How should you react when your husband’s surgeon walks into the waiting room and asks you and your teenage daughter to take a walk with him outside? Outside? Yes, outside. Where the temperature simmers in the triple digits? Yes. Who delivers news in triple-digit heat?

Only later will the answer be obvious to you: a surgeon with bad news to deliver. A surgeon who wants to avoid a dramatic scene in the waiting room in front of the other families. Maybe he thinks the heat will disarm us—rob us of our much-needed oxygen, make our muscles grow heavy and too sluggish to move. Only bad news requires this kind of feverish setting. So, I urge you not to take this walk—never, ever take this walk. Stay seated in the temperature-controlled safety of the waiting room. Superglue your ass to the seat if you have to. I didn’t. I rose, and in rising, my life and my daughter’s took a catastrophic turn—not to mention what it did to my husband’s.

Here’s what’s supposed to happen: Your husband’s surgeon should walk confidently into this room, a communal space of battle-worn couches, vinyl chairs, and overworked Keurig machines, where he will arrive when he said he would. If he says the surgery will take no more than ninety minutes and the surgery is scheduled for 10:00am, he should be walking out of the surgery area a bit after 11:30am, not at 1:15pm. However, in this place, time will not march at a steady pace. Instead, it will ooze and congeal, settling into the tiny cracks throughout the room. Seconds, minutes, and hours—they’ll all fold over and into one another, each keeping its own tempo, never finding the synchronous beats that make a steady rhythm. You can no longer trust the numbers on your watch.

The surgeon should scan the room until his eyes meet yours, and then walk straight to you and your daughter, who will have been fed by whatever the vending machine has offered during your hours in this fluorescent purgatory. No one dares leave for the cafeteria and risk missing his grand entrance—when in mid-stride, he’ll pull off his face mask and tear away his paper gown, giving you the impression he has just sprinted straight from the operating table to you. He’ll toss the spent gown into the container for landfill instead of the one for biohazard waste. Even you know better than to do that. Who knows what cells it is carrying and releasing? But all is forgiven when he turns to you and offers a smile. No teeth. Controlled, honed by years of practice, but the glint in his eyes will betray him as it will radiate a self-congratulatory smugness.

He should clasp your hand in a two-handed handshake that feels intimate and triumphant: the same hands that have just returned your husband to you. Maybe he’ll pat your shoulder, a gesture usually reserved for men, but your man is the patient, and you, the waiter. When you finally release the breath you’ve held for three hours, it will feel nearly erotic in its intensity. You’ve had to keep tears at bay because you didn’t know which kind to shed. Now you can let the happy ones flow.

You can liken your surgeon to God, a compliment he will gladly accept. You’ll see it happen with other families. The room will temporarily glow with their relief, and you’ll feel your own relief warming its hands nearby, ready to be invited in.

But this is what actually happens: You rise. Your daughter’s hand finds yours, sweaty and trembling. You follow the surgeon past the entryway mirror, where you glimpse a woman with unwashed hair and eyes ringed in black from smeared mascara and lack of sleep. You step into the parking lot, where it’s so hot you’re sure it’s a portal to hell. The disinfectants from the hospital’s interior fuse with the acrid, tarry smell of the blacktop, making you nauseous.

The air is so thick, it’s hard to inhale fully, and yet the surgeon keeps walking. Why must we make this walk through the hellmouth? No other families had to. This is not the protocol. You can’t look at your daughter because you don’t want her to see your panic. She does not need to see it because she feels it. Your linked hands pulse together with a frantic tempo. Your steps rise and fall in tandem, pulled by an invisible chain toward a place neither of you wants to go. Sweat breaks out along your hairline, slides down the groove between your nose and lip—you can’t remember what this groove is called. You wipe away the sweat with the back of your hand as drops slide down your back, wetting your waistband.

The deeper into the parking lot you go, the more you wonder if you’re part of an elaborate prank show. It is still possible at this point. When all is revealed, you’ll be angry but relieved, forgiving your friends for ever thinking this could have been funny. You try to hold on to this possibility—grip it tightly, but it offers no handholds. You feel unmoored.

You try to distract yourself. Cars line the lot. You decide to name their emblems in your head: Subaru’s six stars, Mercedes’ peace sign, Audi’s four circles. Then there’s an arched wing inside an oval—it’s a Japanese company. Zoom-Zoom! But the precise name escapes you. Instead, Dory’s chirpy voice, from Finding Nemo, floods your auditory cortex with her singing: Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming. What do we do? We swim. Yes, you can do that—but then a helicopter descends from the sky—you hear its whop-whop-whop—somewhere beyond the roofline. It is a pulsating sound you’ll never forget—a metronome for bad news. As the blades chop the glare into pieces, you feel tightening in your chest.

Still, you refuse to give up. There’s still time for your husband’s surgeon to finally stop walking. He can do that. Just stop, turn, and say, “Everything went beautifully. He’s in recovery now.” He can look at his watch and say, “He should be awake. Let’s head back.”

But he will not say this. He just keeps walking.

Philtrum—that’s what the median line of the upper lip is called. The philtrum. The word arrives like a brittle leaf in the drought of your mind. You cling to it because it’s all you have now.

The surgeon finally stops beneath the narrow shadow of a utility pole, which offers no shade. A ridiculous place for a conversation. He looks at you, then at your daughter, lips pressed thin, jaw tight, eyes downcast.

Mazda. Mazda is the Zoom-Zoom car.

Your daughter’s grip tightens. You look at her face, a fusion of yours and your husband’s. Your blue-green eyes, his patrician nose. Your lower lip, his upper lip. Your stature, his posture. What a masterpiece you two created.

There is no God-like flourish; he does not take your hands. He does not offer a handshake—single, double, or otherwise. No happy clap on the back. He does not provide the practiced smile. Instead, he stands with the posture of a man bracing for impact. Then come the words you’ve been trying your hardest to never hear. This is followed by your daughter’s wails—one sound that is both a scream and a sob.

So, trust me when I say, “walks are not always good for you.” I took a walk, and it changed my family’s fate.

Share This: