Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [118]
“Of course. With the kids still so young, it wouldn’t be that much fun anyway.”
“You know what we should do? Next summer, we should rent a big house in Italy for a month, and bring both our families out. We can make that our home base, and travel around from there.”
“We’ll see,” I said.
“You don’t think that sounds like a good idea?”
“I think it sounds like a great idea. It’s just that I don’t think it’s all that likely. And not just because of my five kids. By then, you’ll probably have another baby.”
“You’re probably right. But we should get some information anyway. I’d bet that most of the people on the tour have been to Italy a few times. We can find out the best place to stay.”
“You really want to do this?”
“Yeah. We should live a little.”
“And you don’t think traveling around the world is living a little?”
He thought about it. “We should live a little more.”
I laughed. “Would you ever have believed we actually went around the world together and seen all these places? By our age, I mean?”
Micah shook his head. “Never. But then again, if you think about it, we’ve lived a whole lot of life already.”
After his comment, I walked in silence, remembering.
In early 1998, Micah was running two businesses, working long hours, and making plans for his wedding. Along with Bob, he also took over my father’s role regarding my sister’s health. He began attending all the consultations, and took notes; in the evenings, he would consult the Physicians’ Desk Reference and peruse medical journals online, to ensure that my sister was receiving the best care possible.
Micah called me with the news as soon as he got back from the oncologist’s office.
My sister’s tumor, invisible only three months before, had grown to the size of a grape. While it wasn’t as large as the original tumor had been—the size of an egg—it was located deeper within her brain, in an area responsible for both memory and vital motor functions. Because of that, surgery wasn’t an option; there was no way to get to the tumor without causing terrible damage. My sister would be left blind and paralyzed in the best possible scenario; more likely, she would either become a vegetable or die during the operation. Nor, we learned, was radiation an option, for much the same reason. The risk was great, the possible benefits almost nonexistent. Instead my sister would be treated with chemotherapy.
After the initial consultation, my sister would be given a combination of three different drugs that had proven to be the most successful in treating the types of tumors afflicting my sister.
Yet the odds weren’t good. Chemotherapy is essentially poison; the hope is that the poison kills the tumors before it kills the person. While it’s effective in many types of cancer, it’s far less effective in the brain. The blood-brain barrier—think of it as a wall between your brain and the rest of your body—makes reaching the high concentrations necessary to kill the tumors almost impossible to attain. They could, however, sometimes control the growth rate of the tumors or, if lucky, even stop the growth entirely.
“So what does that mean for Dana?” I asked Micah on the phone.
“They won’t know anything until after she’s on the drugs.”
“But she has a chance, right?”
“Yeah, there’s a chance, but . . .” Micah trailed off.
“But the odds aren’t good,” I finished.
“They wouldn’t say. All they would tell me is that the regimen she’s going on offers the best chance for her.”
“What happens if the tumor stops growing, but doesn’t actually die?”
“I don’t know.”
“Could they tell you how long the tumor might stop growing if the drug works?”
“No,” he said. “To be honest, Nick, I didn’t get any answers at all. Not because she doesn’t have good doctors, but because they can’t even begin to make an educated guess right now. I’ve told you all that I know. They say they’ll probably know more in three months when Dana gets her next CAT scan.”
“What are we supposed to do until then?”
“Wait and see what happens.”
“That’s what they told you?”
“In those words exactly.