that Alexandra Parker was still in the O.R. They started late, and the nurse on the phone had no idea when they'd be finished.
The nurse walked back to Alex's room and found Sam and relayed the message, and he called his office again, apologizing for the eleven o'clock partners' meeting he was missing. He told them he'd catch up with them when he could, maybe even as late as one o'clock at La Grenouille. He just didn't feel right leaving without knowing what had happened.
It was finally twelve-thirty when they told him Alex was in the recovery room, four hours after she'd gone upstairs. The delays were ridiculous, he complained. And the nurse told him that Dr. Herman would be down to speak to him in a few minutes.
It was ten to one when he arrived, and Sam looked like a caged lion pacing the room, as he waited. He had been there for long enough with their dismal decor, and their antiseptic smells, and their endless waits designed for people who had nothing else to do with their lives. He had a business to run, and he couldn't sit around all day cooling his heels waiting to talk to some damn doctor.
“Mr. Parker?” Dr. Herman entered the room in his operating gown, with his mask still around his neck, and what looked like socks over his shoes. He extended a hand and shook Sam's, and very little showed in his eyes as Sam watched him.
“How's my wife?” He didn't waste any time, he assumed she was fine, and he was almost late for lunch with Simon, his assistant, and their new clients, after waiting for an entire morning.
“She's doing as well as we can expect right now. She lost very little blood, and we didn't have to give her any transfusions.” That was important to everyone these days, and he assumed it would be to Sam, but he looked unimpressed and a little confused when he heard it.
“Transfusions for a biopsy?” There was a long moment's silence. “Isn't that a little unusual?”
“Mr. Parker, as I suspected, your wife had a large mass deep in her breast, involving mainly the ducts, but it has infiltrated the surrounding tissue, although the margins of the tumor were clear. We'll have to wait another two or three days to tell us about possible lymph node involvement. But there was no question that it was a malignancy, and I believe it was a stage two cancer.” Sam's head suddenly reeled as he listened. It was not unlike what Alex had felt when she'd first heard that she had a shadow on her mammogram. All the information after that was just a jumble of sounds and noises.
“We're hoping that we got all of it,” Herman went on, “but I had already discussed with your wife the danger of a recurrence. Recurrences of breast cancer are more often than not fatal. And the important thing in successful treatment of cancers such as these is removing all of it, while it is still encapsulated, before it has spread to any other part of the system. To that end, we try to espouse extremely aggressive measures. With luck, if her lymph nodes are not excessively involved, I think we got it.”
“Just exactly what does that mean?” Sam asked, feeling sick, just asking him the question. “You took the mass out of her breast?”
“Obviously. We took the breast too, of course. It's the only way you can be absolutely sure there won't be a local recurrence. You can't have a recurrence in a breast that isn't there. It could recur in the chest wall, or travel elsewhere, of course, or metastasize, but that will depend on how advanced the tumor is, and how many lymph nodes are involved. But eliminating the breast solves a lot of problems.” Alex had understood that.
“Why didn't you just kill her? Wouldn't that solve the problem too? What kind of barbarian bullshit is that to just chop off her breast so it wouldn't spread? What kind of medicine do you people practice?” Sam was livid, and shouting.
“Cautious medicine, Mr. Parker. We endorse aggressive attacks against cancer. We don't want to lose our patients. And just so you understand, we did some axillary dissection too, which means we removed her underarm nodes, but I'm hoping she doesn't have a lot of nodular involvement. That will be confirmed by pathology in the next few days, and we'll have the results of her hormone receptor tests in