“You’re very close now. Maybe it might be somewhere here?” she said, opening up her drawer.
Jack’s face lit up when he looked inside. “Wow, there’s so many.”
The doctor reached into the drawer and held out a red lollipop. “There you go. Now, can you tell me what color it is?”
“Red,” Jack said quickly.
“Excellent,” she said. “Now, can you remember what we call these? What is this, Jack?” she said, holding the lollipop under his nose.
Jack looked at the lollipop, thinking it might be a trick question. “It’s a lollipop.”
“Well done,” Dr. Flanagan said, giving Jack the lollipop. He beamed and put it carefully into his pocket.
“Now, Jack, can you see this line?” She pointed to a taped line on the floor covered with little fish stickers. Jack nodded. “I want you to walk along the line, okay?”
Jack didn’t move. He looked at Anna and me for encouragement and we smiled at him, urging him on. He dithered, chewing his fingernails, and it was as if we were asking him to walk along a precipice. Finally, he slowly started walking, but he couldn’t keep straight, weaving his way along the line like a drunk.
“Well done,” the doctor said. “Now, the last thing. Can you stand here, Jack?” She touched him gently on both cheeks and then examined his head, the little bumps that had appeared under his skin.
“Wow, you’re an amazing little boy. Would you like to go and play with Suzie out in reception?”
Jack didn’t move, looked nervously at me and Anna.
“We have a PlayStation,” the doctor added, “and no one’s playing right now.”
“Really?” Jack said, his eyes lighting up.
“Really,” Dr. Flanagan said, and she held out her hand and led Jack outside.
“It always gets them,” Dr. Flanagan said, when she came back to her office. “My nephew has one, and it’s like we don’t even exist half the time.” She looked at her watch. “Right, we have eleven minutes left. So I have looked at all the scans and the reports, and I do agree with Dr. Kennety’s and the radiologist’s assessment. It almost certainly is an astrocytoma. However, looking at the shape on the images, I think the tumor might be a little more advanced.”
I felt breathless, like that first meeting in Dr. Kennety’s office. Despair in the pit of my stomach, like feeling homesick as a child. “So it could be a more advanced tumor? A glioblastoma?” I asked, my voice shaking. I had read about glioblastomas on Hope’s Place. They were the astrocytoma’s uglier cousin, a tumor so complex, so aggressive it could kill people in weeks.
“No, I don’t think so,” the doctor said, picking up one of Jack’s scans from her folder. She typed something on her computer and then turned the screen toward us. “That’s what glioblastoma looks like. There, you see all those white areas around the outside. Now compare that to Jack’s.”
We looked at the image. There were no white parts, just an amorphous black blob.
“No, I’m almost certain it’s an astrocytoma. It just might be more advanced than we thought.”
“And could that affect Jack’s prognosis?” Anna asked.
The doctor paused, which was unusual for her. “It could, but I don’t want to speculate or talk numbers until after the surgery. Believe me, I do understand the need—your need to know—but really, it doesn’t help anything.”
I wanted to say something, but my vocal cords had seized up. Dr. Kennety had said 80 or 90 percent. He had said that Jack would be cured.
The doctor looked at her watch. “Right, time is getting tight now, so how much did Dr. Kennety tell you about the operation?”
“A little,” Anna said. “We’ve both read up on it since. He gave us some handouts.”
“Good,” she said. “So the goal is to remove everything. That’s the best chance of a cure for Jack. And from looking at the scans, the location isn’t toooo bad, although I am a bit worried about this part,” she said, pointing to one of the shadows.
I felt that fog descend again, the sense that I was here but not here, that I was floating, looking down on myself. I had been secretly hoping for good news from Dr. Flanagan, that the tumor was in fact benign, or that it wasn’t a tumor at all. I wasn’t expecting to hear that Jack’s prognosis might be worse.
A faint alarm beeped from somewhere within Dr. Flanagan’s desk.
“I know it’s easy for me to say,” she said, as she was showing us out, “but please do try to stay positive. These are very survivable tumors, and there’s a reasonable chance that we’ll get it all out and that will be it. Please try to remember that.”
“Thank you,” we both said, but her words sounded empty, as if they were merely an afterthought.
“Good. So I will see you on Tuesday for the operation. You need to sign some forms regarding Jack’s hospital stay, but Suzie will take you through it on reception.”
We shook hands with the doctor and went back to the reception. Jack was in the kids’ corner playing Super Mario Cart. He was leaning into each corner, nearly falling off the beanbag.
“You okay, matey?” I said, when he had finished his game.
“Yeah, the driving’s really good.”
“It looks cool,” I said. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Dr. Flanagan had said, her concerns about the shadows on the scan.
Jack looked up from the beanbag. “Daddy, why do you look so sad?”
I smiled and reflexively wiped my eyes. “I’m not sad, I’m very happy.”
Jack looked skeptical and then handed me the controller. “Do you want to play the driving game? Maybe it will cheer you up.”
“Okay,” I said, sitting down on the beanbag next to him. “They have two-player mode so we can race if you want.”
“Cool,” Jack said.
We played a few games, and I forgot for a moment that
