Annalise spontaneously leaned over and kissed Harry on the cheek. Then she headed for the hospital.
As Harry climbed into the Volvo, she saw Cory walking through the parking lot. He jogged to catch up to Annalise, and they walked to the entrance together.
Three faces looked up at Harry, whiskers forward in anticipation.
“I thought she’d never shut up,” Pewter moaned.
“Gang, I am so naïve. What have I been doing all my life?”
“You were the postmistress of Crozet before they built the big post office,” Tucker said. “You were the best postmistress in the world.”
“Don’t gild the lily, Tucker.” Pewter lifted one dark gray eyebrow.
“She was.”
“That means you’ve worked with other postmistresses,” Pewter argued.
“Miranda.” The dog named Harry’s friend, who had worked with her.
Miranda Hogendobber’s husband, George, had been the postmaster for decades. When he passed away, Harry, fresh from Smith College, had fallen into the job, assuming it would be temporary.
When the new post office was built—quite a nice one, and much needed—she was told she couldn’t bring her pets to work. No one much cared at the old, cozy PO. Furious, Harry resigned to take up farming full-time. Much as she missed that regular paycheck, she’d never regretted it.
Harry’s eyes followed the two doctors, engaged in an animated conversation. Then Cory pushed open the large glass door for Annalise, and they disappeared into the hospital.
Mrs. Murphy jumped into the passenger seat, leaving Pewter and Tucker to fuss at each other in the back.
Absentmindedly, Harry reached over to pet the tiger cat once she’d started the wagon.
“Good news.” Harry ran her forefinger under Mrs. Murphy’s chin.
“Good.” The cat purred.
“All right. We’re off and running. Who knows what else the day will bring.”
The whole thrust of where we are now with cancer surgery,” Cory Schaeffer spoke to Harry’s support group, “is to get survival rates equivalent to those where women have undergone a radical mastectomy. We’ve accomplished that for the early stages of breast cancer.” Sitting on a chair, he crossed his right leg over his left, holding his right ankle. “As many of you know, there is now tissue-targeted therapy, which we’re using with those breast cancers that overexpress ERBB-two. Tremendous advances have been made in tissue-targeted therapy, as well as endocrine therapy. Tests now are far more sensitive than they were even ten years ago. We can use aromatase inhibitors for women, almost always postmenopausal, with hormone receptor–positive breast cancer.” He took a deep breath. “What I do is remove your cancer, then advise treatments based upon the tumor, the stage of the cancer, and your body chemistry. My great hope is that one day we will be able to prevent breast cancer. We will be able to develop a vaccine just as we have for smallpox.”
Tired from her second radiation treatment, Harry listened, but much of it went over her head.
He continued, “An immunologist at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio believes breast cancer is a preventable disease. I do, too. Clinical trials of a vaccine could begin within the next two years. It’s tremendously exciting.”
At ease in front of a group, the handsome doctor forgot that his audience—unless they had the receptor-positive breast cancer or something rare, such as inflammatory breast cancer—might not understand the technical terms.
When Toni Enright asked for questions, many were for clarification.
Franny Howard asked the most interesting question. “Dr. Schaeffer, you mentioned a vaccine. Does that mean you think cancer is a virus?”
“Some cancers, yes. This is an issue often discussed by oncologists. Obviously there are different kinds of cancers, and they may be caused in different ways.”
Now more alert since the discussion was less technical, Harry asked, “If cancer is a virus, then wouldn’t people close to you come down with it?”
“In fact, Harry, they do. We all know of families where cancer runs through all the generations. Is it genetic? Probably, but there has to be something that kicks it off. This disease is so complex, we don’t know. Can you give it to someone else like the common cold? Probably not, but we don’t know. Some oncologists believe when we can cure the common cold, we will cure cancer. One thing that makes cancer work easier for doctors is it isn’t disguised as something else, the way syphilis is.”
Listening intently was Emily Udall, a young woman in Stage Four cancer. She’d been diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer when pregnant. She had delivered a healthy daughter, but her cancer exploded. Emily knew her time on earth was drawing nigh. But she fought on, more for her baby and her husband than for herself. She wanted to make certain she left them in as good an order as possible, but she feared her disease would reappear thirty years later in her beautiful baby girl.
Franny reached for Emily.
Emily put her hand over Franny’s, then removed it and raised it. “Dr. Schaeffer.”
“Emily.” He was her surgeon.
“How early should my daughter begin getting tested?”
If only he didn’t care so much about his patients. Wretched that he couldn’t save Emily, couldn’t save any woman diagnosed with cancer when pregnant, he said, “I’d begin checkups once she gets her period. And mammograms once her breasts develop. With your family history, this is critical, and we can fervently hope that by the time Teresa reaches adolescence, we will be far more advanced than we are today.”
Emily’s grandmothers on both sides of her family had developed breast cancer. Her mother also died from it.
The questions continued, and Cory did his best not to be so technical.
Watching Emily, Harry realized that what Regina and Jennifer told her was the truth: She had been lucky. Bad as it was to be diagnosed with cancer, her chances were excellent. She knew she wasn’t a deep thinker. Her interests weren’t superficial—she loved art history, she loved history, and, of course, she loved farming—but Harry hadn’t considered the giant questions of life. She’d not given much thought to her purpose, to the direction of her nation, to the fragility of both democracy and life. In a strange way, she was becoming grateful to that invader of her breast. How could she sit near an attractive young mother, her chances nil, and not ask profound questions?
Perhaps the most painful was: Am I living a full life? Am I reaching out to others, be they human or animal? Am I doing one thing to make the world a better place?
She snapped back to the group when Cory and Toni agreed to disagree.
“He has more faith in these things than I do. But he’s the doctor.” Toni smiled.
For all his sometimes arrogance, Cory wanted to ease suffering as much as he wanted to cure cancer. “A regimen of vitamins, staying away from too much salt and sugar, and exercise can help. I actually think in some cases faithfully taking care of yourself through diet, supplements, and even walking a mile a day can jump-start the body’s healing.” He became animated. “Your body wants to be healthy. Again, we don’t understand the interplay between good health habits and disease as much as we should. The emphasis in Western medicine is always on disease, not health. We are woefully behind with preventive medicine, but I believe your body wants to live, to be healthy. How can I or any other doctor explain how a person dying of lung cancer spontaneously heals? An X ray reveals no dark mass. And that person lives another twenty years. While these events are considered uncommon and exceptions that prove the rule, I don’t think they are. I think, however, whoever that individual was, they triggered the body’s deepest mechanisms to heal. Sometimes I think we—by ‘we’ I mean modern medicine—interfere with that. And I am the first one to be dazzled by technology. Yet what are we missing? What am I missing?”