Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [152]
When we first went to the Lombardi Center at Georgetown University Hospital, the staff wanted to reassure us, but words were not going to put us at ease. Test results might, so we kept asking about the MRI of my liver. We thought of little else, including the breast cancer, except whether the anomaly the CAT scan had identified was a benign angioma—a collection of blood vessels—or metastasized cancer. Dr. Susan Ascher would do the MRI. Between Susan in Washington and Dr. Barbara Smith in Boston, I felt as if we had walked onto the sets of soap operas peppered with attractive women playing doctors. But these doctors were for real. Knowing how anxious we were about the MRI, Susan arranged for one immediately. I think I was in the MRI scanner within a half hour of meeting her. Although a technician usually watched the MRI images, Susan watched them herself. John sat with me in the room where I was placed into the scanner, and from his chair, he could see Susan studying the images on a monitor in the next room as the dye they had put in me made its way to my liver. If the anomaly, the growth, didn’t take up the dye, it was cancer. When it filled up my anomaly, the dye going where the blood would have gone, Susan knew it was an angioma. John said he could see the relief wash over her face. For now we were on the right side of the statistics, but we were still a long way from the end of the testing.
We agreed that I would participate in a clinical study that involved additional testing during the course of chemotherapy—periodic MRIs and something like needle biopsies, where a core sample from the tumor would be drawn and analyzed every few weeks. My doctors knew that the chemotherapy, surgery, and radiation regime they were suggesting was effective, not because they had guessed it might be effective but because this sequence had been honed through trials and studies long before I found my bump in Kenosha. Dr. Warren had an arsenal at his disposal, an arsenal provided to him by doctors and scientists surely, but available only because women before me had said yes when they were asked if they would participate in a trial or a study. And with each trial, each study, each woman, the treatment for breast cancer was improved. I knew I could not repay those women—most much braver than I, many of whom had taken a chance with their own treatment in order to help find the best treatments for all of us—except by helping the women who would come after me. It was, oddly, like cleaning the graves of children buried near Wade after their mothers had died. It is a continuum in which I believe. And in this case, I might be making it better for myself, too. The study meant we would be getting more information, and more information was good, wasn’t it?
Well, maybe not. It was 8 P.M. that first Thursday night when I had the last of that long day’s tests, a bone scan. We weren’t worried; in our mind the real test, the MRI of my liver, was behind us. While I lay on yet another metal table dressed in yet another sheet studying the last film the technician had taken, a scan of the bones in my hand, still glowing on the monitor, the technician read the bone scan film in an outer room. John sat beside the technician, who spoke to himself as he pulled up each image. John listened to his easy patter. “This is fine, this is fine, this is fine,” and then he stopped. In a few seconds he said, “You know, this is abnormal.” He kept saying it. He turned to John, “I really want to send you home not worried because I know you don’t need this right now, but there’s something on one of her ribs on the left side.” Although it didn’t look like