Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [79]
‘possible foul play.’” On the screen, Abbie’s picture moved left, making room for my face as it flashed upon the screen. I don’t know where they’d gotten my picture but it looked like a mug shot. “Following a double mastectomy four years ago, Abbie Eliot, once widely thought of as one of the ten most beautiful women in the world, became the unofficial spokeswoman for breast cancer survivors when she invited the public to follow her through her radiation and chemotherapy treatments. But two years ago, the cancer returned. This time to her brain. We take you now to a press conference held by her father, the former governor of South Carolina and now in his fourth term in the United States Senate. Senator Coleman.” The screen flashed to a live shot of the Colemans’ house on the Battery. Senator Coleman, dressed down in jeans and a white oxford shirt, opened the front door, walked onto the porch and spoke over the railing to the cameras below. “Good morning. Thank you for coming.” He panned the crowd of reporters. “Two years ago, Abigail Grace’s cancer was found to have spread.” He was never too comfortable with the way Abbie so publicly talked about her breasts or their absence once they were gone. He turned and pointed to the back of his own head. “The cancer traveled upward and took root somewhere in here. She has what is called a stage four central nervous system metastasis. These several lesions can be found in the back or base of her brain, which because of their sensitive location, exclude surgery as an option of treatment. Abigail Grace is a fighter, so like everything else in her life, she has fought this.” He wiped his face with a handkerchief. “As many of you know, I was the donor for her second bone marrow transplant. But that, too…didn’t take. Something I think about every day.” He folded the papers in front of him. “Two weeks ago, we ran out of options, brought her home, circled the family and called hospice.” He took a deep breath, back beneath the limelight. The sympathetic father—courting and counting the votes. He beckoned behind him to his wife—Abbie’s stepmother—who stepped forward and put her arm around him. “We know that Abigail Grace would want to be here with her family.” His practiced tone and measured cadence were near perfect. “She needs to be under the constant supervision of her doctors. We don’t know Doss’s intentions…” My picture flashed a second time onto the screen, filling the top right-hand corner. “He’s our son-in-law and has been for nearly fourteen years, but certainly his actions cannot be in her best interest if he has taken her from her family and her doctors in what could very well be the last few days of her life.” Senator Coleman looked directly into the camera and held up his right arm, beckoning someone off camera. A shorter man wearing a doctor’s coat and a serious expression stepped into the frame, where the senator put his arm around him. The senator cleared his throat. “This is Dr. Wayne Massey.”
It took me a second to recognize him. Television does funny things to a person. The senator was right. Wayne Massey was a good doctor. Had more plaques on his wall than he had space for them. He was a specialist studying the blood-brain barrier and had approached us hoping Abbie would join his study. The senator leaned forward. “Dr. Massey is one of the leading researchers in the country in studying conditions such as Abigail’s.” I noticed how carefully he chose his words.
Within the last month, we’d called him—we were covering all our bases. Dr. Massey listened to us, asked thorough questions and at the end of the day, he could only recommend a course of treatment that would not change the outcome, only prolong it a few weeks. And even that he couldn’t guarantee. Those were his words, not mine. The choice not to enter into that course of treatment was Abbie’s. The end of the phone call sounded something like, “The medical community I represent simply cannot help her. I am sorry.”
At what point do you stop fighting? At what point does some quality of life take precedence over the possibility