A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [142]
Late one night during the last week in November 1994, Bruce Harker, in his bed in Potomac, Maryland, received a telephone call from Ann in Jakarta. Ignoring the time difference, which she well knew, she must have felt the call could not wait. She had been having abdominal pains for some time, she told him, and the pain had become so severe at the workshop in Ciloto that she had returned to Jakarta to see a doctor. The doctor, a gynecologist at a clinic that specialized in treating expatriates, had concluded that Ann had appendicitis and had referred her to a surgeon at Pondok Indah Hospital, a high-end medical center in a wealthy neighborhood of Jakarta. Faced with the prospect of surgery, Ann was trying to decide whether to stay in Jakarta or fly to Singapore. For routine procedures, many longtime expatriates were comfortable with the best Indonesian hospitals. They did not consider themselves foreign enough to automatically mistrust Indonesian doctors. Furthermore, Ann had friends in Jakarta, as well as her pembantu and her driver, to help her out if she stayed. But other expatriates, and even some Indonesians, automatically went to Singapore for hospitalization, especially for anything major. Gillie Brown, who had taken her daughter to Singapore for an appendectomy, urged Ann to go there, too. “I thought she was nuts, staying in the country,” Brown told me. On the other hand, Harker had once had hip surgery in Singapore, he told Ann, which had been done so badly that it was later redone in the United States. “She wanted to know whether there was airfare and accommodations for her to go to Singapore in the budget,” Harker remembered. “I said, ‘Look, here’s the deal. We didn’t budget an appendectomy. You’ve got health insurance, that’s taken care of. We can cover the airfare. We can cover a few hundred dollars.’”
Ann chose to stay in Jakarta. On November 28, 1994, the day before her fifty-second birthday, a surgeon at Pondok Indah removed her appendix. Three days later, she returned home to recuperate in her housekeeper’s care. The incision healed promptly, she would tell her insurance company in a letter some months later, but the abdominal pain returned. Her surgeon advised patience, because recovery could take several months. When the pain became too much to bear, she returned twice to the medical clinic, where she saw two internists as well as a gynecologist she had not previously seen. According to her account to the insurance company, doctors at the clinic told her she had an abdominal infection and prescribed an antibiotic. After two and a half weeks on the drug, she felt no better. Meanwhile, she had returned to work after a week of resting at home. To some friends, she said simply that her recovery was going slowly. In e-mails and conversations with Nina Nayar, she seemed unconvinced by the diagnosis. She was lethargic and weak. When she ate, she felt immediately full. A masseuse to whom she had gone for a massage declined to continue, Ann told Dewey. “What is wrong with you is serious,” the masseuse warned.
On December 13, Ann met Rens Heringa at a Protestant church guesthouse in Jakarta where Heringa was staying, having arrived six days earlier on a two-month visit from the Netherlands. Ann was more distraught than Heringa had ever seen her. She was in constant pain and barely able to digest food. Weeping, she was certain that the diagnosis of appendicitis was wrong. “She said, ‘I have cancer,’” Heringa told me. “I said, ‘Ann, how do you know?’ She said, ‘Well, I feel it.’” She reminded Heringa that her father had died from cancer—as if it was contagious or inherited. Heringa tried to reassure her. She told Ann about her own six-month recovery from an appendectomy