4
We find the cancer by accident, on Sunday, November 5, 2000, in the emergency room of Providence St. Vincent Medical Center in Portland, Oregon. We don’t recognize it when we see it. We are looking for something else when we find it, the source of a long-standing pain in Terence’s gut. When the doctors point out the cancer we try to ignore them. We consider it a nuisance. A distraction from what we think is the real illness that has been bedeviling him.
We live in Portland now, having arrived here from New York via Atlanta. Terence was born for adventure. When we walk the streets of New York, he points up at bay windows. “I want to live there,” he says. After dinner in Chinatown, he points up at an apartment above the teeming streets. “Let’s move there.”
So when, after nearly a decade in New York, the Journal offers in 1995 to make me a manager in Atlanta, I hesitate. He does not. I have always been a reporter, in charge of no one but myself. Now that will change. It scares me.
“You’re going to be somebody, Toots,” he says. “I’ve told you that all along.”
He is ready to go long before I am.
“My idea of fun,” he says, “is moving to a different place every year. I love new places. I love learning new things. I love meeting new people.” So off we go, and I become not just bossy but a boss, for the first time in my life.
In New York, Terence stands out for his dignified, Midwestern formality. In Atlanta, for his bohemian eccentricity. In our new suburban world of cul-de-sacs and swimming pools and center-hall colonials, regional sales managers, silver Lexuses and black SUVs, he buys a twenty-year-old Volvo, with two hundred thousand miles on it. One morning the entire front crashes to the ground, stopping traffic in both directions for fifteen minutes. Our neighbors hire gardeners to edge their front lawns. Terence plants pumpkins and sunflowers in ours; had I not become hysterical, he would have planted corn.
I fret that I am not like the other women, who have embroidered sweaters for every season, nice hair and nails and tidy homes. He is smug that he is not like the other men. At brunch, I watch from the kitchen as Terence and a tall man in khakis and a polo shirt—a district manager for some company making some thing—sit side by side in the family room.
“Play much golf?” our neighbor asks.
“No,” says Terence.
They finger their drinks in silence. If the man is stupid enough not to recognize the importance of Sarajevo, or of Atget and Margaret Bourke-White, or Bix Beiderbecke, or the problems of translating four-character Chinese sayings into English … well, Terence can’t help him.
Terence goes to work at CNN, creating historical and political context for news stories online. He rails at his twenty-eight-year-old colleagues who can’t tell a flattop from a battleship, or who can’t place Turkey on a map—and don’t seem to care. Our own small neighborhood is filled with children. Evan. Michael. Tessa. Leah. Louis. Lawton. Terence throws himself into coaching at the Baptist church down the street. I join them after work, my heels sinking in the soft earth. He sends away for official coaching manuals. He and Terry do endless grounders and pop-ups in the front yard.
Our new home is three times bigger than anything we have lived in before—four bedrooms, a two-car garage, a finished basement, and a storage area. He fills them all. Before the year is out we cannot use the garage for a garage. We cannot use the basement for a playroom. We cannot use the laundry room for laundry without lifting stacks of newspapers waiting to be clipped off the tops of the machines. One day I slip and the whole edifice collapses, instantly forming papier-mâché with laundry water and detergent. I lie down on the kitchen floor and begin to cry. “I can’t take it. I can’t take it,” I sob over and over again. He is frightened. The papers are gone by morning.
The Olympics come and go. A backpack bomber kills a bystander; a security guard is falsely charged. The Unabomber is arrested and Dolly the sheep is cloned. Yet by Terry’s eighth birthday we still do not have the little girl we want. We turn back to China, where the one-child policy is swelling orphanages around the country with girls—perfect in every way, except for their sex. We write essays. Get recommendations. Ink our fingers at the local police station. A social worker visits our home to check us for suitability.
More than a year later, in January of 1998, the fax arrives in the middle of the night with a thumbnail photo of a sad-eyed child with a ragged haircut. Terry, Terence, and I set off for China in February 1998 to pick up little Liu Yue, who will be renamed Georgia Anne Bennett Foley.
She is nearly four years old, a southern girl, from Wuhan, China’s equivalent of Atlanta. It is immediately clear to Terence and me that, a little more than a decade since we left, the China that we knew is fading into the past, and a new, glittery China is emerging. Wuhan is a midsize city of 7.6 million. There are cars on the street. Lots of cars. We stock up our hotel room with juice boxes and cartons of milk that we buy at the supermarket. There is even a shiny new department store downtown. Georgia’s Chinese is fluent, if heavily accented. Terence and I want her to keep her language, so we speak to her only in Chinese.
She has other ideas. Barely two weeks after she comes home, she flies around Terry’s Little League practice with the other kids.
“Frenchyfry shlushy. Frenchyfry shlushy,” she chants. It gets her the junk food she wants. Terence stubbornly continues to speak to her in Chinese, but she just as stubbornly puts her hands over her ears and refuses to listen.
By June 1998, I have been with The Wall Street Journal for twenty-three years. I am forty-six years old, and I am being offered an excellent job in Oregon by Sandra Rowe, a woman I admire, and will come to love. Yet again I am afraid. His answer to all my objections is the same. “You are going to be somebody, Toots. It’s about time you started.” I close my eyes and jump.
The plan is for me to go on ahead. Terence will stay behind to close up the house. When school ends, Terry and Georgia will fly to Oregon with Anja, their longtime babysitter. They are nervous. Terry has never flown without us; Georgia has been on a plane only once in her life. Terence hits on an idea. “Give them something to take care of,” he says. “It will help them forget about themselves.” We buy a taffy-colored gerbil and a small traveling case. Caramel has never flown before, Terence tells them. They must help him be brave. Off they go, across the country, carefully tending the gerbil through boarding, landing, a plane change. As soon as they arrive, and I meet them at the plane, our first call is to Daddy, to let him know that Caramel has landed and is going to be very happy in his new home.
And for two and a half years, we are.
• • •
By the time the emergency room doctors discover the cancer, Terence and I have been married for more than thirteen years. Georgia is now six, and Terry has just turned twelve. Our family has a life together in Oregon.
With the discovery of the cancer, you might suppose we feel: This is where our whole life changes. This is where everything becomes different. But it isn’t like that at all. As soon as we discover it, it becomes an afterthought, a nuisance, a distraction from another more demanding illness and everything else going on in our lives. The doctors call it a “shadow.”
On the morning of our discovery, the house is filled with not-quite-adolescent boys, celebrating Terry’s twelfth birthday. We’d let them set up a tent in the family room the night before, stowed everything breakable, given them all pillows and flashlights, and let them romp through the house. Terence hadn’t been feeling well for several weeks. Still, he is pummeling boys with pillows and fending off their attacks as he videotapes the mayhem. By 11:00 a.m. I am rousting bleary-eyed boys, filling them with pancakes, and shipping them home one by one as parents arrive. Terence is nowhere to be found.
I find him on our bed doubled over in pain. I’m scared. He’s trying not to moan. I call our family doctor, who orders us to the emergency room right away. When the last boy is picked up, I bundle Terence and the two kids into the car and head across town.
We pack bags of toys for both children, preparing for a long wait at the emergency room.
Instead, when the triage nurse takes his name, age, and symptoms, Terence is whisked past the waiting room filled with other patients right into a curtained alcove. That alarms me even more. What do they know that we don’t? Not wanting to frighten the children, Terence has clenched his jaw all the way to the hospital, but once the kids are installed out in the cheerful large outer waiting area with their X-Men and Barbies, the pain breaks through. On the emergency gurney, he curls into a fetal position and keens in pain. He is wheeled off for a scan almost immediately.
After reading the scan, the attending doctor is vaguely reassuring. Something is clearly wrong with his intestines, but there doesn’t appear to be any immediate danger. Almost as an aside, however, he mentions that on the scan a “shadow” has appeared on Terence’s kidney. “You are going to want to get that looked at,” he says in a very casual tone.
Terence and I are both annoyed. Why is he even talking about a shadow? Who cares about a shadow? His kidneys aren’t the problem. It’s his intestines. He is in such pain from his gut he can scarcely breathe. He is admitted to the hospital directly from the emergency room with a diagnosis of severe ulcerative colitis.
Pain.
It is the thing I recall most clearly from the next five weeks. Terence in pain. He is white with pain, curled up from pain, almost completely consumed with pain. No food. No water. Nothing by mouth, says the chart on his bed. They pump him full of steroids to reduce the inflammation in his colon. Every morning I come by hoping to catch a doctor; every evening I bring the children by with a handmade card, or one of their toys. The children and I eat dinner in the hospital every night. Chili. Meatloaf. Grilled chicken from the cafeteria. Terry plays Christmas carols on a grand piano in the dining room. Georgia learns to work the soft-ice-cream machine. Upstairs, Terence lies half-crazed with the pain. He loses sixty pounds.
Six days later, he is sent home, still in pain, but at least able to stand upright. Let’s see if the severity of the attack subsides, they say. It’s the best we can do. Terence forces himself back to work; I drop him on the corner right outside the door of Portland State, where he is teaching a class on imperialism. When we drive, he cries out at every turn, almost shrieking at potholes. The pain is just barely to the side of endurable.
Just barely.
After several weeks of this, he is in bed one night, his teeth clenched from the agony in his gut. He starts a conversation with me that begins in the middle.
“I won’t leave a mess for you or the children to find,” he says. He gives me no room to answer. He is planning. “I can’t take this much longer,” he says. “I’ll go out into the woods. I’ll leave directions so you can send someone.” I know he has guns, locked somewhere safely away from the children—and from me. I don’t know where they are or how to find them.
The steroids aren’t working. Withholding food isn’t working. Time isn’t healing. All along there has been another choice, a drastic one. Now it is clear it is time to make it. On December 13, 2000, Dr. David Luallin removes Terence’s entire colon.
Emerging from the operation, Dr. Luallin has two things to say. The first is that the operation has been successful. The colon—damaged mysteriously beyond any help, he says—is gone now, and with it the pain. Terence will face several more operations to restore his digestive functions, but there will be no more pain. Second, there is definitely something on the kidney. He saw it while he was inside. A “cyst” he calls it. Of those two sentences, I ignore one, focusing instead on the other, thanking God we ended Terence’s pain before he was tempted again to do so himself.
Of all the things we fight about, the big three of most couples’ contention—sex, money, and child rearing—play no role in our lives. On all three we seem to have a deep, visceral alignment. We arrive at our view of money from different poles. He grew up with plenty of it; my childhood was always panicked lest there not be enough. Somehow we have arrived at the same utilitarian view of it. We think about it like we think about plumbing. It’s got to be there. It’s got to work. Otherwise, we ignore it. I often ignore it to the point of chaos. It’s never unusual to find me paying the same bill twice, or three times, or not at all. I set up systems and promptly ignore them. I get overwhelmed by details and paper. Every couple of months, Terence sits me down and slowly works with me to unravel the latest disaster I have created.
So I pay no attention whatsoever to the cost of the surgery. I’m not even sure who is paying for it. Because I have a good job, I have good health insurance courtesy of my employer, The Oregonian. In this I am typical—one of the more than 80 percent of Americans covered by either private or government insurance. Still, I confess to being a bit hazy about who is actually paying the bills. The sheets of paper we get every time we go to a doctor say “Blue Cross/Blue Shield,” so in some vague way I think it’s “insurance” covering the cost, even though I will come to learn that it is really my employer paying all along. Blue Cross just handles the details.
We had just had an example of how a minor slip-up in that system could cost us a lot. Georgia, who had arrived in our family from China with a mouthful of rotten baby teeth, is so terrified of the dentist that he can’t keep her still long enough even to give her anesthetic. Terence calls me at work: The dentist wants to run her over to the local community hospital, where he can put her under for the few minutes it will take to pull the teeth. A few weeks later, we receive a $1,500 bill for the dentist’s fifteen-minute use of the operating room. The hospital has no agreement with the insurance company. The bill is ours.
When it comes to Terence’s colon surgery, Dr. Campbell, the soft-spoken family doctor who practices out of a modest strip mall, has obviously had experience with this insurance situation. When he orders us to the emergency room, he says, almost as an aside, “Be sure to go to one of the Providence Hospitals. They’ll take your insurance.” A patient he had just sent by ambulance to the nearest hospital is now facing tens of thousands of dollars of uncovered bills. That patient happened to have the same insurance coverage as we do, he explains—Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield of Oregon—so Dr. Campbell remembers what to tell us to do.
I also wonder if I would have been so careless had I seen the actual bills. I’m sure they came to the house after Terence’s hospitalization. I paid what little part was our share and threw away the rest. The bills for the first stay totaled $10,595, including $661 a day for the bed. For the second stay, which includes the hours-long surgery, the hospital bills totaled $44,626.32; the surgeon, Dr. David Luallin, billed $3,503; and the anesthesiologists $1,595.
That Christmas, in the year 2000, the children and I buy the biggest, bushiest, fattest Christmas tree that the Oregon forest can give us. Terry and Georgia and I drive out to a farm in the wispy Oregon mist to pick it out. The children select a huge Douglas fir. I think it cost about seventy-five dollars, which is way more expensive than the ones Terence and I usually would buy. Yet it is tall and perfectly conical with lush full needles and the smell of the woods still on it. It is so big that the three of us can’t handle it ourselves. Sandy, my boss, sends her husband and a friend over to set it up and help us string lights.
We move the piano and set the tree up in a corner of the living room, where two banks of windows meet, looking straight down at the Willamette River. It is an offering of sorts.
Back when we were moving here more than two years ago, Terence and I fought over those windows. Or rather, over the house that encased them. On a house-hunting trip in June 1998, we looked at fifty or sixty houses. They were all too plain. Or too small. Or too big. One lemon yellow center-hall colonial with black shutters was beautiful in the photo; it turned out to be the lone house sitting in a narrow triangle between a gas station and a highway. Terence returned discouraged to Atlanta to close out our house there; I stayed at work and continued the hunt.
One evening the agent called, excited.
Just as twilight began to fall she and I pulled up a nondescript driveway leading up to a garage door and a long cedar walkway. We opened the door and found ourselves suddenly looking out into Oregon itself. Soaring cedar trees framed the view straight down into the Willamette Valley and the river below. Off to the left, flat-topped Mount St. Helens, which had twenty years earlier covered the neighborhood with volcanic ash; off in the distance, the peak of Mount Baker. And there, filling up every window in every room in the house, looking like Mount Fuji, was white-capped Mount Hood. The house was cleverly built into the side of a mountain; the entire front of the house was glass. I called Terence, breathless. “We have to buy this. Now.”
The following weekend he flew out to sign the papers. Excited, I walked him through the house. The big bedrooms. The playroom. The cedar decks hanging out into sheer nothingness over the valley. As we stood, the sun went down behind us, turning the mountain in front of us orange, and then pink, and then a misty gray. The lights below us reflected on the river. He was quiet. His body language was noncommittal. He turned away from me. He walked through the rooms, saying almost nothing.
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
What’s wrong?
Nothing.
He was silent. Not hostile. Just gone.
I was frightened. I didn’t understand what was going on. I was racking my brains. What did I do? What did I say?
Have I said something wrong? Talk to me.
Nothing.
He was silent through dinner. Finally the truth dawned on me. He had been in Atlanta alone for a month while I was working here in Oregon. He didn’t want to tell me he didn’t want to move into this house with me.
“You’re having an affair!” I was close to tears.
His mouth opened into a large O.
“It’s Alison, isn’t it?”
“What are you TALKING about?”
“You won’t talk to me. You won’t look at me. There’s something wrong and you won’t tell me. You’re having an affair and you don’t want to tell me, right?”
The Cost of Hope Page 5
