an occipital seizure,” he confirmed. “That explains the hallucinations and the blurred vision afterward. Also the headache. All very common with this region.”
Hallucinations? Blurred vision? “I don’t understand how blindness in an eye could cause seizures.”
He frowned at me. “It’s not the eye causing the seizures. It’s the tumor.”
I stopped breathing.
Didn’t breathe, didn’t blink.
The tumor?
The doc walked me over to a computer station in the hallway and pulled up her CT-scan images on the screen. He circled a white area inside my mother’s skull about the size of a Ping-Pong ball with his pen—as if anyone with eyes could miss it. He motioned for me to lean in. If he had any qualms about doctor-patient confidentiality, or the fact that she clearly had not told her daughter the fireman about the situation inside her skull, he did not mention them.
“Holy shit,” I said, and I realized I was having the same feeling I’d had back at the station when Josie had called. Not clarity, but the opposite.
He nodded. “It’s a doozie.”
I didn’t know what to say. But I felt like I should have something to say. Professionally, anyway. I scanned through my knowledge of types of brain tumors. “Glioblastoma?” I finally asked.
He shook his head. “It’s not primary. It’s secondary. A melanoma recurrence many years later. But it’s large enough now to impact the brain.”
Wait—she’d had a melanoma? Hospitals mixed up charts all the time. Maybe this doc was thinking of another old lady with a homemade calico eye patch.
“Is it malignant?” I asked.
“Oh, yes,” the doctor said. He looked almost excited about it. And I got that. When you see these things all the time, sometimes the people behind them start to seem like a whole different story.
I shifted back a little.
“I’d say she has a few months,” the doctor said, still staring at the screen. “A year at the most.”
I felt a sudden collapse in my chest. A year at the most.
The doctor glanced over at me, read my face, and seemed to remember he was talking to a human. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess she hadn’t told you.”
“She had not told me,” I confirmed, keeping my eyes on the films in front of me, like I was studying them. Which I wasn’t.
It seemed impossibly rude that he hadn’t bothered to trim his nose hairs before delivering information like that—as if it were just some ordinary moment in some ordinary day.
The doc stared at the films alongside me, but I got the feeling he wasn’t studying them, either.
I felt sorry for him, in a way. He never expected, popping in, that he’d be delivering this kind of news to an unsuspecting family member. I knew what it felt like, how it jolted the system. I knew how you had to gird yourself for it—go in fully armored. It was always the moments you didn’t expect that haunted you the most.
I’d given bad news to hundreds of people over the years. Sometimes they collapsed to the floor. Sometimes they screamed, or erupted into sobs. Sometimes they went eerily silent. One woman had slapped me across the face.
For a second, I thought more about what that doctor must have been feeling in that moment than what I was.
Until he said, “Well. The good news is, she seems to be otherwise healthy. As far as we can tell.”
I felt sorry for him right then, trying to come up with some good news. But I felt sorrier for me. Because there really was no good news.
* * *
THE DOCTOR WENT into the room after that, but I stayed in the hallway. I don’t remember saying good-bye to him, or thank you, or whatever I must have said. I just remember the most searing feeling of cognitive dissonance. A total stranger, with one unexpected sentence, had just irrevocably changed the story of my life.
On the way into the hospital, I’d thought I might ask for an X-ray, but now my ankle was forgotten. I’d worry about it later, if it didn’t get better. It was all I could do to soak the news in. My brain couldn’t understand it. It was like a white fog inside my head where the comprehension should be.
A year at the most.
She’d known this whole time. She’d known, and she hadn’t told me.
I felt my knees start to tremble, and because I wasn’t ready to face her, I found a sitting area in the hallway. My brain didn’t understand, but my body did.
Why hadn’t I tried harder?