Six years ago on this date, Lee was languishing in a hospital bed, stricken with late-stage pancreatic cancer. Hers was a horrible existence.
She was in severe physical pain, of course, but was suffering terribly emotionally, too. She not only had trouble getting straight answers from members of the medical team, but, perhaps more importantly, felt she wasn’t being heard.
Understandably, members of the nursing staff, though generally compassionate, could not provide actual medical answers about her condition. They merely passed along the information they were able to glean from Lee in their notes to her medical chart.
I know Lee found it troubling that, despite frequent attempts to communicate with her primary oncologist, a woman whom she trusted with her life and had admired greatly, this physician suddenly now seemed too busy to visit her despite maintaining offices in the same hospital complex, literally, across the street.
Meanwhile, day after monotonous day, Lee would be passed off to whichever anonymous doctor happened to be performing rounds. Their recommendations seemed driven by their specialties: the surgeons suggested further surgical procedures; the palliative care doctors suggested new drug treatments for her pain, and so forth. But no one was willing to address Lee’s critical questions head-on. Was this cancer going to kill her, and if so, when?
We knew Lee’s cancer was serious, but to this point, after roughly eighteen months of various failed treatments and interventions, no medical expert had ever opined that Lee was living under a death sentence from which there would be no 11th-hour reprieve. Now at last, it was dawning on Lee and me that the bold and hopeful talk we’d been hearing from doctors since the onset of Lee’s cancer journey had just been talk.
It was time for plain talk. We continued to press the primary oncologist to meet with us face-to-face. Finally, one Saturday, around noon, the doctor showed up at Lee’s room.
It was just Lee, me, and Lee’s brother, Paul. The meeting didn’t last very long. Paul and I both had assumed this discussion was going to be about a recommendation for another surgery that one of the visiting doctors had suggested could be helpful in alleviating Lee’s excruciating abdominal pain.
Instead, Lee immediately cut to the chase. Am I going to die? For the first time, Lee’s oncologist conceded that the cancer was terminal. Lee pressed further. How long do I have? The doctor responded that Lee had three months, maybe a bit longer, before turning on her heel, never to be seen or heard from by us again.
We knew it was time for us to go home. I’m glad we did, because, looking back today, even this final and most dire forecast proved wildly optimistic.
