by Susan Conley
It is decided. We will wait.
How it goes after this is I call my doctor in the States. “Wait? How long ‘wait’?” says Dr. Rainville. It’s nine o’clock in the morning in Portland, Maine.
“Three months ‘wait,’ ” I say loudly over the phone. The line from Beijing is scratchy.
“We never wait. I never advocate waiting.” Dr. Rainville is a woman who doesn’t mince words.
“No?” I ask. I am calling her from my bed, and now I put my head down on my pillow and close my eyes. I was afraid she might say this. Afraid my time with Dr. Lan in Beijing was not over yet.
“No waiting. Because you can’t be sure, Susan. No waiting. You go in and you find out.”
I call Dr. Lan back the next morning. “It’s Susan,” I say into the phone after a nurse tracks him down. “The American with breast lumps. I’m not waiting. I can’t wait.”
The thing is, in China, if you have money you can undergo surgery any day you want. There’s no backlog at the international hospital, and so the very next morning I’m scheduled in the operating room at ten. Before Tony and I go, Aidan climbs into bed and lies between us and asks if we’ll live in China forever. It’s still dark out and the dump trucks are quiet in the hutong. Tony says no—there’ll come a day when we move back to the States. Then Aidan says, “I like it here. It is different than Portland. There is bamboo in China.” Which gets me wondering again how the mind of my five-year-old works. Mostly, I’ve decided, Aidan lives in a kind of free association: one thought leads to another until they can be strung together to form a series. How nice to live in that nonlinear space—a land of sights and smells and memories and no breast surgery.
What will transpire between now and then is I’ll feed the boys Honey Nut Cheerios and poached eggs. Then I’ll go over Thorne’s spelling words with him (this week he has compounds like chopstick and crossroad). I’ll fill each boy’s backpack with a water bottle and a bag of Wheat Thins for the bus ride home. Then Tony will walk the boys down to the bus stop. I won’t tell them I’m having surgery today. At the door, just before they go, I’ll say, Have a great time at school. You know how much I love you.
If neither boy looks me in the eye, I’ll say it again: You know, right? You know how much I love you? I can do this now that I’m having surgery. I can push the envelope on how much you talk openly about the love with elementary-school boys. And sometimes Thorne can be harder to get my hands on, but there he is, standing in the elevator, smiling at me while I kiss him one last time. Aidan drinks it up. He’s always open to talking about the love and how much—just as long as it isn’t in public.
At the hospital, the nurse walks me into an examining room to have an EKG before the surgery. They are big on EKGs in China. I’ve already had two here (which is two more than I’d had in my whole life before now). For some reason the Chinese feel EKGs are the benchmark for good health. You can’t get a long-term visa here until you’ve passed your EKG. You might have some serious disease (like cancer, for instance, or hepatitis) and they’ll let you into the country, but not if you have a weak EKG.
The nurse has trouble with the machine’s wires, which are connected to small round suction cups meant to adhere to the skin on my chest, but they’ve lost most of their sucking power. When things seem to be in place, I lie back on the bed while Tony watches from a chair across the room. The machine spits out numbers on the ream of graph paper and then the nurse turns to me in alarm. She asks loudly, in a heavy Chinese accent, “Are you having heart attack? Do you feel unusual?” Her words are labored and rushed. Tony stands up and grabs the graph paper and looks over at me. Then he reaches for one of the little suction cups that’s come loose on its wire.
“Do you feel unusual?” the nurse screams again, and I shake my head.
I want to tell her yes. Yes, I do feel unusual. I’m about to have breast surgery in China with an unwilling surgeon. I don’t have family here, so while I’m in surgery, my children will be watched by our wonderful ayi, whose last name I am still a little unsure of. She lives in a small village out near the airport and I don’t know the name of that either or what these lumps are doing inside my breast. The one thing I know on this Thursday morning is that I’m not having a heart attack. My heart feels fine.
After the EKG, the nurse walks me into a small changing room and hands me a hospital johnny made of green crepe paper. I put it on and come out into the waiting room and then I’m the naked woman standing in front of the bank of upholstered brown chairs, wearing a see-through gown. That’s when I start laughing so hard I cry. Tony takes a picture of me wearing the thing, and then he laughs too, while I run back inside the changing room and wait for him to bring the nurse, who hands me something else to put on made of gray cotton.
“Who told you to put that on?” the new nurse asks in English with a straight face. Then she says, “Ha. Funny. That’s funny. Take it off now.”
• • •
When the surgery is over, we have to wait for the pathology in a postop room where there’s sledgehammering going on. I’m not alone in this room—a sweet-faced seven-year-old Chinese boy lies behind the curtain next to me. He keeps screaming in pain—long, sustained, high-pitched screaming. How has it come to be that my boys are at home, oblivious to my surgery, while there’s a little boy Aidan’s age next to me, going through his own hell? Tony sits on the bed, holding my hand, looking more and more worried. The pathology is taking too long. He has a bad feeling, I can tell.
What he explains to me later is that Dr. Lan burst out of the operating room after the surgery and told Tony the tissue looked funny. But Tony doesn’t tell me this now. What he does is hold my hand and, every now and then, touch my face. The sledgehammering goes on, and Tony asks the nurse in Chinese what the problem is. It’s as if men are pounding into the wall behind my head. It’s impossible to sleep and hard to hear ourselves speak. The little boy’s extended family comes and huddles around his bed. There are twelve of them—aunties and uncles and grandparents and parents. The boy’s father finally takes the boy in his arms and rocks him to try to ease his crying.
We wait for the pathology some more, but I know now. I know because Tony is jittery, and he hardly ever acts this way, even though he hates hospitals. For years Tony went to the hospital in Hartford, Connecticut, with his sister, Polly, while she had her leukemia shots. He’s told me the shots she got were scary big. It was the 1970s. Tony was eight, Polly was six. Most children didn’t survive leukemia then. Tony would watch Polly get the shots and see how much pain she was in, and then he’d tell their mother he had a stomachache so he and Polly could stay home from school together. Tony missed a lot of school during those years.
Now he keeps standing up and pacing our little corner and then sitting down again and taking my hand. The boy next to me finally falls asleep. His family stays in the room, but they get quiet too. Then Dr. Lan must have come and fetched Tony because when I wake up, Tony is standing next to me, holding my hand and crying.
“It’s bad,” he says. “It’s not good. It’s bad.” The first thing I think of is how silly we’d been to take those stupid pictures of me in the see-through green johnny. How carefree we were just three hours ago—and that we can never go back there. I believe that kind of laughter is lost to us now. The second thing I realize is that I’ve never seen Tony scared before. Never scared like now. He stands above the hospital bed and weeps, and it brings the whole thing home.
I’m awake and crying too and the sledgehammering below us is so loud. Is it coming from the walls? Where is it coming from? The little boy next to me begins to stir and that’s when his father walks over to the nurse by the door and begins to rage in Chinese about the hammering and the inefficiency of the hospital and how could the place be so inept. He yells loudly until the little boy wakes up. Then Tony tells me that Dr. Lan won’t let me go home. “He is deciding whether or not to go back in and do the mastectomy right now,” Tony explains. “He’s worried he’s st
irred up the cancer and that he needs to finish what he started.”
“Mastectomy?” I whisper. How have we gone from harmless cysts to mastectomy? There’s the sledgehammering in my head and the fact that Dr. Lan does not believe in doing needle biopsies and so I’ve had an unplanned lumpectomy. I realize later that Dr. Lan is not able to do needle biopsies. He does not know how. Then I have to remember that the Canadian internist told me I had a choice about whether or not to use this hospital. Dr. Lan was a good surgeon, she’d said, but they did not have a cancer program at the hospital. They did not engage in what we in the Western world call “patient care.” I’d wanted to stay in Beijing for the surgery. I hadn’t wanted to fly off to Hong Kong or Boston. What hit me was that Beijing had become my home. It had snuck up on me, but it was home now.
The little boy’s father demands to see the hospital manager. Then Tony stands up again too, and together both men say they won’t pay unless the nurse produces someone who can explain the noise. The nurse goes down into the bowels of the hospital and brings back some mid-level manager of something, who says in Chinese how sorry he is. Tony answers that you can’t have surgery patients recovering in a construction zone. That they need to rest. They need sleep. It isn’t fair.
And why? the boy’s father asks. Why now? Why today? That is when the manager explains that the noise is because of the Olympics. “All the dignitaries and athletes will need extra rooms,” he explains. “There will be injuries and dehydration. We are working around the clock—night and day—to finish the new construction,” he says. “And we are behind.”
Then Dr. Lan pops his head in through my curtain and smiles. He says he’s thinking it would be best to go back in and finish the surgery and proposes an on-the-spot mastectomy. He is trying, I decide, to make up for his nonchalance. “Get me out of here,” I say to Tony in English. “You have to get me out of here.”
Inner Mongolia
Right now I’m in the bulkhead of Continental Airlines Flight 85 heading back to Beijing from Boston, where I’ve seen a small soccer team of doctors. The plane crosses the North Pole and heads out over the broad expanse of Russia. Dr. Lan got the initial cancer out—but in Boston I learned I have enough trouble to warrant the mastectomy. The next surgery is on the books in one month in Boston. One long month, and I haven’t even landed in Beijing yet.
The man next to me on the plane owns a plastic bottle manufacturing plant. He looks like the actor Greg Kinnear’s twin brother. He tells me his company makes every kind of plastic bottle you can imagine. “Spritzers,” he says. “Pour tops, and bottles with caps, and water bottles. Any time you go into Walgreens,” he says, “the plastic bottles in that store came from me.” I smile at him. I’ve hit a new personal low, and I haven’t found the bottom of it yet. We don’t know how bad the cancer is. Won’t know until after the next surgery. I’m sad and dazed by the travel and the litany of doctors. According to my Boston team, my cancer story is still a good one. You caught it early is the refrain I heard. It amazes me how cheery people can be about a cancer diagnosis.
Greg Kinnear seems nice. I don’t have the heart to ask if he’s heard the recent news that plastic bottles are leaching into our food and disrupting our endocrine systems. Or that some researchers think plastics might be directly related to breast cancer. I watch Atonement on my own TV screen and cannot believe how sad a movie it is. I’m trying to be hopeful while I fly back across time zones and hemispheres. But if you admired the novel like I did, then you know the movie is going to be sad from the start.
I’m trying to be about good endings right now. But it’s as if somewhere over Inner Mongolia, I hear the Boston surgeon’s words for the first time: mastectomy. My kind brother, John, met me in Boston at the airport. Then he and my amazing friend Electa took notes in the white hospital rooms with the doctors. Every evening we’d gather in the cozy restaurant of my small hotel on Charles Street, and John and Electa would go over what we’d learned that day, while I tried to pay attention. Electa would pull out her laptop, then she and John would write a story of what the doctors had told us, and what the prognosis looked like. Then they’d send an e-mail to other doctors and friends who might know something more about the disease. What we were doing was trying to get a leg up—racing to figure out the best tactic in the fastest way possible. The speed at which things moved was startling.
But sometimes bad news settles slowly. I’m watching the movie on the plane and then deep sounds come from a dry place in my throat I’ve never felt before. I try to pretend I’m crying over Atonement and grab my sweater to hide my tears from Greg Kinnear. Then I stand up to wash my face. It can’t be true that there’s more cancer. I open a closet door in the plane’s galley instead of the bathroom and hear the flight attendant say “She’s drunk” to the woman standing near her. But I’m not. Not really. Or maybe a little. I did have the glass of wine after the valium. Or maybe two glasses—it’s hard to remember now, and who’s counting?
As we drove to the airport for the flight to Boston last week, Lao Wu told Tony he had something he needed to say to me and went on to give a speech in Chinese that had to do with the importance of not worrying. The kids would be fine while I was in Boston, Lao Wu said. I could only catch snippets, so Tony began to translate. Lao Wu said he would make sure the kids were fine. My job was not to worry, he announced as we pulled up to International Departures. My job was to think only good thoughts.
At first, Tony had tried to tell Lao Wu about my cancer and Lao Wu hadn’t wanted to hear it. They’d sat in the minivan outside the apartment and Lao Wu put his hands up in the air as if to ward off bad news. He said, “Women bu shi peng you.” We are not friends. Which was another way of saying they did not have the intimacy needed for such a hard conversation. It seems the Chinese like to talk about sickness and death even less than Americans do.
In the van Tony had to switch tactics with Lao Wu. “Lao Wu,” he said. “If we’re not friends, then I’m your employer. I pay you to drive the minivan. I need you to know this information about Susan.” And this was how Tony got Lao Wu to understand that I had cancer.
Then Lao Wu asked Tony if he believed in Buddhism. Tony told him that he’d read Daoist writings in college and that he was mostly a Daoist. Tony asked Lao Wu what he believed in and Lao Wu said, “The Communist Party doesn’t allow anyone to believe.” Then he recited a Buddhist poem.
We’re crossing over the Inner Mongolian plains, an hour or so from Beijing, and I can’t stop thinking about the boys. What to say to them? How to say it? In Boston I saw a wise therapist who told me that the best way to talk about breast cancer with children is to tell them the truth. She ran a center for parents with cancer at the hospital. She said we each get one cancer chit to lie to our children with, and that I’d used mine by telling the boys I was at a teaching conference in Boston this week.
The plane lands in the pouring rain and taxis to the gate. A man begins flirting with me at the baggage terminal. He’s in his sixties and tells me he’s come to China for the car parts industry. I have that feeling again of being on the outside of some great entrepreneurial Chinese gold rush: so many have come from far away to sell plastic bottles and gaskets here. This man says he lived in South America in the 1970s and that it was reckless. I tell him my husband is waiting for me outside customs. He puts his hand on my arm, just for a second, and says he hopes to see me around.
I grab my duffel and find Tony at the gate holding a bouquet of red roses. “They were all I could find,” he says, and smiles.
“I feel like we’re going to the prom,” I joke, and it’s good to laugh for a second. Roses are not his style. I’m floating through the terminal. I have so much to tell Tony.
“I’m here,” he says quietly while we walk. “I’m here now. Let’s sit somewhere. Let’s stop.”
“But we have to get the kids,” I say, looking sideways at him. “Where are the boys?” I remember they’re with Hans and Britta—a German couple we met
skiing two months ago. They have three kids of their own whom Thorne and Aidan love to play with.
“Britta said to take as long as we want,” Tony tells me. “She’s planning on giving them dinner.”
I’d only known Britta for two months when I called her on the phone ten days ago and told her I was having surgery in Beijing. I didn’t want to have to test our new friendship. I didn’t want to have to trust it. I sat at my dining room table, and when Britta answered, I said nervously, “We don’t know each other well yet, but I’d like to tell someone here that I’m having surgery tomorrow.” Britta is a strong woman. She’s not easily cowed. That’s why I called her.
“I don’t want to talk just now,” I say to Tony in the newly finished Terminal Three—the largest airport hangar in the world. It’s too anonymous in here. “I can’t focus on the master plan. I have Thorne and Aidan on the brain.”
“We don’t need the plan, Sus.” Tony takes my arm. “I just need to hear how you are.”
“But I want to get the boys,” I say. “I need to get them.” We walk out under an enormous billboard that reads “My Games, My Contribution, My Happiness.” I’ve seen this sign in Beijing all year. Whose contribution are we talking about, and what kind of happiness?
Back at our apartment Aidan has a drawing of concentric hearts waiting for me. The hearts are in different shades of red magic marker and the word MOMMY is written in blue capital letters in the center. Thorne’s made a card out of green construction paper that reads, “I hope you’re home for good now.”
