All You Could Ask For A Novel by Mike Greenberg

Author:Mike Greenberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: romance, Contemporary Women, General, Family Life, Fiction
ISBN: 9780062220752
Publisher: William Morrow
Published: 2013-04-02T04:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT CHAPTER BEGINS two days later, when the phone rings again. The voice on the other end is one I do not recognize.

“Hi, Brooke, this is Dr. Downey calling.”

For a moment I cannot recall any Dr. Downey. Then I remember the throat infection I had two years before. He is a primary care physician, and when my husband’s company switched insurance companies, I had to choose one, so I listed Dr. Downey. Even though I haven’t seen him since then, his name is on all my insurance papers. And so it is that the call I have been waiting so impatiently for comes from, essentially, a total stranger.

“Hello, doctor,” I say, my throat barely open.

“I was hoping you could come into the office this morning,” he says. “I have the results of the test you took the other day and I think we should talk about them.”

Then I am in his completely unfamiliar office, staring at his completely unfamiliar face, listening to his completely unfamiliar voice. “We see breast cancer,” he is saying, “and we do see an invasive cancer. That means it is the kind of cancer that could involve your lymph nodes. We think it is localized but we’ll need some more tests to know for sure. I have the name of an excellent breast surgeon here in Greenwich and I recommend you visit him. Of course, if you have another surgeon you would prefer to see, by all means you should see him or her. But seeing a breast surgeon is the next step in this process.”

If I were you, this is the part where I would put the book down. I hate it when things like this happen to characters I like. I can’t count the number of books I haven’t finished because I didn’t like where they appeared to be heading. So if this was a book I was reading, I wouldn’t want to read any more. But when you’re the lead character, you don’t have that choice.

If you’re still reading, you’re braver than I am.

The next scene takes place six days later, first in the operating room, where the breast surgeon is performing a lumpectomy and a sentinel node, which is where they take out the lump in your breast and, while they are in there, inject a dye that makes its way into a specific lymph node beneath the arm. And then they take me to the recovery room and I wait. And wait. And the seconds feel like hours, much as they did when the twins were small and I was home alone with them, and there were days when they were crabby and uninterested and those were the days when time felt as though it stood still. The difference is now oftentimes I feel nostalgic for those days, but I am pretty sure I’ll never feel nostalgic for this one.

Then, finally, the doctor comes back, and the news is good.

“Brooke, we got the lump out, it looks to be about a sonometer and a half—”

“How big is that in English?” I ask.

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