Contrary to myth, the med degree conferred no emotional invulnerability. Even doctors feared death—even successful doctors. Feared it and avoided it. Sometimes neurotically. During his residency, Matt had worked with an oncologist who hated his patients… He was a good doctor, unflaggingly professional, but in a lounge or a cafeteria or a bar—among colleagues—he would explain at length what weaklings people were. “They invite their tumors. They’re lazy or fat or they smoke, or they inebriate themselves with alcohol or lie in the sun with their skin exposed. Then they bring their abused bodies to me. ‘Cure this, please, doctor.’ Sickening.”
“Maybe they’re just unlucky,” Matt had ventured. “Some of them, at least.”
“The more time you spend on my floor, Dr. Wheeler, the less inclined you will be to believe that.”
Maybe so, Matt thought. The contempt was not reasonable, but it served a purpose. It kept death at arm’s length. Open the door to sympathy—even a crack—and grief might crowd in behind it.
It was not an attitude Matt could adopt, however, which helped steer him into family practice. His daily work was leavened with mumps, measles, minor wounds stitched, infections knocked out with antibiotics. Healing, in other words. Small benevolent acts. He was a bit player in the minor dramas of ordinary lives, a good guy, not a death angel presiding at the gateway to oblivion.
Seldom, at least.
But Cindy Rhee was dying, and there was nothing he could do about it.
He had told the Rhees he would stop in to see their daughter Friday morning.
David Rhee was a forklift driver at the mill south of town. His parents were Korean immigrants living in Portland ; David had married a pretty Buchanan girl named Ellen Drew and twelve years ago Ellen had borne him a daughter, Cindy.
Cindy was a delicate, thin child with just a touch of her father’s complexion. Her eyes were large, mysterious, brown. She was suffering from a neuroblastoma, a cancer of the nervous system.
She fell down walking to school one autumn morning. She stood up, brushed the leaf debris off her jacket, carried on. Next week, she fell again. And the week after. Then twice in a week. Twice in a day. Finally her mother brought her in to see Matt.
He found gross anomalies in her reflexes and a pronounced papilledema. He told Mrs. Rhee he couldn’t make a diagnosis and referred Cindy to a neurologist at the hospital, but his suspicions were grave. A benign and operable tumor of the brain might be the girl’s best hope. There were other possibilities, even less pleasant.
He attended her while she was admitted for tests. Cindy was immensely patient in the face of the unavoidable indignities, almost supernaturally so. It occurred to Matt to wonder where such people came from: the obviously good and decent souls who endure hardship without complaint and cause duty-hardened nurses to weep for them in the hallways.
He was with the Rhees when the neurologist explained that their daughter was suffering from a neuroblastoma. David and Ellen Rhee listened with ferocious concentration as the specialist described the hardships and benefits, the pluses and minuses, of chemotherapy. David spoke first: “But will it cure her?”
“It might prolong her life. It might send the tumor into remission. We don’t use the word ‘cure.’ We would have to keep a close watch on her even in the best case.”
David Rhee nodded, a gesture not of acquiescence but of brokenhearted acknowledgment. His daughter might not get well. His daughter might die.
I could have been a plumber, Matt thought, an electrician, an accountant, anything, dear God, not to be in this room at this moment. He couldn’t meet Ellen’s eyes when she left with her husband. He was afraid she would see his craven helplessness.
Cindy responded to the chemotherapy. She lost some hair but recovered her sense of balance; she went home from the hospital skinny but optimistic.
She was back six months later. Her tumor, inoperable to begin with, had disseminated. Her speech was slurred and her eyesight had begun to tunnel. Matt canvassed the hospital’s specialists: surely some kind of operation… But the malignancy had colonized her brain too deeply; the X-rays were eloquent, merciless. Surgery, if anyone had been mad enough to attempt it, would have left her speechless, sightless, possibly soulless.
Now she was home to die. The Rhees understood this. In a way, the prognosis was kind; she was functional enough to leave the hospital and with any luck she wouldn’t end up DNR in some pitiless white room. Now Cindy was blind and could form only the most rudimentary words, but Ellen Rhee continued to care for her daughter with a relentless heroism that Matt found humbling.
He had promised he would stop by this morning, but he didn’t relish the task. It was hard not to care about Cindy Rhee, hard not to hate the disease that was torturing her to death. There was a state of mind Matt called “being the doctor machine,” in which he kept his emotions filed for later reference… but that was a difficult balancing act at the best of times, and this morning he was feverish and disoriented. He popped a decongestant and drove to the Rhees’ house in a grim mood.
There was the question, too, of what Jim Bix had told him. He carried it like a stone, a weight he could neither dislodge nor easily bear. Jim was sincere, but he might still be mistaken. Or crazy. Or maybe this really was the beginning of the end… in which case, as indecent as the thought sounded, maybe Cindy Rhee was the lucky one.
He parked in the driveway at the Rhees’ modest two-bedroom house. Ellen Rhee opened the door for him. She wore a yellow housedress with her hair tied away from her neck. The air in the living room smelled of Pine-Sol; an old upright vacuum cleaner stood sentinel on the carpet. It was Mart’s experience that in the homes of the dying, housework is performed religiously or not at all. Ellen Rhee had taken to frantic cleaning. In the last few months he had seldom seen her without her apron on.
But she was smiling. That was odd, Matt thought. And the radio was playing. Some AM station. Cheerful pop music.
“Come in, Matt,” Ellen said.
He stepped inside. The house was not as dim as he remembered it; she had opened all the blinds and pulled back all the drapes. A summer-morning breeze swept the odor of antiseptic past him, and a more delicate waft of roses from the backyard garden.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “The house is kind of chaotic. I’m in the middle of cleaning up. I guess I forgot you were coming.”
She sniffed and dabbed her nose with a Kleenex. The Taiwan Flu, Matt thought. Wasn’t that what the papers were calling it?
He said, “I can come back another time—”
“No. Please. Come in.” Her smile had not faded.
The clinical word for this kind of behavior was “denial.” But maybe it was simply her way of coping. Carry on, smile, and welcome the guest. A new wrinkle in the etiology of Ellen Rhee’s grief. But it seemed to Matt she looked different. Less burdened. Was that possible?
“Is David home?”
“Early shift at the mill. Would you like a coffee?”
“No, thank you, Ellen.” He looked toward Cindy’s bedroom. “How is she today?”
“Better,” Ellen said. Mart’s surprise must have been too obvious. “No, really! She’s feeling much better. You can ask her yourself.” It was a macabre joke. “Ellen—”
Her smile softened. She touched his arm. “Go see her, Matt. Go ahead.”
Cindy was sitting up in bed, a small miracle in itself. Mart’s first astonished thought was: She did look better. She was still brutally thin—the delicate bone-and-parchment emaciation of the terminal cancer patient. But her eyes were wide and appeared lucid. The last time he stopped by, she hadn’t seemed to recognize him.