Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [149]
Whatever she’d surmised from her conversations with John and me in Raleigh, on election night she’d heard directly from me that I was pretty sure I had breast cancer. She and I had stood alone in a small dark hotel room, arms resting on each other’s shoulders, bands playing below us in Copley Square. She’d already been weakened by the crush of the day, but it could not wait. I’d needed to tell her what would happen the next day, I needed to land the next blow here, alone, so that she would be ready. She hadn’t broken. This is the child who did not cry when the end of her finger had been accidentally cut off when she was seven—it regenerated, which can happen at that age—and she did not cry election night at my news. She stiffened then so we could tell my brother and my sister who waited a few steps away. But now she was here in the hospital room, held together only by years of practice at holding herself together. A friend, journalist Meryl Gordon, told me afterward that she wanted to speak to God on our behalf to say, “These people have had enough. Enough already with them. Leave them alone now.” And I surely felt that way about Cate.
Barbara Smith came back in the room to a huddled family, but when she said those words, that it was cancer, we rallied. In the next hours, we even laughed and teased one another. We now had a dragon we could slay. At other times it had been different. Wade had had no chance to save himself, and we had had no chance to save him. John had been unable to convince the Kerry campaign to continue to fight. His protestations were ignored. Nothing we could do would fix these things. But we could fight cancer. It was terrible and ominous, and for Cate, for John, and the younger children, I admit that I was afraid to lose this fight. But it wasn’t, by a sad and huge distance, the worst news we had ever heard. Wade’s death had spared us that and spared us some degree of fear as well.
I don’t want to misrepresent this. My reaction was to get ready for battle, but I wasn’t always strong. I wasn’t even strong all that first day. I had times along this path when I wanted to say I’ve had enough, I can’t keep dealing with the latest side effect, the latest setback, the latest scare. I’d be in great pain or just not be able to do things I’d always done, and I’d say I know I have to kill this dragon, but the killing it is killing me. How easy it would have been along this road to fall back into that fear, but there was always someone waiting to help. John bringing me a soda and a sandwich, my sister calling to cheer me up, Chris Downey coming by with flowers, John Auchard coming by with dinner. A letter from Cedar Rapids or a card from Harrison, New Jersey—I had met them or I hadn’t, but they reached out. Connective tissue that wouldn’t wither even when I wanted to, that held me up when I could not stand, that would not let go. And so I was nourished by strangers and friends. But at this moment, it was the three of us.
As we followed Barbara Smith on our way to the CAT scan, we teased the Secret Service detail, who were trying to be invisible in their dark suits in the white-walled halls, surrounded by white-coated hospital staff. It was hopeless; they stood out more than we did. They were probably glad to stand outside the room while I went in to be scanned. The CAT scan would look at my torso to determine whether the cancer had spread. We were still jovial, John and Cate perched on stools while the huge machine hovered over me. Jovial until Barbara said there was an “anomaly” in my liver.