Hospital Corridor

As we were wheeling Jacob to CAT scan, she looked at Jeremy and me. Do you have other children? she asked. No, I said.

She shook her head back and forth making a tsk tsk sound with her mouth. I don't remember much about her except she was heavyset and hopefully close to retirement. She had large wet eyes lolling with pity. Our plight made her exhausted.

We moved on quickly. We had somewhere to be. Also, the only way through this was through it.

Later, after all of the screaming, crying, testing, surgery, pathology reports, meetings with oncologists and more imaging, we had a lay of the land. Jacob's prognostic indicators were high. His tumor type was exquisitely sensitive to chemotherapy. The neurosurgeon in particular had a lithe way with words.

I carried Jacob's good prognosis through a lot of places. I took it over to that long, ugly hallway where the lady gave her sorry assessment of the three of us. I slapped her again and again with Jacob's good news. I didn't  do this for real, but it's vivid in my mind anyway.

Much later, after all was said and done and Jacob had landed on the wrong side of the prognosis, the not a home run side, the sorry side, I realize that the lady was indeed right. But it was not helpful to write Jacob off so early on. She shouldn't have done that.

But yeah, skipping over the optimism, the treatments and the clean scans, she had it correct in the end. She can still go fuck herself because one thing I learned is that hope based on solid evidence is never wasted.

It's odd to think of her now. I imagine her laying her head down one last time, welcoming death, weary from years spent in that hospital, witness to people like us.

It was her time. She's in a better place now. Stuff that people say when someone dies from natural causes at more or less the acceptable time. Things we never hear about Jacob, at least not out loud or within earshot.


From the archives:
The Best Thing Someone Never Said To Me
So Long
Nothing