The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,43

from my worst dream, except I’d never dreamed this nightmare of the people closest to me in this life crying over me like I was already dead. I wanted to pinch myself awake and find myself back in New York living the life I knew and loved, but the pain in my hard and distended abdomen reminded me constantly that this was all too real and that this was a living nightmare to which there was no foreseeable end.

17

The Hand of God

I follow no institutionalized religion and have no patience for proselytizing, but I do have faith in a higher power—most of the time, anyhow. In my elusive moments of faith, when I am alone and still and no one asks me to verbalize or justify that faith, I know with a certainty that I could never explain that the hand of God has touched my life.

Even as the memories of that period of diagnosis continue to traumatize me, I also recall that time with a certain fondness. It was a magical period full of beauty and incomparable love; and it is that sense of magic and wonder that also resonates for me of providence.

Even as I and my immediate family were trying to process the fact that I had cancer and fighting through the paralyzing shock in my tiny half of the hospital room that Sunday morning of July 7—I don’t think we had quite made it to the point of thinking about what had to happen next. For I think it was literally minutes after Josh had handed me the colonoscopy report and my brother was still sitting by my bedside—my cellphone rang. A caller from New York with a phone number that was vaguely familiar. Automatically, I answered, “Hello?”

“This is Dr. F. We spoke the other day when I advised you to go to the ER. I’m just calling to check in and see what happened,” the voice on the other end said. It was the doctor covering for my internist, Dr. N.L., over the Fourth of July weekend, calling me on a Sunday and minutes after I had received this devastating news. Did he have a sixth sense that something had happened?

I was just so happy to hear a medical voice from “home,” at least the place I considered my adult home, where my life was, where my trusted doctors were. My response was immediate, even if it was somewhat panicky and tearful. “I’m so glad you called, Dr. F. I just received the results of my colonoscopy. I have a mass blocking seventy-five to ninety-nine percent of my transverse colon, and it’s suspicious for cancer!”

The briefest moment of silence, and then Dr. F. said, “I’ll call you right back.” My phone rang again a moment later. “I just spoke to Dr. N.L., and we both agree that you need to get out of that hospital and get yourself to a reputable facility in Los Angeles and you need to find a colorectal surgeon immediately.”

A colorectal surgeon? What was a colorectal surgeon? I’d never ever heard the word “colorectal” in my life. And how the hell was I going to find a colorectal surgeon, and how was I going to get to a reputable facility? I was hooked up to an IV that was giving me food and pain and antinausea meds, and I was severely uncomfortable with a stomach that made me look like I was four months pregnant. It wasn’t as if I could just walk out of the hospital. All those thoughts hit my brain at once. I knew one thing for certain, though, even in my shocked state—there was no way in hell the incoherent surgeon at Garfield Medical Center who had said that he’d seen nothing in my X-rays and that the blockage would just clear on its own was ever going to touch me. I hated him and that hospital and I wanted to leave immediately, but not to another facility in Los Angeles. I wanted to go back to New York, to doctors I knew. “Coming back to New York for surgery is not a good idea,” Dr. F. stated firmly when I told him I wanted to go home. Dr. F. and Dr. N.L. knew of no colorectal surgeons in Los Angeles. I would have to find one myself.

True, I had grown up in Los Angeles, but I had left twenty years earlier. I knew the big hospitals were Cedars-Sinai—that’s where all the celebrities seemed to go—and