A Friend of the Family by Lauren Grodstein

Author:Lauren Grodstein [Grodstein, Lauren]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781443403375
Publisher: Algonquin
Published: 2009-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

SIX YEARS AGO, a Tuesday morning, Elaine found a smallish lump on her left breast while she was trying on a new sports bra at Macy’s. She let it sit for a week, hoping it would go away, and sometimes it did seem to disappear for a few hours, only to reemerge when her panicky fingers did a more invasive probe. The following Tuesday, a visit to Rhonda Nighly, a biopsy, and a diagnosis: stage 2 B invasive ductal carcinoma, unaffected lymph nodes. The prognosis, considering everything, wasn’t terribly bad. Rhonda asked her to come in as soon as she got the test results, but Elaine had a class to teach at ten and was able, somehow, to expound upon the Wife of Bath at Bergen State while Rhonda Nighly’s office manager logged her results into a patient database. I met her at the oncology office that afternoon, listened to the news, asked Rhonda everything I remembered about ductal carcinoma from medical school, and kept my arm tight around Elaine’s shoulder.

“The prognosis?”

“We’ll have surgery, chemo, probably six to eight rounds. The cancer is hormone-receptive, so we’ll start her on Tamoxifen. Nothing too radical.”

“And then?”

“We caught this relatively early, Pete.” What was with all the “we”? Elaine caught it, Elaine would have surgery, Elaine would suffer through chemo alone. The best we could do was to guide her and do our best to hide our superstitions or doubts. And perhaps it was this folksy “we” that did it, or perhaps it was just my own panic, but for all my pride in my collegial workplace, when it came time to schedule Elaine’s surgery, without even blinking I asked Rhonda Nighly to send us to Columbia.

“Columbia?” she said. “But wouldn’t you rather have her right here? Elaine, wouldn’t you rather be here?”

Elaine looked at me as trustingly as a deer. “You’d rather have me at Columbia, Pete?”

There was no reason the more-than-competent surgeons at Round Hill couldn’t have handled the job, but I explained to everyone that, if the ladies had no objections, I was more comfortable doing it somewhere less familiar, that if God forbid something went wrong … although, truth be told, that wasn’t it. Like so many Round Hillers who needed nephrectomies or partial thyroidectomies or scheduled C-sections, I wanted the name-brand New York City Ivy League teaching hospital for my wife and her extremely routine surgery. I wanted docs I looked up to. I didn’t want to feel like one of the smartest guys in the room.

“You know, Columbia has terrific outcomes.”

Rhonda shrugged at me—I wasn’t making any real sense—and said she’d refer us to an oncological surgeon across the river. Was I sure I didn’t want to go with Charlie Joffe? She’d worked with Joffe for years, liked him, trusted him; he did beautiful reconstruction work. I’d seen Joffe get looped on Coke-and-whiskeys at the annual hospital holiday bash. No way were his bloated hands going to slice into my wife.

So Elaine and I checked into the massive surgical ward on 168th Street on a gloomy Wednesday in May, 7 a.

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