Sarah tried again, “I just want to make Hailey feel better but I can’t. We’ve been seeing doctor after doctor over the last two days. If they find it’s cancer like they think then they want to bombard her system and keep her in the hospital for a month. We’ll have to see even more doctors and then also have to do meetings with hospital counselors and the Army’s family morale program too. There’s already a ton of paperwork and I have no idea how to fill most of it out. The nurse said if its cancer then I should prepare for a lot of waivers for side effects to chemo.”
“What sort of waivers?” Stephen injected.
“I don’t know, Stephen. It’s tons of stuff. Waivers for things like heart attacks, a stroke, and learning disabilities that might not even show up for 10 years.” Sarah paused and began to force her words out through a sob. “This stuff is horrible but Stephen, but what choice would we have?”
Sarah paused as if replaying every medical conversation through her mind before softly speaking again, “The hospital doctor. Umm, he told me all of this stuff like she could be ‘High-Risk’ and they wish they had diagnosed her earlier and that I’m supposed to prepare because if she has this type of cancer then there’s like this 5-year survival number they talk about that means she has something like a 40 percent chance or something.” Sarah blasted out in a tearful release. “40 percent? What the hell am I supposed to do with a number? How am I supposed to tell our little girl that everything’s going to be fine when I’ve got 40 percent rolling around in my head?”
Stephen blinked hard to keep his eyes focused on the space in front of him as the heavy wind gusts pushed sand drifts farther into the road ahead of them.
Sarah continued and made no attempt to prevent him from hearing her tears through the words, “She fell last week and hurt her knee. When she started crying I went to hold her but when I touched her back it hurt her even more than the scratch on her knee. I lifted up her shirt and she had bruises. That was the first time I had seen them. I told the nurses at the hospital when we got there but they said bruising was consistent with the disease and that I shouldn’t be overly concerned about the bruising itself. How am I not supposed to be concerned about it when my baby is in pain and I can’t do a thing to help her?” Stephen’s emotions roared but he couldn’t separate the anger of being so far away from the hurt of not being able to hold either of them.”
“She started crying for you yesterday. She told me her body hurt and that you would fix it. She said because Daddy always fixes things. She wants you home because she knows that I can’t make the hurt go away. She was standing there crying and screaming at me to bring you home and I know it’s because she’s in pain but all I want to do is make this go away and have you here with us.” A lifetime seemed to pass in the moment Sarah caught her breath, “But this won’t go away and you can’t come home… and you can’t fix this.”
Stephen blinked and he felt a release in his eye as a tearful stream slipped over his dust covered cheekbone.
“So I held her as calmly and gently as I could until the medicine kicked in and she fell asleep in my arms. And then I cried. Without making a sound, I just sat there on the floor holding her and I cried, Stephen. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop it anymore than I could bring you home tonight. As quietly as I could so I wouldn’t wake her up. I don’t know how many hours passed but I just sat there and cried.”
Sarah’s release of frustrations broke Stephen. She was right, he couldn’t fix this. His daughter needed him more than anything and he couldn’t even be there to tell her everything would be alright; even if it meant lying to her. His anger drifted into the desert as he surveyed the cloudless day. A pit formed in his stomach. It seemed to pull him down and he felt his body physically contracting as frustration turned to emptiness and the emptiness brought about a terrifying fear.
Stephen had been gripping the vehicle’s guardrail in front of him, oblivious that his knuckles were turning white. Sarah had to know this was killing him. Didn’t she know he couldn’t do anything while so far away? This desert traipse had never been his choice. But it was his decision to step forward, to volunteer and take a stand for something greater than himself. Stephen had always known Army life would be more complicated with a family. Sarah had agreed and they had both believed that the National Guard would be a family friendly endeavor. He had always known that serving meant sacrifice, but now he question whether the trade-off had been a mistake. The guilt only made the pit in his stomach heavier.
He looked pointlessly along the long sandy road they were traveling. On the horizon he saw a rusted-out vehicle parked on the side of the road. The car had been left too far off the shoulder and it was covering up about a quarter of the lane they were traveling on. Stephen stared at the broken down car simply because it gave him a point of reference while the hurricane in his mind whipped around. Vehicles in their convoy moved to the center of the road to pass the car. Stephen became conscience that he was leaning against the passenger side door of the humvee. Perhaps it was less like leaning and more like indenting. He lifted his head a bit, aware that his tension had caused him to press his head firmly against the glass. If he hadn’t been wearing the helmet he would have certainly bruised his forehead; instead there was just a tender spot from grinding his melon into the bands under the lip of the protective helmet. He adjusted the Kevlar helmet and secured it back firmly on his head.
He glanced out the passenger window again and caught sight of his own reflection. A glimmer of light reflected off the window and caused him to look away. Taking a deep breath out of exhaustion, Stephen was surprised by an unexpected sense of peace that began to blanket over him. The welcome pause gave him a touch of clarity as he considered Sarah’s words. In his mind he heard himself say that Sarah wasn’t the enemy here.
Sarah broke the silence and calmly said, “The doctors. They know this is big and they’ve been patient with me and really sweet to Hailey.”
Stephen could tell her own patience was in overdrive. “I’m sorry I’m not there.”
“I know. It’s, it’s… anyway, the doctors. They talked a little about…” her voice trembled but she retained her composure, “they talked a little about a multi-phased approach. It might include surgery, radiation, chemo treatments and they even mentioned stem cells.”
“Sarah, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either.” The tension in her voice wound her tight and she began to ramble, “Stephen, it’s not like I know anything more about this stuff what I’ve overheard in other people’s conversations. Somebody had to have surgery or somebody was getting radiation, such-and-such’s mother was undergoing chemo treatments. I don’t know near enough about these things to make any decisions on it.”
He realized he couldn’t be there next to them, but he perhaps he wasn’t completely helpless. He reasoned that Sarah had been carrying the weight of their household and now Hailey’s sickness entirely on her own. At that moment, with her husband away at war, life was simply too heavy for her to carry alone. She needed him to share the burden and lighten her load. Stephen knew that he couldn’t hold his little girl but maybe his voice could hold Sarah in a way that gave her encouragement to be strong for Hailey.