Chapter 1: Part 8

Continued from part 7

Hal hadn't been sedated when I arrived at his room the next morning.

The surgery was scheduled for one hour from then, eleven o'clock. He was calm and loving and didn't show any signs of nervousness. Hal was never good at showing nervousness; he could cry at the sight of a terrible natural disaster on television but couldn't cry for himself.
We both felt relieved to know what the problem was and we firmly believed that this operation would take care of it. The thing is, you simply are incapable of seeing too far ahead when your life is splintering. We've always been lucky; so what's a little cancer? Or to use what was to become Hal's favorite expression, "Cancer shmancer, just so long as you've got your health."

Next came the hospital game called The Big Switch. Once the surgery was done Hal would be be moved from his medical ward to a surgical floor. The nurse instructed us to bundle up all his things and take them with us until the new room was designated. We each carried plastic bags full of the accumulation of three weeks enforced stay, with his clothing draped over our arms.

We found the special waiting room on the operating room floor. People behave in strange ways during a stressful time. Most people in this room sat hunched over their knees, barely speaking. We sat and gossiped and giggled. We were three manic women doing anything to keep from imagining what was happening down the corridor. The volunteer in this room checked a couple of times and reported the operation was progressing satisfactorily and should be finished soon. Finally she announced it was finished and the doctor would be along soon.

Another hour dragged by and the doctor hadn't come. We became very quiet, wondering what might have gone wrong. Finally the volunteer reported that because of several delays, the doctor had been forced to immediately begin the next operation and would be along after that.

At last he stood at the entrance to the room and motioned me into the hall.

"Your husband came through the operation very well. The tumor was in the large intestine, close to the join to the small intestine; it was very large and had become embedded in the intestinal wall."

I breathed a deep sigh. It never for a moment occurred to me to ask the standard question, "Did you get it all?"

There was more.

" Also, I'm afraid there are some spots on the liver." I thought my heart would pound right through my chest.

" I couldn't remove them because they were pretty well separated; if they had been clustered in one lobe, I could have tried to remove the lobe."

He continued on and finally asked me the usual, did I have any questions. I felt as though a permanent, all-enveloping grey cloud had descended over me. My uncle had died of liver cancer and I tried to remember how long he survived. I thought it was about two years.

I said, "No one survives cancer of the liver."

This dear man then did me the biggest of favors and set the tone for the next part of our lives. He looked sternly at me and said,

"Now look, I promised your husband yesterday that I would level with him. He wanted the absolute truth about what I did and what I found. This is not a death sentence. I know of a man who lived another eighteen years with cancer on his liver. Don't write your husband off because of this. You've both got lots of living to do. Now I'll be in first thing in the morning to tell him what we found."

He squeezed my shoulder and left. I wasn't able to take it in just then, but his message would slowly seep into my subconscious over the next few days.

to be continued in part 9