by Senft, Adina
Please, dear Gott, let that be so.
“The green it is, then. We’ll save the black for another day.”
Chapter 6
Instead of going to the examination room to give her the results of the MRI, Dr. Hunter led her down the hall to his office. He indicated the padded chair in front of his desk. “Have a seat, Mrs. Beiler.”
This was going to take a long time, then. Fortunately, Daed was immersed in Newsweek out in the waiting room, so he wouldn’t miss her even if it took half an hour.
She seated herself, tucking her skirts around her and smoothing down her apron. She wasn’t sure what to do with her shabby leather purse, which no one would guess held two thousand dollars in cash, so she laid it in her lap and folded her hands on top of it.
Dr. Hunter gazed at her across the glass top of his desk. A large manila folder rested on it, and reading upside down, she saw her name typed on the label. “I’d like to go over the results with you.”
She nodded. A picture of her insides. This disappointingly flat envelope was the result of that dreadful glassed-in room, where they’d put her in a big tube like a roast in the oven and commanded her not to move. She’d lain there, hardly daring to breathe, while the machine went crazy all around her, banging and clacking like a bunch of boys beating on the corrugated-tin walls of a culvert to scare a possum out. When they’d finally slid the table from the tube and let her get up, her muscles had been stiff—both from obedience to the technician’s directive and from sheer anxiety.
She’d had every sympathy with the possum.
“While the image itself isn’t a hundred percent conclusive, when I put it together with your symptoms, your situation becomes clear.” Her gaze didn’t move from his face. “Mrs. Beiler, it seems evident that you have multiple sclerosis.”
As though someone had flapped reins over her head, her mind took off at a gallop. Multiple sclerosis. Lila Esch had come down with it in her forties. Within five years she’d been confined to a wheelchair. By the time she was fifty, she’d been unable to sit up without a strap around her chest and her speech had become a series of unintelligible noises. Soon after that, she was dead, and six months later her husband married the Mennonite girl who had nursed her.
Multiple sclerosis. Dear Gott, no.
She was going to end up like Lila Esch. And who would look after the boys? The next ten years would see them grow up and become teenagers, and who would make sure they became good men? Certainly not a helpless, speechless body strapped into a wheelchair.
Oh, no. No. This couldn’t be happening to her. The diagnosis must be wrong.
“Mrs. Beiler, I realize this must be a shock, but it’s not the end of the world.”
Only the end of hers.
Dear Gott, mein Gott, why have you forsaken me?
“There are a number of medications that have been proven to slow the symptoms, and some patients have even responded so well that they’ve gone into complete remission.”
Still she could not speak, though questions tumbled through her mind in a waterfall of fear.
“Would you like to see the MRI image so I can show you what we’re basing our conclusions on?”
She nodded, though she really didn’t see what good it would do to look at a picture. The Lord had been right to command His children not to make graven images. They only brought trouble.
The doctor slid a large plastic sheet out of the envelope and pushed it toward her. She looked down because he expected her to—looked and did not comprehend. A mass of color and swirly lines and black circles. What on earth? Her insides resembled nothing so much as the floor that time Matthew had eaten green crab apples and hadn’t made it to the compost bucket fast enough.
“I don’t know what I’m seeing,” she finally said—the first words she’d spoken since she sat down.
Dr. Hunter reached over, pointing. “This is your skull, and this is your neck area. The camera takes slices—cross sections. Like when you slice potatoes. Think of this as pulling one of those slices out, laying it down, and looking at it from the top.”
She tried to wrap her imagination around someone slicing her like a potato and gazed at the image again. He pointed to some circles and wiggly lines. “This is the area we’re concerned with. See these lines? They could be lesions, here, below your brain, consistent with the ones generated by MS. The loss of feeling in your extremities is caused by these. The body is attacking itself. Basically, what it’s doing is eating away at the nerve casing, so your hands are reporting those sensations, not what they’re actually feeling. Do you understand?”
“My body is attacking itself. And my hands are feeling the attack, not whatever is actually touching them.” Her voice sounded high, strained, foreign.
Her body wasn’t hers anymore. Not even her voice belonged to her. Her life was being taken away, nibbled bit by bit, the way a rat gnawed at a tomato in the garden until nothing was left but a dead stem.
And the tomato sat helplessly, knowing what the rat was doing but unable to do a thing to stop it.
“Mrs. Beiler, you look very pale. I know that this is a shock, but as I said, there are a number of things we can do. Would you like a glass of water?”
When she nodded, he went out into the hall and murmured something to someone he found there. A moment later a nurse leaned in with water in a paper cup.
“Denk— I mean, thank you.” She took a sip, then drank the whole of it down.
Dr. Hunter reached for a prescription pad. “I’m going to give you a course of medication to start with. Take two of each a day, and if they make you sick, back it off to one a day.”
Make her sick? Weren’t pills supposed to do the opposite? “What are they?” He told her something that sounded like a foreign language, which did not help at all. “What I meant to say is, what will they do inside me?”
“These will inhibit your pain receptors, which will stop the burning sensations, to start with.”
“That will be good, but what about curing the MS?”
He gave her a long look. “Mrs. Beiler, MS isn’t curable. You have to live with it. Our goal is to make you as comfortable as possible and slow it down as much as we can. I’m going to have you come in for more blood tests so we can pinpoint the drugs your body will respond to best.”
Drugs. Prescriptions. “How much will this cost?”
He tore the sheet off the prescription pad. “I won’t lie to you. It will be expensive. A thousand dollars a month—maybe less, if we can get you into a discount program. Is your income below twenty thousand a year?”
He’d lost her at “a thousand dollars a month.” The pallet shop brought in enough to tithe, to pay the rent on her space and make the mortgage payment and household expenses, with a little left over to put into savings. That little bit certainly didn’t amount to a thousand a month for pills. How could something so small be so expensive?
“Mrs. Beiler?”
She gazed at him. “I don’t have a thousand a month for pills.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Maybe we can get you on the discount program, and the church will pick up the remainder.”
“For how long?”
His eyes were kind under those strange eyebrows. “For the foreseeable future, I’m afraid. We’ll reevaluate periodically, but other patients have been and will be on some form of medication for the rest of their lives.”
Which would be the next ten years, if poor Lila was anything to go by. A thousand a month for twelve months times ten years … oh, dear. Daed had been able to get two thousand from the bishop. Would he be so amenable if the sum were a hundred and twenty thousand? You could almost buy a house and five acres for that.
“Is there—” Her throat closed, and she cleared it. “Is there any other way? Any treatment other than these drugs?”
For a moment he didn’t answer, just gazed at her. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Well…some of our folks up in Bird-in-Hand went to Me
xico for a special kind of cancer treatment.”
“You don’t have cancer, Mrs. Beiler.”
She was not communicating very well. And did he have to sound quite so sorry for her? “What I mean is, could I find a way to help this without it being so expensive? I just don’t know if I could ask the church for a thousand dollars a month for the next…for the rest of my life.”
“Such are the benefits of a health plan,” he pointed out.
She straightened. “We don’t believe in those.” Why did he even bother to mention it? She needed to deal with what was, not what he thought it should be.
“So I understand. What I believe you’re asking is if there are alternative treatments. The answer is yes, of course there are. But most of them are bunk, in my opinion. Behind every offer of a miracle cure, you’ll find a charlatan more interested in taking your money than giving you actual solutions.”
He was not going to help her. If she went with his plan, she might impoverish the church. Even though the whole district tithed, was there enough money in the coffers to keep her in pills and help others, too? Could she justify the entire community sacrificing for her when she could give nothing back?
And in the end, even in the best of cases, he’d said himself these drugs wouldn’t cure her. They’d just slow things down, drawing out the payment of money even longer.
Amelia’s shoulders drooped with the weight of all that obligation. And what about the boys, who would be left to care for her instead of finding the wives God had prepared for them and starting their own lives? Even if she made them go, what would she do? Return home and be a burden to Mamm and Daed?
Dr. Hunter pushed the slip across the desk, and she took it automatically. “I’ll call this down to the pharmacy, and it will be ready for you by the time you get downstairs. Take your time, Mrs. Beiler. Do you have someone with you?”
She nodded. Stood. Walked to the door like a scarecrow held up by nothing more than crossed broomsticks, then down the hall, her sense of direction taking her back to the waiting room.
Daed looked up from his magazine when she stood silently next to him. “I’m convinced that the world is crazier than ev— Amelia? What is it, daughter?” The magazine fell from his hands and landed upside down on the floor, like a bird that had been shot out of the sky. “What did the MRI tell you? What did that doctor say?”
She told him.
Told him again. And when he finally understood, when his dear, lined face had gone so white that she thought he might crumple up in a faint, that was when she finally began to cry.
It wasn’t until they’d taken the long bus journey back, retrieved the horse and buggy, and were rolling down the road at a smart pace a mile out of Whinburg that she remembered she hadn’t given the doctor his two thousand dollars.
“It can’t be true. Why, Lila Esch—” Carrie stopped abruptly and picked up the iron before it burned a hole in her neat Crosses and Losses block.
“She’s the first person I thought of, too,” Amelia admitted. “I can still see her, strapped in her wheelchair, trying to say Guder Mariye to the bishop and not being able to get a single syllable out.” Her lips wobbled, and a shot of fear arced through her stomach the way a shooting star fell across the sky. “Surely it isn’t God’s will for me to…” She couldn’t finish.
“It was His will for poor Lila.” Carrie left the rest unspoken. If it’s His plan for you, you have to be willing. There is a purpose for everything, even being strapped in a wheelchair.
“Let’s not talk about God’s will until we know for sure that the diagnosis is right.” Emma dropped three completed blocks on the table, alive with several shades of green—sage, slate, and even a lime that could only have come from someone’s underslip. Certainly a color that vivid would never be worn where anyone could see it, lest it attract attention.
“You mean I should get another opinion?” Amelia asked her. “But you said Dr. Hunter was a good doctor.”
“He is. But he isn’t the only one in Lancaster County. After all, didn’t he say the MRI wasn’t a hundred percent conclusive? And he used words like ‘I believe’ and ‘appears to be.’ Not ‘I know’ and ‘is.’”
“Doctors never say anything for sure, just in case they turn out to be wrong,” Carrie said.
“But I’d take that ‘not a hundred percent’ and put my hope there.” Emma sounded so firm. Amelia wished she felt half as confident. But then, putting one’s faith in how a person used his words didn’t mean much when you had the reality of little boys and running a business to deal with.
“What should I do?” she finally said. At least her feet still worked. She got the treadle sewing machine going and used her left hand to weight the triangles of blues and purples as she fed them under the needle while she kept them lined up with her right. Thread and fabric. A person could count on these. She might be floundering in an internal sea of fear and indecision and lack of knowledge, but on the outside she could control color and cloth.
“I would go and see Milner Esch,” Emma said, “and ask him who Lila went to.”
“Whoever that was didn’t help her much,” Carrie pointed out. “We want someone who can tell us something different. After all, didn’t Dr. Hunter say Amelia’s symptoms could be a couple of things?”
“True,” Emma admitted. “Well then, what would you suggest?”
But Carrie couldn’t think of anything. “The only time I go to the doctor is to get a filling in my teeth. And that’s not the right kind of doctor.”
“What about the Clinic for Special Children?” Amelia said suddenly.
“Are you a special child?” Emma grinned, and Amelia stuck out her tongue at her.
“They take care of kids with strange diseases. Maybe they could recommend a doctor closer than Lancaster who might know something. Maybe even one of the doctors there.”
“That’s a good idea.” Carrie looked at her the way her teacher in the one-room schoolhouse used to do when she got an arithmetic problem right on the blackboard.
“We can stop by the phone shanty on the way home and call,” Emma said. “They’d be in the phone book.”
Whoa. Slow down. That was just like Emma—from thought to action in two seconds. “Maybe I should talk it over with Mamm and Daed.”
“Why?” Carrie wanted to know. “You’re just asking. And if there’s no one there who knows about MS, ask if they can refer you. Someone around here has to know about it. After all, Lila didn’t get her diagnosis out of a box of laundry soap.”
The picture made Amelia smile.
“That’s better,” Carrie said. “I’ve missed that smile.”
“You have to admit, I don’t have much to smile about.”
“But you have us,” Emma said. “You’re not going through this alone. Carrie and I will be by your side the whole way, whether that means looking after the boys or giving you rides to the doctor.” She looked at Carrie. “Isn’t that right?”
Carrie nodded, the sun glinting off her blond hair where her Kapp rested on it. “Whatever you need. I probably have more time than Emma, now that Melvin has decided to go up to Shipshey again.”
Amelia’s foot ceased its rocking on the treadle. “He’s leaving? Already? For how long?”
“For the six weeks between Thanksgiving and Old Christmas.” Carrie swallowed. “And again in February. Apparently they need relief men in the RV factories to cover for people who are taking holidays.”
“And they don’t have enough men in Indiana for this?” Amelia couldn’t believe it. Indiana was a long train ride away. And what if Carrie needed her husband during those six weeks? What if something happened? And how would she stand it, all alone for such a long time?
“His cousin is getting him in, and because he worked there before and they liked him, it was easier. And we…we do need the money,” Carrie said softly. “What is he going to do with himself all winter if he doesn’t go?”
What the other men did. Take care of his
horses. Repair the harvesting machinery. Work on the barn. Fix things around the house.
But Melvin didn’t have the gift for fixing things that other men had—or the lifetime of training. He was the son of a harness maker who for some unfathomable reason had decided to take up farming far away from his family.
“Has Melvin ever considered moving home and going in with his father in the harness shop?” Amelia asked.
Carrie began sorting burgundy, pink, and red triangles, laying them out this way and that, looking for an order that pleased her. “His dad and the shop are sore subjects. Besides, his brothers bought in when he left, so there isn’t really room for a fourth.”
“Why a sore subject?” What a relief to talk about someone else’s problems. “Don’t Melvin and his dad get along?” First his mother and his wife, now his father…What had gone wrong in that family that there was so much tension?
“He never says much about it, but from what he lets slip every now and again, his dad has a bit of a temper. Melvin always tried to please him but never seemed to be able to. And it just got worse as he got older.”
“Like me and Karen,” Emma muttered.
Carrie looked up from her focus on the fabrics. “It must be awful to be the one taking care of them and all the time your dad thinks it’s Karen.”
Emma’s face had set in pale lines. The sullen skies outside the window didn’t help—even the light seemed to conspire to wash her in shades of gray. “It is awful. Sometimes I’d just like to scream at him that it isn’t Karen cleaning him up after he has an accident or feeding him when he has a bad day and can’t manage the fork and spoon.”
“But you wouldn’t do that,” Carrie said, looking a little shocked.
“Of course not. He’s my father, and if I did scream at him, he’d probably still clout me.” She took a deep breath, as though she were searching for her usual calm. “Mamm’s my example. With all she has to live with, she still does little things for him. Still tries to help me. She can hardly get from her bedroom to the kitchen, and there she is at seven in the morning putting the water on for porridge for all of us, with her oxygen tank following her around like a pet dog.”
