By Donnaldson Brown
A slim woman, who looked too young to be wearing a white lab coat, approached me. Her waist-length chestnut hair glistened beneath the harsh fluorescent lights. Peering at the clipboard in her hand then the number affixed outside my husband’s hospital room door, “Mrs. KoKeeKo?” she inquired, mispronouncing my husband’s name, a name I hadn’t actually taken.
My back flush against the white hallway wall, cell phone in hand, “Yes,” I answered.
Before I could even tell my friend I’d call her back, the young woman launched into the results of the biopsy.
Three days earlier, on a hot, late August day, I flew back home to New York City after dropping our son off at college. I arrived midday, went out to run a few errands and do some grocery shopping. When I got back to the house, weighed down with food and detergent, my husband, Mike, was home. He was in the sitting room, a folded newspaper he wasn’t reading on his lap. I can’t think of another time he was home early from work.
We greeted each other. Yes, the college drop-off went fine. Then he told me he had fallen. “I was standing talking with Peter.” Peter was the architect on the construction job he was managing. “The next thing I knew, I wasn’t.”
“You weren’t what?” I asked.
“Standing,” he said. “My legs just gave way.”
I tried to get more details. He was evasive, kind of spacey. “Did you hit your head?”
“I don’t think so,” he said.
His self-diagnosis was stress. A project manager for a high-end residential contractor in Manhattan, he had just finished an enormous job, the complete renovation of a double town house for a client on the city’s Upper East Side with household name status. He hadn’t really taken any time off. A long weekend was approaching. He was just going to rest for a couple days.
My medical knowledge is basically nil, but I was pretty sure people don’t collapse for no reason.
“Fine,” I said. “But first, we’re going to the doctor.”
At ten o’clock the next morning, our doctor checked my husband’s vitals, asked some questions. No, he hadn’t had any dizziness before he fell. Hadn’t had any nausea. His legs just gave way, he repeated, waving it off as though he was embarrassed to be making a fuss. Ten minutes later, we were in a taxi on our way to the ER. Just to be sure it’s nothing serious, I thought to myself, taking note of how easily Mike—usually utterly obstinate when it came to doctor’s visits—complied.
An hour and a half after that, after X-rays and a brain scan, doctors in tandem came into the room where Mike lay resting. I was at his side. When they each took a seat, I knew their news wouldn’t be good. There was a mass in his upper right lung, and two suspected brain tumors.
I lost my breath. I reached for Mike’s hand. He closed his eyes, said nothing.
They admitted him immediately. And then began a parade of doctors and nurses and technicians that traipsed through his room. His roommate—an elderly Russian man, who spoke no English and had amassed a collection of alcohol packets which he seemed to be distilling through gauze—paid all this no attention, apparently accustomed to the foot traffic. More tests revealed a tumor pressing on the optic nerve. His eyesight was endangered. The neurosurgeons wanted to operate immediately. The oncologists insisted on determining the exact cancer they were dealing with: small-cell lung carcinoma, large-cell carcinoma, squamous cell carcinoma. First, though, they weren’t sure he was stable enough to be anesthetized to go through the lung biopsy. While the doctors continued to order more tests and haggled, I made phone calls to family, to friends who could take the dogs, to neighbors to watch the house, our son’s college (though not to our son yet) in case he would leave for the semester.
For two nights, I slept nestled between my husband and the metal bars of his hospital bed or on the vinyl-covered chair at his bedside. Nurses brought pillows and blankets and tea. On day three, they ordered the biopsy. Holding his hand, I walked alongside the wheelchair as he was taken down the hall, into the elevator, across the lobby, down another hall, into another elevator. We emerged, Mike, the two techs and I, onto a basement floor that was almost frigid. More cotton blankets were procured. Soon they wheeled him through double swinging doors without me. Shivering, I returned to his room.
Several hours later, he was resting comfortably in his room, his roommate watching a game show with the sound off, and I was on the phone in the corridor, talking with a close friend, when the young resident approached.
Clipboard in hand, she looked up at me quickly. “This is a get-your-affairs-in-order diagnosis,” she said before I could even say goodbye to my friend. Then letting the clipboard hang by her side,
she declared—in a tone one might use to order a sandwich at the deli, “Your husband has six weeks to nine months to live.”
An IV stand clinked against the metal sides of a gurney pushed by techs in maroon scrubs, an almost shrouded figure prone beneath the white blanket. The corridor’s fluorescent lights flickered off the white walls, white ceiling, the white mottled linoleum floor. My back flush against the corridor wall, a sharp inhale stabbed my chest and I thought: You don’t know my husband. You don’t know how strong he is, or how smart, how funny. You don’t know that he can build anything with his two hands. You don’t know anything…
The PA system paged someone to go somewhere. And I knew that I was not telling my husband that prognosis. And I was not telling our son. I would hold it so tightly it would never get out. It will be our secret, yours and mine, I thought. Her ignorance and arrogance would stay right there, in my chest.
“Any questions?” she asked, tossing that glistening hair over her shoulder.
I shook my head.
What to this day I wish I had spoken aloud is this: for all your education and all your training, you know nothing about being a human being.
Mike passed away peacefully at home twenty-three months later, after countless treatments and trials, and multiple brain surgeries.
What I’ve come to understand is that I didn’t divulge the prognosis, the death sentence, delivered by that young pulmonary resident in the public hallway under the quivering fluorescent lights. But I let it take away my hope and my prayers. Would my prayers have made a difference, have helped? Magical thinking, I can hear some say. But I believe they may have helped. They may have helped him live a little longer, a little better. Is it important to be prepared? Of course. And it’s important how you prepare. You can prepare someone with compassion, with connection, with presence. With your humanity intact. Because that’s where healing begins. For the one who is sick, and for the ones who may be left behind.