Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [157]
The staff learned, of course. To get John’s attention, don’t start with how well your idea polls. Start with “I met a young father who…” or “I have an aunt who inspects nursing homes and she said…” Maybe it was the storyteller in John, the part of him that had been informed about health care first by those whom the system had mistreated, the part of him that had for twenty years told those stories to juries. And it wasn’t just staff telling stories to John. John and I would both be talking about what we were hearing. How in the world were people making it? The answer is that some weren’t. Some were, of course, but some of those only with the generosity of others.
During the campaign, I had held a panel discussion on women’s health care in North Carolina. On the panel was a woman named Pat, whose husband had gotten up one morning and, with his—and her—health insurance, walked out on her. And then she discovered she had breast cancer. Her community stepped up, the doctors and nurses, her friends and neighbors, and she was making it. She gave me a lovely jacket she had made, which I might have worn instead of what Hargrave called my Courage Jacket if we hadn’t had to return it because it exceeded the Senate’s gift restrictions. After I was diagnosed, Pat sent me a lovely—and considerably less expensive—cap she had made, passing on the generosity she had been shown. At a Silver Lady Fund benefit in Miami, I heard from a woman who had made it through her struggle because the Fund had helped her with transportation and child care, meeting the expenses of the disease that insurance would never reach. John packed away what we saw and heard, packed it away for another day. There was so much to be done, but for now we had our own fight.
For the clinical study I had more tests and more MRIs. The MRIs were a completely leveling experience where—so that a record can be made of changes in the tumor—you lie facedown with your bare chest hanging over the edge of a table. And there were also periodic analyses of core samples of the tumor. A beautiful Greek doctor, Erini Makariou, very polite and very elegant, would apologize as she shot a little needle into my breast—it sounded like a children’s cap gun—to take a core sample of the cells in the lump. The first time she had to take a sample, she said it was easy as pie. You’ve got a huge target there, she said of my tumor. From where do you want to take the cells? By the last core sample collection, she was just beaming, saying, “It’s hard for me. I try to put the needle in but there’s nothing there. It just goes right through.” It was, I imagined, like the wrappings left over from what had been a full package of cancer.
I don’t know what the study said about how much doctors can learn from such constant testing during chemotherapy. What I do know was that, as a patient, it was terrific to have constant progress reports, particularly since the tumor was responding to the chemotherapy. And what’s more, the clinical study team, like the chemotherapy team, made me feel I had people who were cheering for me the whole time. Ann Gallagher, who monitored the study, held my hand during these sessions, squeezing it with excitement as the good results rolled in, and smiled as if she herself had just gotten the best present imaginable. Honestly, they couldn’t have been better cheerleaders if they wore sweaters with Elizabeth written across them. This was their victory, too. I know that people say they are under Dr. So-and-so’s care. I didn’t think of it that way. I liked my doctors immensely, but I spent more time with Ann and with Mercedes, and I felt I was under their care. It was with them—and John—that I most wanted to celebrate whenever we got good news.
After four sessions