A cool skim of a glance at me, as she turned back to the counter. “How come you don’t like the idea?”
What I didn’t like was the implication that Hugo’s doctors might have missed a trick. It raised the horrible possibility that mine might have done the same thing, left something undone that could have magicked me straight back to normal if only they had bothered— “I just don’t want Hugo getting his hopes up for nothing.”
“Better than having him give up when he doesn’t need to.”
“What do you think is going to happen? This Swiss guy is going to come back and say hey, surprise, he doesn’t have cancer after all?”
“No. But he might come back and say hey, we could try surgery and chemo after all.”
“If there was any chance of that, I think at least one of the first three guys would have mentioned it.”
“They’re all buddies. They’re not going to contradict each other. If the first one says there’s nothing they can do—”
“I was in the same hospital,” I said, “and my doctors were great. They did absolutely everything anyone could have done. Everything.”
“Good. I’m glad. I’m sure they did.”
I had just taken out the tea bags before the teapot and I couldn’t work out what to do with them while I looked for it, and I really wasn’t in the mood for that cool flat tone. I knew I should probably be encouraging her, or at least I should prefer all this no-stone-unturned stuff to Leon’s doom and gloom, but what I actually wanted was for everyone to fuck off and leave us alone. “So why are you looking for a fourth opinion?”
“Because,” Susanna said, buttering half a scone with one hard neat sweep, “Hugo’s not you. He’s sixty-seven, and he’s obviously not some rich powerful big shot—he doesn’t even have health insurance, did you know that? He’s been going public. And let’s face it, he’s vague enough and scruffy enough that if you weren’t paying a lot of attention, you could easily write him off as a batty old loser. At least he’s a guy and he’s white and he’s got a posh accent, so he’s got those going for him, but still: just because they went all out for you, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re going to pump the same resources into some half-senile old geezer who’s probably going to die soon anyway.”
The rush of anger took me by surprise. “Well that’s just bullshit,” I said, after a moment where I couldn’t even talk. “For fuck’s sake, Su. You seriously think they’re deliberately letting Hugo die, just because he’s old and scatty and not a millionaire? These are doctors. I don’t know what kind of social-justice-warrior shite you’ve been reading, but their job is to make people better, if they can. Which sometimes they can’t. That doesn’t mean they’re evil villains rubbing their hands and looking for ways to fuck up people’s lives.”
Susanna pulled the teapot out of a cupboard, whipped the tea bags out of my hand and dropped them in. “Remember when Gran got sick?” she asked. “Horrible stomach pain, for weeks, all bloated up? She went to her GP three times, she went into the ER twice, and they all said the same thing: constipation, go home and take a nice senna tablet, good girl. No matter how many times she told them that wasn’t it.”
“So they made mistakes. They’re human.” I didn’t actually remember any of this. I had been thirteen, head humming with girls and friends and rugby and bands and school; I had visited Gran at least a couple of times a week while she was sick, used my pocket money to buy her favorite fruit-and-nut chocolate as long as she could eat and her favorite yellow freesias when she couldn’t, but I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to all the ancillary stuff.
“Basically,” Susanna said, “they took one look at Gran and decided she was just a batty old lady looking for attention. Even though ten seconds of actually listening to her would’ve told them she wasn’t like that at all. You know what it took before they bothered to even check for stomach cancer? My dad finally went in and gave her GP a massive bollocking. Then he sent her for tests. And by that time it was too late to do anything useful.”
“It might have been too late anyway. You don’t have a clue.”
“Yeah, it might’ve. Or it might not. That’s not the point.