Barefoot by Elin Hilderbrand

Porter on the baby monitor and she raced up two flights of stairs. Something was wrong with her.
    Vicki’s disdain of doctors and hospitals was legendary. In college, she contracted a bladder infection that she left untreated, and it moved to her kidneys. She was so sick, and yet so averse to going to the doctor, that her roommates took her to the infirmary while she was asleep. Years later, when she had Blaine, she arrived at the hospital forty minutes before he was delivered and left twenty-four hours later. And yet that morning, she drove right to the ER at Fairfield Hospital. What is wrong with me? Why can’t I breathe?
    At first, the doctors thought she had walking pneumonia, but the X-ray looked suspicious. An MRI revealed a mass in Vicki’s left lung the size of an apple. Subsequent tests—a PET/CT scan and a fine-needle aspiration—confirmed that this mass was malignant, and it showed suspicious cells in her hilar lymph nodes. She had robust stage-two lung cancer. She heard the oncologist, Dr. Garcia, say the words “lung cancer,” she saw his melancholy brown eyes swimming behind the lenses of his thick glasses—and yet Vicki assumed it was some kind of joke, or a mistake.
    “Mistake?” she’d said, shaking her head, unable to come up with enough oxygen to say anything more.
    “I’m afraid not,” Dr. Garcia said. “You have a four-centimeter tumor in your left lung that is hugging the chest wall, which makes it difficult to remove. It looks like the cancer may have also spread to your hilar lymph nodes, but the MRI didn’t detect any additional metastases. A lot of times when the cancer is this far along it will turn up elsewhere—in the brain or the liver, for example. But your cancer is contained in your lungs and this is good news .” Here, he pounded his desk.
    Good news? Was the man stupid, or just insensitive?
    “You’re wrong,” Vicki said. It sounded like she meant that he was wrong about the “good news,” but what she meant was that he was wrong about the cancer. There was no way she had cancer. When you had cancer, when you had an apple-sized tumor in your lung, you knew it. All Vicki had was a little shortness of breath, an infection of some sort. She needed antibiotics. Ted was sitting in the leather armchair next to Vicki, and Vicki turned to him with a little laugh. Ted was a powerful man, big and handsome, with a crushing handshake. Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted! Vicki thought. But Ted looked like he had taken a kick to the genitals. He was hunched over, and his mouth formed a small O. Tell the doctor he’s wrong, Ted! Vicki did not have cancer, technically or otherwise. Who was this man, anyway? She didn’t know him and he didn’t know her. Strangers should not be allowed to tell you you have cancer, and yet that was what had just happened.
    “I have children,” Vicki said. Her voice was flat and scary. “I have two boys, a four-year-old and a baby, seven months. You would have a hard time convincing them or anybody else that their mother having lung cancer is good news.”
    “Let me tell you something, Victoria,” Dr. Garcia said. “I’m a pulmonary oncologist. Lung cancer is my field, it’s what I do. And if you take all the patients I’ve seen in the past fourteen years—let’s say, for the sake of argument, a thousand patients—I would put you smack in the middle. It’s a challenging case, yes. To give you the best shot at long-term remission, we’ll try to shrink the tumor with chemo first and then we’ll go in surgically and hope we can get it all out. But full remission is a viable outcome, and that, Vicki, is good news.”
    “I don’t want to be a case,” Vicki said. “I don’t want you to treat me like your nine hundred and ninety-nine other patients. I want you to treat me like the mother of two little boys.” She started to cry.
    “Many of my other patients had children,” Dr. Garcia said.
    “But they’re not me. My life is valuable.