Chapter Twelve
Perched awkwardly on the unforgiving hospital table, I waited for my diagnosis. This room was colder than the rooms I’d waited in before, the air frozen and gray. The confidence I’d felt Friday night with Jason was obliterated by the panic pulling me under.
Dr. Nichols marched into the room, a gaggle of lab coats filing in after, taking positions around the exam table, causing a whoosh that sent a chill up my bare legs.
“Good morning, Ellie, Sonia.” That look on her face. I can’t take this. I gripped on to Mom’s arm like I was five years old, as she said a quick hello for both of us because I couldn’t speak.
Dr. Nichols brought up my MRI scan on a large screen on the wall. “I’m sorry to have to tell you, but the biopsy shows the tumor is malignant. You have a rare cancer called chondrosarcoma—an overgrowth of cartilage in the bone.”
Everything in me shattered.
No. No.
Please, please, no.
Mom clutched me to her chest and whimpered as I stared at the scan, a section from my hips to knees. All of the bones were clean and strong-looking…except for one. The left one, bent like a weeping willow, mottled with blackness.
A silent war had been raging in the deepest part of me, my entire femur bone beaten and eaten. I’d had no idea. My poor little bone. It was the saddest, ugliest thing I’d ever seen. And it was inside me. Cancer was inside me and, from the image on the scan, it was winning. Ready to take over.
My eyes clouded, and my heart thumped in my gut somehow, all of my anatomy now backwards and misshapen. A voice broke through the fog. “Ellie, we have no other cases with which to compare yours. To help you understand how rare this is, you are one percent of one percent of one percent. Because the tumor takes up almost your entire femur and has curved the bone, it makes the options for surgery more complicated. Chemo and radiation aren’t effective with this type of cancer, so wide-sweeping excision is the only way to treat this. There are several procedures we can discuss.”
None of this made sense. She had to be wrong.
Mom still had my head pressed to her, and I could hear her breath and her heart rioting inside. In a shaky voice she asked, “Why…why is it malignant? How did she get this?”
“There was nothing you or Ellie could have done. I’m sorry there is not a better answer, but this is an unlucky mutation.”
Mom tensed so much she was crushing me. Like if she held me hard enough she could undo this, keep me safe, protect me from whatever was next. “What do we do?” she whispered.
Her face solemn, Dr. Nichols said, “We haven’t worked with a case like yours at this hospital before, but options to consider include…” A ringing in my ears made it difficult to focus on the dizzying list of procedures that followed, but I caught some that didn’t even sound like real words. Allograft. Partial allograft. Fibular graft. Arthoplasty. Curettage. Amputation.
Mom cut her off before she finished. “Excuse me, amputation?” She let go of my upper body and clasped my hand instead. She wasn’t technically shouting, but she might as well have been. “Is that a real option? Obviously, we don’t want that one.”
Dr. Nichols’s face twitched. “I understand it sounds scary, but amputation offers the best chance of avoiding a recurrence.” She pointed to the scan. “Ellie, because of the tumor’s proximity to the knee joint, you need to understand that all the options for limb-salvaging surgery carry the high probability that you will always walk with a limp and never be able to fully bend or straighten your leg again. Most importantly, amputation is the option with the lowest mortality rate.”
Saliva flooded my mouth. I swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. I can’t do this. How will I do this?
“Prosthetics are quite advanced, and it would allow Ellie to maintain her ability to run and jump.”
“We’ll want a second opinion,” Mom said.
“Of course. You’ll want to act fast with your decision, but a second opinion is always a good idea. Since her case is so unusual, I recommend we send her scans to one of the big cancer centers—MD Anderson or Memorial Sloan Kettering. We’ll give you information to take home and read about prosthetics, as well as a list of the options to review.”
They went back and forth with more questions and responses. I tuned out. Then, the appointment was over. Dr. Nichols and her flock of students with their swooshing white coats left us there in the silence, the cold, the never going back.
This time I wished for a wheelchair because my limbs had dissolved into uselessness. Wobbling, shaking, Mom spotting me all the way, we somehow got me dressed and made it back to the car.
When we got in, Mom gripped the steering wheel but didn’t turn the key. Through gritted teeth, her voice came out low and determined with a few cracks giving away how hard it was to keep it together. “I’m sorry, Ellie, I’m so sorry. We’re going to find you the best doctor…the very best option. Okay?”
She turned to me and pulled me into a hug, which wasn’t so much of a hug as us collapsing in on each other, sobbing, desperate, one in our desolation.