The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,114

didn’t want him to be humiliated by these younger guys. Josh never gave up on him, though. Never. Josh believed as I have never seen anyone believe. He kept telling me that as long as Fed could go deep into a Grand Slam tournament, he still had a chance.

Federer cut his 2016 season short by six months to recover from knee surgery. No one, including him, was expecting much at the Australian Open, the first Grand Slam of the year. Even so, he looked good in the rounds leading up to the finals. I still wasn’t watching. Josh questioned whether Federer should even strive to make the finals because it was looking more and more likely that he would meet Nadal, at whose hands he had suffered so much defeat, there; Nadal had long ago gotten into Federer’s head. Could Fed handle yet another defeat? Could we? I told Josh I didn’t think I could bear to watch another Federer defeat, and to Nadal no less. It would simply crush me. Josh got up early to watch the finals on tape delay, with me rising soon thereafter (after I had, of course, looked online to see that he had been broken early in the fifth set—not good at all; most assuredly he was on his way to losing). But I got up anyhow to support my devoted husband, with the slimmest bit of hope in the final outcome. Josh confiscated my phone when he saw me trying to sneak another look at a live update. So I really had no idea what was about to happen.

Somehow, some way, with the momentum against him, Federer dug deep and held serve and proceeded to break Nadal to level the set, held his own serve easily again, and then broke Nadal again. He won the match soundly shortly thereafter. Josh and I, our hearts racing, were jumping up and down, dancing for joy, hugging, kissing, high-fiving. The kids would definitely have thought we were certifiably crazy, but we had locked them in our bedroom at the far end of the apartment and turned on nonstop Monster High. In his postmatch interviews, Federer spoke of how sweet this victory was, given that it had taken him so long, given how hard he had worked, given his age, given all the naysayers.

Josh never stopped believing in Federer. He has never stopped believing in me, either, never. Even when I’ve said that it’s game over for me, that I am dying. I told him that this past birthday would be my last. My emphatic statements and the disheartening scan results no doubt have made him question his own belief, but he still held firm. I told him he was delusional, that he just couldn’t accept my death, that he had to tell himself I still had a chance for his own sanity. He would look at my skin and watch how I move about and he would say, You’re not dying. He would say, As long as you are still playing, you still have a chance.

Federer won, and I felt like that was a sign in late January, that I had to actually start listening to my husband. Horror of horrors! But what else was I supposed to do exactly?

40

Pain

For a week, I’ve been trying to write, but nothing comes out. Nothing coherent. Nothing good. I am in chaos, and so there can be no good writing under the circumstances.

I have been unable to persuade Dr. Y., the radiation oncologist, to move up radiation treatment on my spine. He didn’t perceive any immediate danger; he said the tumor seemed to be growing into my bone, rather than toward my spinal cord. I suppose he was right, since I made it to the radiation treatment on June 5 without becoming paralyzed beforehand. In fact, the pain seemed to ease in the interim. I was shocked and attributed it to my conscious effort to sleep with proper alignment. I had three radiation treatments on consecutive days. The treatments themselves were uneventful, quick and easy enough. It was the aftereffects I hadn’t quite expected. Pain. Excruciating, throbbing pain in my upper right back, the kind of pain that had me sitting up at night, desperate to rip that part of my body out. I turned to oxycodone, which relieved the pain but had me feeling washed out the next day, very sleep-deprived, nauseated and vomiting multiple times in twelve hours. Apparently, it is normal for the pain to