‘The cancer was only discovered late,’ she says quietly now, tracing the seam of her blanket with her finger. ‘I kept getting infections, nothing you’d rush to the doctor for.’
Yes, that’s how it started for me too. Fever and fatigue. ‘And then?’
‘When it kept coming back again and again, I went to the doctor. He said I was working too much – I’m a cook – and that the stress in the kitchen wasn’t good for me,’ she continues.
By now my infusion is running; I tilt the backrest of the recliner and place a pillow at my neck. Lilly tells me how she tried to fight the recurring infections with relaxation techniques and nutritional supplements to strengthen her immune system, but she kept feeling worse and worse. She kept working anyway, because she needed the money.
‘You know, in my family we don’t talk much about it when we’re not doing well, and my doctor also said I was physically okay,’ she says now, as if she had to apologize for her illness. ‘And then there were these weddings my boss desperately needed me for.’
I have a sense of where this is going. ‘How long did your illness go undetected?’
She lowers her lids. ‘Eight months.’
What? She must have had symptoms most of the time and lost a lot of weight.
Didn’t her family worry about her?
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say quietly.
She waves it off. ‘Oh, it’ll be fine. It just takes a little longer, that’s all.’
With her disease at such an advanced stage, her chances of survival are now probably around fifty to sixty percent. That’s significantly lower than mine, since my illness was detected early, but it’s still a good chance.
‘You can do this.’ I reach my hand out to her, wanting to encourage her, even though she herself seems to have plenty of courage.
She takes my fingers and squeezes them, barely noticeably. ‘We can do this together.’
Just under nine months later, my oncologist declared me healthy, and a doctor on the palliative care ward declared Lilly dead.
The memory hurts; I clutch my patient’s file—the one with the swallowing difficulties—even tighter to my chest and let my gaze wander down the corridor of the emergency department.
Doctors, nurses, cleaning staff, police officers, paramedics, patients, and relatives hurry past me. There are so many people around me, yet with all the emotions raging inside me, I feel alone.
Lilly and I were about the same age, led similar lives, had the same illness. The fact that my heart is still beating while hers will never beat again is mainly because my doctor realized what was wrong with me earlier than hers did.
It isn’t fair.
It just isn’t fair.
That won’t happen to my patient, that much is certain. No matter what Dr. Franks just said, ordering the tests was the right thing to do.
I march down the hallway, the memory aching in my chest along with the realization that what happened can’t be changed anymore. Only our future can be changed. By doing the right thing today.
Three days, echoes through my head, and my stomach turns. I’ve done everything right these past few months, but was it enough to stay healthy?
The emergency coordinator waves at me. ‘Hey, Nyla, the test results are in.’
Churned up inside, I walk over to his desk, take the papers, and thank him before I bury myself in the documents.
In a moment my suspicion will become certainty and Dr. Franks’s doubt will become carelessness. I can feel it. There’s something there. No one wanted to believe me with Lucy’s mom either, until the barely visible edema on her ankles finally turned out to be an early sign of heart failure.
‘Okay, what do we have?’ I let my gaze drift over the numbers and letters.
Lab diagnostics: unremarkable. Same as the tumor markers.
Strange.
Thyroid function: within normal range. MRI of neck and head, thoracic CT, ultrasound of the thyroid—everything without findings.