story, every detail, but mostly she wants to convey that she is one of them. She is them, they are her, they are al in this together. She cal s herself a survivor, but the term, as they al know, is conditional, because maybe the cancer is al gone, but maybe it only went into hiding, like an evil jack-in-the-box face that wil , eventual y and to her sudden surprise, resurface. Vicki lived for thirty-one years as a confident, capable person, but now she is shackled by fear and uncertainty. Nothing wil ever come easily again.
“Tel us,” Dolores says. “Tel us about your journey.”
Vicki is cautious about what she says. She wants to be honest but not confessional, straightforward but not graphic. She was afraid of the surgery, she tel s the group, so afraid that she developed a stutter. She was unable to speak clearly; her tongue was a lump in her mouth. Every sentence was garbled. When she returned to Darien from Nantucket, she was unable to keep food down, and she was hospitalized for dehydration. Dr.
Garcia referred her to a psychotherapist. The therapy worked in reverse, her stutter worsened, and Ted was forced to acknowledge that something else was wrong with her. She wrote notes on paper, but even the notes were confusing and disjointed. She couldn’t concentrate on anything except her own fear and anxiety—it was a minute-by-minute battle to keep it from escalating into ful -blown panic. The anesthesia, they’re going to kil me, I’m going to die. She dropped Blaine off at preschool, she picked him up, she shopped for diapers and Oreos and rib-eye steaks, she oiled her butcher-block countertops and did laundry, but the question was always with her: Why bother? Was this how she wanted to spend her final days?
Wasn’t there something else she should be doing to stop the train that was speeding toward her? She couldn’t sleep, and when she did sleep, she had nightmares. Dr. Garcia prescribed Ativan. Vicki and Ted met with their attorney and signed a new wil . Vicki named her sister as guardian. She donated her organs, lungs excepted. She signed a Health Care Proxy, a DNR order, and gave Ted power of attorney. She vomited in the bathroom of the lawyer’s office. She wrote the boys each a long letter, and she wrote a long letter for Ted, and she wrote a shorter letter for everyone else that she wanted Brenda to read at her funeral. The night before her surgery, she went to church; she knelt in the empty sanctuary and prayed, then felt like a hypocrite because she didn’t know what she believed. She went home and sat on the side of the bed as Ted read to the children. She kissed them good night and thought,
“What I’m tel ing you,” Vicki says, “is that I thought I was going to die. I was sure of it.”
Around the circle, there are nods.
Vicki was so terrified that pre-op was a blur. She has vague recol ections of listening to the anesthesiologist and the head surgical nurse. She remembers changing from her clothes into the gown and wondering if she would ever wear clothes again; she remembers trembling and feeling cold. She remembers the IV stuck, after three tries, into the back of her hand. She remembers Ted wearing khaki shorts and a cheerful, red polo shirt; he was there the whole time, whispering, it seemed like. Whatever he was saying, Vicki couldn’t hear him. Both El en Lyndon and Brenda were at home with the kids. Vicki had (irrational y) insisted that she wanted them to hold Blaine and Porter the entire time she was in surgery. She remembers being wheeled down a series of hal ways, with as many tight turns as a Moroccan souk, Ted at her side, in turquoise scrubs now. He was going to stay with her until they put her to sleep. She remembers the incredible gravity of the surgical team, the meticulous professionalism, the nurses going through an inscrutable protocol—numbers, codes, her blood pressure, her temperature. It was as dramatic as the theater, and for good reason—they held Vicki’s life in their hands! But, too, it was just another day at work for these people. Hers was the body today; tomorrow it would be someone else.
The OR was cold. Vicki’s feet were bare, sticking out from under the sheet like a TV corpse. Everyone wore scrubs and masks. Vicki couldn’t tel one person from another, man from woman; it was as if she had arrived on another planet. Ted was there at her side and then a second familiar face—those thick glasses—Dr. Garcia.
“You’re going to be just fine,” Dr. Garcia said.
There was a stirring, a soft commotion, then a parting of the seas. The surgeon had arrived. His name was Jason Emery, and he was a giant—
tal er and broader than Ted, and very young. A superstar, Dr. Garcia had cal ed him, the best thoracic surgeon in Connecticut. (How many could there be? Vicki wondered.) The nurses worked as quickly as a NASCAR pit crew, pul ing on Dr. Emery’s gloves and getting him his equipment.
When he took his spot at the helm, his mask stretched, and Vicki knew he was smiling.
“Hi, Vicki,” he said. “It’s Jason.”
They had met the week before in his office, where he explained every step of the surgery. Vicki had liked him. Like Dr. Garcia, Jason Emery was unshakably optimistic. But so young! How old? He would turn thirty-two on October 9, and so would Vicki. They had the same birthday, they were twins, it was a sign, he could save her.
