A Singular Woman - Janny Scott [148]
“She was saying something pretty profound,” McCauley told me. “But it was sort of like the end of a conversation, as you’re leaving. Nobody wants to face the obvious.”
Ann had told McCauley many times that she did not want her children to see her in the state she was in. But in the weeks that followed, McCauley said, “I often wondered, maybe I should have called Barry and bugged him. I asked Maya to talk to him. I said, ‘You all need to realize that it’s going to happen fairly soon.’ But I didn’t know him well enough. I just thought it was kind of presumptuous for me to tell him what to do. I know they spoke. It’s a difficult issue to deal with.”
In mid-September, Ann and Madelyn flew to New York City for a series of appointments at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, widely considered the most respected cancer center in the country. An oncologist at Sloan-Kettering had agreed to give Ann a second opinion. Maya, working full-time as a student teacher while in graduate school, met her mother and grandmother at LaGuardia Airport. Ann emerged from the terminal in a wheelchair, looking dazed and startled. Madelyn, a month away from her seventy-third birthday, was suffering from severe back pain. They were carrying with them Ann’s medical records, X-rays, and tumor slides. They settled into the Barbizon Hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, near the hospital. Barack, back from his book tour and one week away from announcing his candidacy for the Illinois State Senate, arrived from Chicago with Michelle. At the first of two appointments at Sloan-Kettering, Ann was given a physical examination; she turned over the records to the doctor and the tumor slides for reevaluation by the pathology department. Then she returned to the hotel to wait.
Maya and Ann walked in Central Park, bought frozen yogurt, wandered among the glittering displays of smoked fish and cheeses at Zabar’s, the legendary food store on Broadway on the Upper West Side. They watched a movie of no particular interest to either one of them, Maya sitting next to her mother, holding her hand. When it was over, Maya asked Ann what she thought of the movie. It was a good distraction, she said, from the turmoil inside. Years later, Maya would remember her uncertainty about how best to help her mother—whether to encourage her to talk about what she was feeling or simply to be with her. If she could just get through the semester at New York University and at the school where she was teaching, Maya thought, she could fly home to Hawaii and stay with her mother as long as she was needed.
On September 15, 1995, the oncologist saw Ann for a second time. On the basis of the reevaluation of the tumor cells and the pattern of the illness, he believed Ann’s cancer was uterine, not ovarian, and stage four, not stage three. He recommended that Ann’s physician in Honolulu switch to a chemotherapy regimen based on a different drug, Adriamycin, or doxorubicin. The survival rate for women in Ann’s condition was poor, he said, and sixty percent of patients did not respond positively to the drug he was suggesting. But if it worked, Ann might hope for a delay in recurrence and a period relatively free of symptoms.
Back in Honolulu, the new treatment proved grueling. Arlene Payne’s conversations with her niece became shorter and shorter. Ann had never been inclined toward regrets. If she regretted anything now, it was not having left Indonesia sooner to get medical care, Payne told me. “But she fought it for as long as she could. Then she sort of gave up and just sort of lived out the rest of her life.” The United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing came and went. From the point of view of Women’s World Banking, it had gone well. Much of the language hammered out in the report of the expert group on women and finance, in which Ann had played a central role, had been incorporated into the action plan endorsed by the delegates in Beijing. Hillary Rodham Clinton, then the First Lady, had spoken on a panel on microfinance that Women’s World Banking had helped organize.