Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [153]
At the end of the tests on that first Thursday, we sat again with Dr. Warren, to map out a plan of attack. He was organized, attentive, and sweet—and aggressive in his treatment, which was particularly consoling to us. Barbara Smith had already given us the broad strokes: chemotherapy, pause, surgery, pause, radiation. Now we were filling in the line drawing and deciding when to start. He was talking about starting the chemotherapy in a few weeks. No, no, we said, we wanted to start right away. Tomorrow? He couldn’t make that work. Monday? No. We wound up starting chemotherapy on Tuesday, November 9th, one week after the election.
So the first weekend after the 2004 election was also the last weekend before chemotherapy started. We had some of the staff over to the house, we watched football, we played basketball with Jack and Ian Moore from next door, Emma Claire played with Patsy’s dog in the back alleyway, and I tried to spend the time not thinking about being sick. It was hard, of course, because I was sick, and hard, too, because people who wished us well kept telling us so. Teresa Heinz called me to give advice about what she had learned—she’d sweetly been on the phone doing what we had been doing, trying to find the best place for my treatment.
“There are plenty of good doctors,” she said. “Just don’t use…” and she named one of the doctors on my team. There were real valleys in this process, and sometimes the valleys are precipitated by little pieces of misinformation from which no one can really protect you. And on that first weekend, Teresa’s warning—which we concluded was wrong—sent me into a real valley. If you had hit me in the face with a two-by-four, I don’t think my expression would have been much different than it was listening to Teresa. I wanted to know why and I didn’t want to know why she’d said that, and mostly I wanted the conversation to end. I thanked her for all the work she had done on my behalf, and I meant it. Then I hung up and fell right off the razor blade on which I had been sitting, the one I had been denying for the past days. There was no part of me that did not feel beaten. In the bad-moments department, this was pretty huge. This time it was John’s turn to be the upbeat to my downbeat. He reminded me what I, on reflection, might have figured out, if reflection had been possible: people who have bad medical results want to find a reason, and a lot of people blame a doctor. He’d seen it hundreds of times when he practiced law, hundreds of times when he had turned cases away because—despite a bad result—the doctor had done nothing wrong. Not all cancer patients live, even those getting the very best care possible.
When Vicki, Ted Kennedy’s wife, called to share with me what she had learned when her daughter had had cancer, I broke apart again and told her about the conversation with Teresa. Vicki suggested we talk to Alan Rabson, deputy director of the National Cancer Institute, about my team of doctors. Dale, a friend from English graduate school, had also recommended I speak to him. John, seeing how desperately I needed reassurance, moved mountains to get Dr. Rabson on the phone. He assured us that we had made good choices, that we had