Terminal

“We don’t know much yet,” Dr. Judy Buckley said. “These initial images are very superficial cuts.” Judy Buckley was the chief of neuroradiology and had been happy to come into the hospital at the director’s request. Also in attendance were Dr. Vance Martinez, the Sharenburgs’ internist, and Dr. Stanton Rainey, chief of neurology. It was a prominent group of experts to be assembled at any hour, much less at one o’clock in the morning.

Ted paced the tiny control room. He couldn’t sit still. The story he’d been told about his daughter had been devastating.

“She experienced an acute paranoid psychosis,” Dr. Martinez had explained. “Symptoms like that can occur, especially with some sort of involvement of the temporal lobe.”

Ted reached the end of the room for the fiftieth time and turned. He looked through the glass at the giant MRI machine. He could just barely see his daughter. It was as if she were being swallowed by a technological whale. He hated being so helpless. All he could do was watch, and hope. He’d felt almost as vulnerable when she’d had her tonsils out a few months earlier.

“We’ve got something,” Dr. Buckley said.

Ted hurried over to the CRT screen.

“There’s a hyperintense circumscribed area in the right temporal lobe,” she said.

“What does it mean?” Ted demanded.

The doctors exchanged glances. It was not customary for the relative of a patient to be in the room during such a study.

“It’s probably a mass lesion,” Dr. Buckley said.

“Can you put that in lay terms?” Ted asked, trying to keep his voice even.

“She means a brain tumor,” Dr. Martinez said. “But we know very little at this point, and we should not jump to conclusions. The lesion might have been there for years.”

Ted swayed. His worst fears were materializing. Why couldn’t he be in that machine and not his daughter?

“Uh oh!” Dr. Buckley said, forgetting the effect such an exclamation would have on Ted. “Here’s another lesion.”

The doctors clustered around the screen, transfixed by the vertically unfolding images. For a few moments they forgot about Ted.

“You know it reminds me of the case I told you about in Boston,” said Dr. Rainey. “A young woman in her twenties with multiple intracranial tumors and negative metastatic workup. She was proved to have medulloblastoma.”

“I thought medulloblastoma occurs in the posterior fossa,” Dr. Martinez said.

“It usually does,” Dr. Rainey said. “It also usually occurs in younger kids. But twenty percent or so of the incidents are in patients over twenty, and it’s occasionally found in regions of the brain besides the cerebellum. Actually, it would be wonderful if it turns out to be medulloblastoma in this case.”

“Why?” Dr. Buckley asked. She was aware of the high mortality of the cancer.

“Because a group down in Miami has had remarkable success in getting remissions with that particular tumor.”

“What’s their name?” Ted demanded, clutching onto the first hopeful news he’d heard.

“The Forbes Cancer Center,” Dr. Rainey said. “They haven’t published yet but word of that kind of a result gets around.”

3

March 2

Tuesday, 6:15 A.M.

When Tom Widdicomb awoke at 6:15 to begin his workday, Sean Murphy had already been on the road for several hours, planning on reaching the Forbes Cancer Center by mid-morning. Tom did not know Sean, and had no idea he was expected. Had he known that their lives would soon intersect, his anxiety would have been even greater. Tom was always anxious when he decided to help a patient, and the night before he’d decided to help not one but two women. Sandra Blankenship on the second floor would be the first. She was in great pain and already receiving her chemotherapy by IV. The other patient, Gloria D’Amataglio, was on the fourth floor. That was a bit more worrisome since the last patient he’d helped, Norma Taylor, had also been on the fourth floor. Tom didn’t want any pattern to emerge.

His biggest problem was that he constantly worried about someone suspecting what he was doing, and on a day that he was going to act, his anxiety could be overwhelming. Still, sensitive to gossip on the wards, he’d heard nothing that suggested that anyone was suspicious. After all, he was dealing with women who were terminally ill. They were expected to die. Tom was merely saving everyone from additional suffering, especially the patient.

Tom showered, shaved, and dressed in his green uniform, then went into his mother’s kitchen. She always got up before he did, insistent every morning as far back as he could remember that he should eat a good breakfast since he wasn’t as strong as other boys. Tom and his mother, Alice, had lived together in their close, secret world from the time Tom’s dad died when Tom was four. That was when he and his mother had started sleeping together, and his mother had started calling him “her little man.”