Saving Graces - Elizabeth Edwards [169]
Here’s a secret about the people who work on campaigns: not many of them know much—and way too many know nothing at all—about sports. As much as I love David Ginsberg and Miles Lackey and Matthew Nelson, I don’t want to watch basketball with any of them. We are serious fans. Lexi, on the other hand, was great company. A Cornell graduate, she didn’t have any uncomfortable basketball allegiances—meaning she didn’t cheer for Duke—and she was a sports fan through and through. The hotel staff had been really sweet—they knew why we were back in Boston—and they left platters of fruit and sodas and water for us, so we wouldn’t have to leave the room while we contemplated the upcoming surgery. What it meant for us was that we never had to leave the room during The Game.
Carolina was ahead at halftime, and in the silly way of sports superstitions no one was allowed to change seats. The second-half score was tied when Duke went on a 9–0 tear, and now with 2:45 left in the game, we were down nine points and Duke had all the momentum. The magic of our assigned seating had worn off, so Cate and I changed places. Jawad Williams tipped in a shot, then Raymond Felton caused a turnover and freshman Marvin Williams sank two free throws. Cate and I looked at each other. Not moving again, we said. Sean May converted a three-point play, and suddenly it was 73–71. David Noel stole the ball with thirty seconds to play. We guessed that even John might be yelling. Felton was fouled, and he made his first shot. We were down one. Felton missed his second—but with seconds left, Marvin Williams won the rebound and put it back for the lead. With the free throw he then made, Carolina had scored eleven straight points. Duke’s final shots failed, and Carolina won the game. Here we were in a hotel in Boston screaming and yelling. We had a hotel room with a beautiful water view, but the only thing we were looking at was a television screen, and it looked beautiful to us. It was just the surgical preparation I needed, and, we decided, a very good omen.
Early the next morning we went in for the surgery. So much of what I had been through before was private. In the blood testing room, there might have been only one other patient. In the examining rooms I was alone. During my chemotherapy sessions, I rarely saw another patient. Here, however, at this great medical center preparing for surgery, I was getting a lesson too. In the area where I was prepped there were two rows of beds, ten beds at least on each side, with a center aisle. And every bed was occupied. Every bed a story of trial and, we hoped, of triumph. Certainly every bed held the story of a life turned upside down by disease.
After the surgical prep, I was wheeled to another room where the anesthesiologist came in and talked to me. We had a dear friend, Maureen, who is a doctor in Boston, and she knew how persnickety I was about anesthesiologists and how important I thought it was to get the right one. So Maureen got me the anesthesiologist she herself would have used, a warm pillow of a woman who spoke gently and worked her magic. Once she gave me the anesthesia, I was out. Afterward I was asked: Do you remember this about the surgery? Not a bit. Do you remember that about being wheeled in? Not a bit. I remembered none of the surgery. I remembered nothing about the first postoperative hours in recovery either. I awoke in a private room, John reading in a chair, Cate on the small couch.
Barbara came in at some point in my fading in and out of sleep and told us that the margins were clean—she cut enough tissue around the tumor in order to be certain that she had not left cancer cells—and that the sentinel node biopsy had been positive, so she had taken additional lymph nodes, five of which had some minuscule number of cancer cells, and the others