She smiles.
“Not exactly as I was taught in med school,” she says. “But I gotta say, pal, in this case it’saccurateas shit.”
The room goes silent then, except for the monitor. I hear the PA system outside in the hallway, a nurse being summoned to one of the rooms on my floor. The ping of an elevator bell. Hospital sounds. Again. I’ve spent too much time in hospitals lately, in two countries.
Now I am back.
It never ends.
But I knew that before ending up here again.
“Is this about my cancer?” I ask Sam Wylie finally.
“Yes and no,” she says.
ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN
DR. BEN KALINSKY COMES into the room, having gone to get coffee for him and for Jimmy. He leans over and kisses me on the forehead, pulls up a chair next to Jimmy, and takes my free hand in his.
“But Iamback from the abyss?” I ask Sam Wylie.
She looks fabulous, as always, in a navy dress. She’s even wearing pearls.
“Back from the abyss yet again,” she says.
She does her best then to simplify what I generally refer to as her doctor hooptedoodle. The first time I used the expression, she told me in her smart-ass way that it actually came from a John Steinbeck book. She even told me what book.Sweet Thursday.
The things you remember.
Sam tells me that fainting the way I did at Jimmy’s bar was the culmination of what she says was a perfect medical storm: the drugs in my system, fatigue, dehydration yet again, hypertension, dangerously low blood pressure, and the thing that she said was like a lit fuse for all the rest of it, anemia.
“Are there any boxes that I didn’t check?” I ask when she’s finished.
“Yeah,” Sam Wylie says. “A broken fucking leg.”
She further explains that the IV to which I’m attachedhas been pumping me with a cocktail of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and fluids ever since I was admitted last night.
“So maybe drinking wine wasn’t the best idea I’ve had lately?”
Sam smiles again. “Yeah, but ask yourself something, Jane,” she says. “When has an extra glass of wine ever been a good idea for you?”
“So, I’m not dying.”
“Not today.”
“So when can I get out of here?”
Ben squeezes my hand. “Asks Miss Impatient,” he says.
“Just a bad patient, if you ask me,” Jimmy says.
“Look who’s talking,” I say.
“Mike Gellis is on his way,” Sam says.
My oncologist.
“Since you were already so nice to come to the hospital,” she continues, “Mike doesn’t see any reason to wait until next week to do more imaging on the tumor.”
