by Emily Bold
‘Thirsty!’ Lauren managed weakly, but was barely able to keep her eyes open. The aftereffects of her anesthetic made her sleepy.
‘You’re not yet allowed to eat or drink anything, Lauren, otherwise you might vomit. But they have you on a saline solution through the IV.’
Lauren remembered that the doctor had mentioned this before the surgery, but this did not stop her from being excessively thirsty and having a burning throat.
‘Are you all right? Are you in pain?’ He hesitated and studied her expression. ‘Can you move everything? Remember everything?’
The worry in his voice was unmistakable. But Lauren found it impossible to concentrate on anything else but her need for some water.
The door opened, and an entire fleet of doctors poured in. Doctor Eckhard led the charge, along with Professor Ahrens, the German neurosurgeon who had overseen the operation. Eckhard checked that the IV was working properly, and glanced over the machines that Lauren was connected to.
‘You’re back among the living, Mrs Parker,’ Professor Ahrens welcomed her and stepped toward her bed. He shone a light into her pupils, and smiled. ‘You’ll be pleased to know that the operation went very well. We are very happy with the amount of tumor cells we were able to remove without causing damage to the brain.’ He gave Tim an encouraging nod, too. ‘A tissue sample is now on its way to the laboratory, where the tumor will be classified. After that, we can take additional therapies into consideration.’
Lauren found it hard to follow, but she interpreted the expression on his face as good. She attempted a smile, but her lips hurt from the excessive dryness. However, she wasn’t too worried about that right now. Ahrens brought good news – which was all that mattered. Encouragingly, Tim squeezed her hand. There was hope and confidence in his blue eyes.
‘So what happens next? How long will Lauren have to stay in the Intensive Care unit?’
Eckhard looked at them in a friendly way, tucked Lauren’s patient record under his arm and put his fingers together.
‘For one night at the very least. Once everything is stable, we’ll transfer you to the normal ward. And we should be able to send you home within a few days. We just need to run a few more tests to make sure that you won’t be experiencing any neurological malfunctions. Sometimes after procedures such as this, patients may experience a post-surgery cerebral edema, some swelling, or fluid retention. We want to keep an eye on that.’
Lauren nodded weakly – or at least she tried to, but she was barely able to move. Eckhard touched a switch, and the head section of her bed was raised up a little, shifting Lauren into a half-sitting position.
‘Ring the bell if you need anything – or ask your husband to ring it for you. If you experience any pain, please don’t hesitate to call me. We take pain management very seriously around here.’
‘Thank you, doctor.’ Tim’s face finally started to regain its color.
‘And now we’re going to need to bother you for a little bit,’ one of the other physicians explained, folding back the blanket over Lauren’s feet. Using a curved metal needle, he tried to determine whether Lauren had any feeling in her legs or feet, by pressing it into the soles of Lauren’s feet, and running it over her insteps and the balls. He also ordered Lauren to make various movements, and asked her to perform several mental calculations. Next she was asked to talk about episodes from her childhood, and he wanted to know what she’d had for lunch the day before.
Lauren felt like a guinea pig being experimented on, but tried to do everything correctly, despite how tired she was. While the world around her kept slipping in and out of focus, everything else about her felt normal. She knew the names of her children, their birthdays, remembered her favorite dish, and was able (albeit slowly) to recite the alphabet backwards.
When finally the team of neurologists, oncologists, and surgeons was satisfied, Lauren felt worn out and exhausted. As soon as the door had closed the door, she breathed a sigh of relief and slumped back into her pillow.
‘You did a great job!’ Tim praised her, applying lip balm to her chapped lips. ‘You’re very brave, Lauren. And I’m so glad you’re all right.’
He breathed a kiss against her cheek and cautiously ran his hand over the dressing around her head.
For the first time since she’d come to, she realized how terrible she must look. With the dressing, the tubes, the electrodes . . .
She was grateful that Tim was with her despite all that, holding her hand. She wasn’t sure she’d be strong enough if the situation were reversed. Gingerly, she raised her hand and felt her head. She touched her hair that spilled out under the dressing by her ear and wondered what she might look like without all that white gauze.
Lauren knew it was ridiculous for her to worry about her looks at a moment like this. After all, she’d just had brain surgery. Still, she could not turn off her sense of vanity, and she hoped people wouldn’t stop and stare at her just because the back of her head had been shaved.
‘You have no idea how tired I am,’ Lauren whispered and lowered her hand again. It was too late to do anything about her hair anyway.
‘I can imagine. You look exhausted. You’ve been through a huge operation, honey. Get some rest, it’ll make you feel better.’
Lauren wanted nothing more than to get lost in Tim’s blue eyes. His smile made her feel safe, and she felt his love.
‘I don’t want to fall asleep. I’m scared to wake up and be alone, surrounded by all these machines,’ she confessed.
Tim bent down to her and pressed another kiss on her cheek.
‘I’ll be here for as long as you need me, Lauren. I’m not going anywhere, I promise.’
His promise brought tears to her eyes. ‘You can’t stay. The kids must be waiting.’
‘They’re in good hands over at your parents. Today you need me more than they do. I’ll stay for as long as you want me to. And now try to sleep.’
* * *
Tired, Lauren closed her eyes. Even her voice sounded frail, although she could feel the river of life coursing through her veins. Now more than ever she wanted to hold on to today.
‘Weren’t you doing better after the operation?’ Chris asked, taking a sip from his beer bottle. It was as if his tattoos were coming to life in the flickering light of the flames. As if snakes and dragons were coiling around his body. Lauren shook her head to wipe the image from her mind.
‘Yes, I expected to feel better after the operation, but I didn’t. The headaches lessened but then with all the waiting around . . . I felt like my entire life was spent in waiting rooms. First I had to wait for the surgery, then I had to wait for the lab results. I never expected waiting to be such an awful thing.’
Waiting
The day before, Lauren had been discharged from the hospital and was told to take things slow. Her vision was still slightly blurry – an aftereffect of the surgery – and her sense of balance was impaired, which was why she was not allowed to drive or leave the house unaccompanied. Not that she was planning on leaving the house anyway. Although the way they had shaved her head and the scar from the operation were not as noticeable as she had feared. She could easily comb the rest of her hair over it, and nobody would notice. Still, she felt incapable of facing the rest of the world just yet. In a way, after the shock of the diagnosis she no longer felt connected. She felt isolated, as if nobody were able to empathize with her fears and with what she was going through. Not even Tim.
She was not being fair to him, she knew that, because he could not be more attentive. But this didn’t change the fact that she was angry at him for some reason. Angry, because he didn’t share her fear of dying.
Lauren touched her forehead and put her feet up on the coffee table. This was ridiculous!
The TV was on, but she wasn’t watching it because it made her head hurt even more. For a moment, she thought about turning it off, but decided against it. The background noise gave her a feeling of normalcy. Besides, i
t made her feel less alone. The couple on the television screen were yelling at each other because he had cheated on her with her sister. It took the host all his strength to keep the two of them far enough apart to avoid a physical fight. Lauren raised her eyebrows in irritation. Relationship issues!
When the fighting became more vocal and foul-mouthed, she turned the TV off after all, but felt restless in the sudden silence. She walked into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water to wash down her medication.
If she held on to the countertops, she was actually doing quite well – in spite of her poor sense of balance. In truth, she really wanted to give Rachel a call. But since she and Tim had decided not tell anyone about the tumor just yet, it seemed strange even talking about her operation. She didn’t want to lie to her friends, but they were under the impression – just like her parents – that the procedure had something to do with her migraines. Bad enough that they’d trotted out this migraine story in the first place, but they didn’t want to worry anyone unnecessarily.
Before spending time at the hospital, this had seemed the sensible choice to make, but now all Lauren wanted was someone to talk to.
Maybe she should invite Rachel over for a coffee and tell her the whole story. Everything inside her screamed to her to talk to her best friend. On the other hand, she was afraid to give the tumor more weight than was necessary. As if her words could fuel its growth and make it worse.
She hoped that if the tumor wasn’t mentioned, it would fade into nothingness: just the boring origin story behind some headaches – a story that would have a happy ending and that nobody would need to worry about anymore.
Feeling frustrated, she sat down by the kitchen island and opened the daily newspaper. She needed to keep busy until the lab results were in. According to Doctor Eckhard, this could take a few days. If only he knew what a few days of waiting were doing to her!
She scanned the headlines without paying them much attention to them. When she reached the last page, she folded the pages back together and carefully smoothed them down. The letters were blurry, and she gave up trying to make sense of them. Hopefully her poor eyesight would soon improve.
Dejected, she shuffled back into the living room and collapsed into the sofa. She put her feet up, trying to relax, and looked out of the window. Not long now until the start of fall. The first few leaves were changing color, and the birds outside were angrily bickering over the berries hanging from the bushes.
A sparrow fluttered from the hedges onto the roof of the garden shed, and Lauren’s eyes wandered over the peeling paint on its exterior walls. They would really need to give it a fresh coat of paint in the spring. Oh, there was so much that needed to be done! And never enough time to do it.
In her mind, Lauren started making a list of all the things she wanted to stop putting off once and for all. Paint the shed; plant onions (which she had bought several weeks ago) in the vegetable patch outside the patio doors; and the windows could really do with a wash, too. Why had she never noticed before? Now that she was condemned to doing nothing, work seemed to lurk in every corner. And just like the time she had felt the need to build a nest during her pregnancy, now it again felt as if everything needed her immediate attention. If only she could be back on her feet again!
She was so lost in thought that she flinched when the front door opened.
Alyssa stormed in, running through the hallway and swinging her school backpack like a lasso. The vase on the apothecary chest was dangerously close to the twirling backpack, and Lauren jolted up.
‘Alyssa, stop! Slow down!’ she called. But only Mia, who entered behind her little sister, looked at Lauren, a grumpy expression on her face.
‘You’re supposed to stop, you little toadhead!’ she hissed at Alyssa, yanking the backpack from her.
‘Hey!’ Alyssa wailed. ‘Give it back!’
‘Mom said stop!’ Mia repeated.
‘Enough – both of you!’
‘Mommy, Mia called me a toadhead!’
‘Because you’re hopping around like a crazy person!’
‘I’m not crazy! You’re crazy . . . and mean!’
‘I’m only doing what Mom told me to do!’
‘Mom didn’t say for you to be mean!’
‘Quiet! Shut up, the both of you!’ Lauren screamed, rising to her feet with a stagger. Her head was about to burst, and the entire room was spinning. ‘Another word, and there’ll be hell to pay!’
‘But, Mom . . .’ Mia started.
‘No more buts! You’ll be quiet now! Go to your rooms and . . . and don’t ever come down again!’ she panted, pressing against her temples with the flats of her hands.
Both girls stared at her with their mouths wide open. Never before had Lauren taken that tone of voice with them. United in the feeling that they had been treated unfairly, the two sisters grabbed each other’s hands and angrily stormed upstairs. When the bedroom doors slammed closed behind them, Lauren sank back down onto the sofa. She was shivering. Her eyes met Tim’s, who was standing, startled, in the front door.
‘Everything all right?’ he asked anxiously. Lauren moaned and shook her head.
‘Dear lord! I don’t know what’s gotten into me!’
‘What happened?’ With a frown, Tim looked up at the stairs.
‘Nothing, really,’ Lauren said. ‘They were squabbling, as always. But I . . .’ Embarrassed, she pressed her lips together and kneaded her fingers. ‘ . . . I completely lost it. My head, I thought it was going to explode!’
Finally, Tim unfroze and closed the front door behind him. Thoughtfully, he entered the living room and sat down beside Lauren.
‘That’s totally understandable. Your nerves are on edge, and I can’t blame you for it. Why don’t you take some time out until you’re back on your feet again?’
‘This has nothing to do with the operation. It’s this miserable waiting around! I can’t take it anymore. I need to know what’s going on, you know what I mean?’
She ran her fingers through her hair, feeling the stitches on the back of her head.
‘Of course. I want to know what the lab results say as much as you do, so that we can get back to our normal life.’
Lauren didn’t respond. She would have loved to share Tim’s optimistic outlook on things, but she found it impossible to do. Fear was eating away at her insides, and as long as she didn’t hear back from the doctors she couldn’t be sure, couldn’t be in a position to hope.
And so she only nodded and leaned back against the cushions.
‘How was your day, anyway?’ she said, changing the subject.
‘Same old, nothing special. But when I picked Mia up from school, I saw her holding hands with a boy – until she spotted me!’ he told her, rubbing his chin. ‘Isn’t she a little too young for a boyfriend?’
This was the last thing Lauren needed! She took a deep breath.
‘Definitely. I’m sure it was this Seth guy. Did you mention it to her?’
Tim laughed.
‘And incur her wrath? No thank you. That sort of talk is your responsibility as her mother.’
‘Sure it is. But you’re the lawyer in this family, and you’re better at arguing a case.’
‘As if she’d listen to me!’
Lauren let out a theatrical sigh. ‘All right. I’ll take care of Seth – and you can pick up the pieces of furniture if she breaks anything in a fit of rage.’
‘Agreed. Why don’t you have a word with her out in the yard? It would reduce the risk of her breaking anything.’
Lauren looked out the window, wondering how on earth she was going to lure Mia outside. These days, her sulky teenager tended to lock herself in her room and acted as if the zombie apocalypse was raging outside. Even though it was her who was turning into a zombie. Her clothes were getting darker, and black was becoming her favorite color.
Lauren rubbed her hands over her face.
As if they didn’t have enough prob
lems already!
She nestled into the crook of Tim’s arm, taking deep breaths of his familiar scent. There was a scratch on his neck from playing hockey, and tenderly she traced the line with her finger. Nobody was beyond injury. Not Tim, and not her.
Except that everyone’s injuries were different. Gingerly, she felt for the rubbery stitches on the back of her head again.
She had almost relaxed into Tim’s embrace when the telephone set her pulse racing.
* * *
Mia was biting her fingernails, looking awkward. The guilt was clearly written on her face, even in the low light of the dying fire.
‘I’m sorry, Mom,’ she muttered under her breath and bashfully lowered her eyes. ‘But I had no idea what was going on.’
‘Oh, honey!’ Lauren hugged her daughter, pressing her tightly against her. ‘My sweet darling!’ she mumbled into Mia’s pitch-black curls. ‘It’s me who is sorry! That was a bad time for all of us. You did nothing wrong, you hear?’
Mia nodded and wrapped her arms around her mother.
‘I want everything to be like before, Mom,’ she sniffled, wiping over her eyes with the sleeve of her black woolen sweater.
‘We all do, sweetie. But that telephone call and the hospital visit right after changed everything.’
All Meaning Lost
Lauren stared at her hands. She could overhear Tim whispering with the counselor that the hospital had assigned them to help them handle the diagnosis better.
Lauren let out a breath like a hiss. As if anything this stranger said would help! Nothing could help. Nothing. Again and again she twiddled the wedding band on her finger, surprised at how cold her hands were. So cold it was as though she was already dead. But she wasn’t. Not yet.
‘. . . in your case is a glioblastoma. A malign tumor, grade IV on the WHO classification scale,’ Lauren could still hear Professor Ahrens’ harsh German accent in her head. Lauren had been surprised at how easily he’d talked about the face that the tumor would lead to a drastic reduction in life expectancy. Even though they’d been able to remove a large part of the tumor mass. ‘A glioblastoma tumor is so malicious due to its diffusely infiltrating growth. We must assume that the tumor cells have already penetrated additional tissue where they are going to continue to expand. This is why the complete removal of glioblastoma tumor cells is basically impossible.’