“Surgery?” He looked down at his body, counting his limbs. They were all present and accounted for.
“A craniotomy, Jerry.” The answer came not from Ana, but from the tubby doctor who stepped through the curtain, medical file in hand. He placed the file in the holder on the foot of the bed and took his stethoscope from around his neck. “Hello, Ana. Jerry, we ran those tests we discussed last week—the CT scan and the MRI—and found a large mass. We need to do more tests but the pressure was building and we had to make a little hole and relieve some of the pressure. We also took a biopsy while we were in there and should have the results by tomorrow morning. I put a rush on them and the lab is going as fast as they can.” He pulled up a chair and consulted his clipboard.
“Are there any changes to those things we discussed last visit, Jerry? Memory, vision, confusion, sense of smell, tremors, fatigue… ?”
“I was afraid you were going to ask that. Yeah, pretty much a little of everything except tremors.” The doctor started taking notes. “I’ve forgotten names I shouldn’t, I get tired really easily, and my eyes are giving me trouble, especially the right eye.”
The neurologist took a shiny metallic blue penlight from his jacket pocket and got up out of the chair. “Can you focus off in the distance, please. Maybe at the fire sprinkler in the ceiling over there.”
Jerry did what he was asked, and the doctor clicked the penlight on then swung it back and forth across each of Jerry’s eyes twice.
“Thank you.”
“So how did I do? Did you find that contact I’m missing?”
“You wear contacts, Jerry?” He consulted the clipboard, concerned.
“No. Sorry. Bad joke. You looked a little worried so I tried to make funny.”
“Sorry. Yes, I’m worried. Your right pupil is dilated.” He checked the second page of the report. “Yes, here it is. It was noted by the EMS team. It doesn’t really surprise me, unfortunately. Having already performed the CT and MRI, I have a very good idea what we’re looking at here, Jerry.”
Jerry squeezed Ana’s hand tighter. He was scared like he’d never been in his life, yet he felt selfish, too, what with Ana actually being dead already. Whatever the doctor was about to tell him, there was probably some slim hope for him, but there was none for Ana. The woman he had come to love was beyond help.
THEY GAVE JERRY a little something for the pain and a big something to fend off infection from the surgery, so he spent the next three days sleeping a lot, texting back and forth with Manny about ideas he had for the station, and listening to Ana read poetry from her book. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Manny through text or even in person while lying on his back in the hospital bed how severe the situation was, so he asked the big Aussie to call an emergency staff meeting on Saturday afternoon. He was released from the hospital on schedule Saturday morning with more meds and a handful of hospital shower caps to protect the stitches from the closed-up craniotomy until they healed. After he got cleaned up and into fresh clothes, Jerry arrived at the station an hour early to brief Manny before speaking to the entire staff.
It had been an emotional meeting with tears on both sides, but the two men pulled themselves together in time. Manny now stood quietly against one wall of the station’s modest conference room, his long arms folded across his chest and his damp, red-rimmed eyes only partially hidden behind his glasses. His staff were arranged around the room, sitting where there were chairs, standing where they had to. The engineer on duty had put on a pre-recorded thirty-minute mix of music and seasonal humour to allow the station to run on auto-pilot while everyone attended the meeting. Rolf reached up and turned off the speaker on the wall. The faces around the table were a mix of glum and confused. Stories of Jerry’s collapse at the Empress had spread quickly, but few were sure what it might mean.
Jerry stood at the head of the long, oval conference table, the book clutched in his hands and a NIKE baseball cap covering his partially shaved skull and the bandage. “So. Manny and I have just had a long chat and I wanted to tell you all in person that he’ll be posting my job on Monday.” Gasps and whispered one-word exclamations from around the room made him pause. He took a deep breath, knowing what was coming had to be said, but not finding it any easier than it had been when he’d told Manny in private.
“It’s not because I don’t love the job, the station, and all of you. It’s not because Manny had a change of heart and decided I wasn’t what he was looking for in a Station Manager. I am being replaced simply because Manny and you all need someone you can rely on to be here for the long run, and that’s not me.” He thought he’d better address some of the rumours bouncing around. “No other station has made me a better offer, and I’m not running back to Ontario to some abandoned mystery family with a dog and three-point-two kids. It’s called a neoplasm. Anaplastic astrocytoma. Specifically, glioblastoma multiforme or GBM, to all the specialists and textbook publishers. Brain cancer. Advanced and aggressive. Grade 4, for those of you who understand this stuff. Probably inoperable, but brains smarter than mine are currently debating that. Radiation, yes; chemo is something called Temodar to start with, but because it’s in my head and there’s this blood-brain barrier thing that often prevents the drugs from reaching the cancer, they may have to go with implanted wafers of some sort. I’ll be seeing the oncologist on Monday.
“Apparently they found it way too late. It wasn’t nitrates in my luncheon meats, or stress, or poor posture, or any of the dozens of ideas we batted around. Unlike Ahnold, it is a toomah.” He forced a smile, took a long slow breath, and washed it down with a sip from the glass of water on the table in front of him. Tears were already flowing around the room and he was barely holding on, himself.
“How long? Untreated, if I get six more months, I’ll be the luckiest man on earth. Three, tops; more likely six to eight weeks, untreated. But I’m not giving up, because there have been great advances in treatment and they’re trying to fast-track me into this clinical study they’re doing here in Victoria; but the reality is that even if I beat the odds, Manny needs someone he can rely on and I’m going to be a mess for a while. We’ve made a compromise. He’s going to offer my replacement only a one-year contract, with a healthy dose of prayer and support for my recovery in that time.”
He took another sip and in that short break, Lee-Anne bolted from the room. Jerry looked up at Mika and nearly cracked when he saw the tears pouring silently down her cheeks as she stared at the table in front of her. Small sobs shook her slender frame. She looked up and he nodded at her. She nodded back and smiled weakly, then stood and quietly left. Manny snorted into a handful of damp tissues but said nothing. Jerry looked around the room, at the faces feeling his pain with him.
“That’s all for now, I guess. We’ll talk more, once the shock has worn off both you and me. I’m going to head back to my office for a bit, so if you could give me a half-hour or so before you swing by, I’d appreciate it. Who knew a tumour could be so exhausting?” He tried to smile and only managed to deflect a tear rolling down toward his chin.
The remaining staff stood and filed out in silence. Most looked his way, lost for words. He understood, and smiled with hope he didn’t really feel. Eventually he was alone in the room. As if drinking from his glass could give others his cancer, he picked up the tumbler and wandered to his office. He could hear sniffles and tears and at least one person sobbing loudly behind a closed office door. It sounded like it came from the direction of Lee-Anne’s office, but he didn’t have the energy right then and there to confirm it. He’d find a time when they could sit down, after the first round of tears dried up.