“Still have a chance?” Matthew sensed the implication. He mustered the courage to ask the all-important question. “Still have a…? How’s my case doing?”
David, Donna, Sarie, and Matt’s physicians had made a bargain with him from the day of his diagnosis. No one would ever lie to him.
“Dad? My case?”
“Not so good. The surgeon couldn’t get it all.” David held back tears.
Matthew knew that his tumor was resistant to chemotherapy, that only once had any combination of chemicals caused a response, and even then only a partial one. To the best of his information, surgery had been his final hope.
“Then I’m… going to die?” Matt asked the question as if he didn’t understand the meaning of the words, as if they were gibberish or a foreign language. But all at once he did understand, and tears leaked from his eyes. “I’m going to die?”
A physician, who saw Matthew seldom and thus hadn’t established rapport with him, responded. “You have to face up to it. There’s a strong risk you might not survive.”
At the time, David thought the doctor’s response was so cruelly matter-of-fact that David wanted to grab the man, shake him, and curse him for his insensitivity.
But the physician, it turned out, had been forced to answer that ultimate question so many times in his career that he’d finally concluded that the only adequate response was to be direct and objective. An unemotional statement of the facts.
And the fact was that Matthew did have to be prepared. His chances of survival were narrowing. There was a likely possibility he would die.
“But”-Matthew sobbed-“I don’t want to die.”
“No one wants to die,” the physician said. “Everyone eventually does, though.”
“When they’re old, when they’ve lived their lives.”
“It doesn’t always happen that way.”
Matthew sobbed harder. “I’m just a kid.”
No pain, no catastrophe that David had ever endured compared with the heartbreak Matthew’s next sobbing statement caused.
“No one will remember me.”
David wanted to scream.
Instead he held Matthew’s hand and tried not to let him panic.
“If the worst does happen, I promise, son. You won’t be alone. And you will be remembered. But no one’s giving up. I told you, we’ve still got a chance.” David looked with hope toward the physician. “A bone marrow transplant.”
“Yes,” the physician said. “Provided your son meets the requirements.”
“Requirements?”
9
The start of another nightmare. During Matt’s operation, when the surgeons had explained the unforeseen complications of his tumor, when a decision had to be made within fifteen minutes, there hadn’t been time for the surgeons to discuss the conditions required for a bone marrow transplant.
There were four.
First, the bone marrow transplant unit wouldn’t put Matthew through the extreme procedure unless there was a reasonable expectation that the treatment would succeed. To determine whether Matthew was a suitable candidate, the physicians had to know…
Second, whether the remnant of the tumor that the surgeon had been compelled to leave against Matt’s spine was as small as the surgeon had described.
Third, whether the tumor was growing on any other parts of Matthew’s body, on his legs and arms, for example, where Ewing ’s sarcoma customarily struck.
Fourth, whether his bone marrow was free of any microscopic evidence of tumor spores.
If any or all of these latter three conditions gave cause for pessimism, “all bets are off,” the physician said.
Time was crucial. The sooner the answers were determined (provided they were encouraging), the sooner Matt could be given a bone marrow transplant. That quarter of an inch of tumor that for sure was still in his body, against his spine, would keep growing, and if it got much bigger, it might resist even the massive doses of chemotherapy with which the physicians would attempt to kill it.
Mentally, psychologically, emotionally, and physically, Matt had almost reached the limit of what a human being can suffer and withstand.
10
But the suffering persisted. Within forty-eight hours of Matt’s surgery, he was wheeled from floor to floor, from ward to ward. Each bump made him cringe in pain. Each time he was transferred from his bed to various examination tables, he groaned and sweated. But he never screamed. He never panicked. He had chest X rays, skeletal X rays, CAT scans, magnetic resonance images. Some of these procedures required him to remain immobile, stifling his agony, for an hour.
Then his bone marrow had to be tested. Lying on his good side, fighting the excruciating stress on his bad side, he gripped David’s hand with the force of a wrestler and endured the threaded point of a needle being screwed through each buttock and into each hip bone. The needle probed to the very center of each bone and extracted marrow.
David had no idea what marrow looked like. He imagined it resembled bone. But as the needle was unscrewed from each hip and its contents pushed onto a microscope slide, he saw that bone marrow looked like blood, the thickest, the darkest he’d ever seen.
The tests were completed. The waiting began.
Three days of unimaginably nerve-taut waiting while David, Donna, and Sarie worked every minute to make Matt as comfortable as possible and strained to alleviate his mental alarm.
“Hope, Matthew. Hope.”
11
A sleepless son to a sleepless parent at three o’clock in the morning.
“Is there an afterlife?”
How does a father answer such a question from a son in danger of death?
David sat up from the cot beside Matthew’s bed. He chose his words carefully, and each word tasted like salt. “Afterlife? I promised I’d never lie to you. The truth is, I don’t know. There’s no way to tell. I think there is. I want to believe there is. For sure, a lot of people do believe there is. But unless they get there, they’ll never know.”
“I’m pretty sure there’s something after death,” Matt said.
“You mean like heaven?”
“Sort of. I’m confused.”
“We’re all confused. So many theories. A lot of Eastern religions believe that we live many times and that when we die, we’re reborn in a brand-new body.”
“I’ve heard about that. What’s it called? No, I remember. Reincarnation.”
“I’m surprised you know that.”
“I’ve been reading. I want more time. There’s so much I want to learn about.”
“You’ve learned quite a lot already.”
“Not enough.”
David forced himself to keep talking. “Those Eastern religions believe that eventually, after several lives, we die one last time and go to God.”
“I remember. But…”
“What is it, son?”
“Am I good enough for God?”
That was one question David could answer without a doubt. “You’re the finest person I know, the most honest, the most fair, the most decent. By all means, you’re good enough, more than good enough for God.”
“I love you, Dad.”
“Matt, I can’t express how much I love you.”
12
The waiting finally ended. The results of the tests came back. Three physicians and a nurse surrounded Matthew on his bed, while David, Donna, and Sarie waited anxiously in the background. This was it. The day of judgment. And the physicians had such blank faces it was impossible to predict what they would report.