Let Him Live (9 page)

He looked down into her face with troubled eyes. “Meg, medicine is a strange business. It’s life and death. Sometimes it’s making choices that no one but God should have to make. I know what
you’re feeling because I’ve felt that way myself. I want to tell you something, and I want you to listen closely.”

“I’m listening.”

“The only way to treat patients and not go crazy is to distance yourself from them. You can’t allow yourself to become so personally involved that you lose your professional perspective. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Yes. You think I’m overreacting.”

“No, your concern is all too human. But you can’t become too personally involved in any one case or in any one patient’s life. It’s the first rule of the doctor-patient relationship.”

She took a deep breath, forcing down a retort. She wasn’t a doctor. Nor did she ever want to be. Medicine was her father’s world, and she was sorry she’d gotten mixed up in it at all. “Don’t you ever get involved, Dad? Doesn’t someone ever become special to you?”

He shrugged and glanced away. “It’s a fine line to walk. I have to watch myself. My patients are just that—patients. No matter how hard I try, I can’t save them all.”

She tried to apply brakes to her runaway emotions. She took a deep breath and attempted to distance herself from the drama she had just witnessed. “I’m all right now,” she said. “I-I’m sorry I got so angry.”

“It’s understandable.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Now, I’ve got the tough job of telling Donovan.”

“Will you tell him now?”

“I’ll take you home first, then go check on him. My transplant team knows there won’t be any surgery. Donovan will be fairly groggy for the next couple of days, but sooner or later, he’ll figure out he didn’t have the transplant. You’re right about one thing—he’s going to be a very disappointed young man.”

Her heart squeezed as renewed concern for Donovan swept through her. She was going to have to face his disappointment also. Meg took a deep breath and followed her father out into the hall. If professional distance was one of her father’s rules, she knew she was in trouble. She’d already broken it and could figure no way to turn the situation around.

“Y
OU’RE DRAGGING AROUND
today, Meg. Did you have a hot date last night?” Alana asked.

Meg shook her head in response and sipped a soda, hoping the cola would revive her sagging energies. The lunch crowd in the hospital cafeteria seemed especially loud to her. “I wish it had been a hot date. No, I’m afraid last night was a real downer for me.” Quickly, she recounted her and her father’s false alarm run to Bethesda for Donovan. “I didn’t get to bed until four
A.M
. and then I couldn’t go to sleep. I feel like a zombie today. Sorry if I’m not carrying my share of the work on the floor.”

“Forget it. I’m just sorry the donor didn’t work out for Donovan. Have you been by to see him this morning?”

“Not yet. Frankly, I’m not looking forward to talking to him. I know how depressed he’s going to be, and I feel so helpless. I don’t know what to say to him. I mean, how do you go about consoling someone because he didn’t get a transplant? Someone who’s still living on borrowed time?”

Alana’s expression was sympathetic. “You know I understand because of my brother’s situation. I wish I could help people understand that.”

“I wish I could help the whole
world
understand it,” Meg countered. “The truth is, unless it happens to someone you care about, it isn’t important to you.”

Alana started stacking the empty plates from Meg’s lunch tray onto her own. “You’ve got some free time. Why don’t you go see Donovan now?”

“He’s still in ICU and won’t be brought back to his room until tomorrow. Maybe by tomorrow, I’ll feel better myself. I don’t want to make him even more depressed.”

“He doesn’t have to know about your going to the other hospital with your father. And all you have to do is hold his hand and listen to him. Don’t feel you have to be responsible for making him cheerful. Sometimes, it’s okay to let a person work through his anger by himself.”

Meg thought Alana sounded very wise. “The voice of experience?” she asked.

Alana nodded. “Sometimes all I could do for my brother was listen. He needed to get it out, and I was the one person in our family who let him say anything he felt like saying.” She smiled
impishly. “And sometimes that boy had some pretty shocking things to say. I didn’t know he knew such words.”

Meg felt a flood of gratitude toward her friend. Maybe it would be best not to tell Donovan how upset she’d gotten over the family’s refusal to donate their dead son’s organs. “I’ll remember what you said.” She touched Alana’s arm. “And thanks for the advice.”

Alana smiled. “Anytime.”

Two days later, Meg could visit with Donovan. Even after he was brought down from ICU, he was still incoherent. Meg spent time with Mrs. Jacoby during one of her visits to the hospital. They met in one of the pediatric playrooms, where Brett, well out of earshot, was building a spaceship with giant snap-together blocks.

“The night the hospital called me, I almost went delirious with joy,” Donovan’s mother told Meg, sighing. “I thought it was finally happening for him. I bundled up Brett and took a cab to the hospital. The two of us waited and waited. Brett fell asleep—thank heaven—but I couldn’t think about anything except Donovan’s surgery.”

“And then there was no surgery,” Meg commented. “You must have really felt cheated when you found out.”

“I felt both disappointed and relieved at the same time.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Disappointed for the obvious reasons. Relieved because the unknowns are so scary for me.
I mean, once he has the transplant, he has a long road of recovery ahead. Also, once it’s done, there’s no turning back. If his new liver rejects, or if something goes wrong, Donovan will certainly die. I know I shouldn’t borrow trouble, but that fear always lurks in the back of my mind.”

Meg swallowed her own taste of fear. “I guess you’re right. Even though he’s sick, even though his own liver’s failing, at least he’s alive.”

Mrs. Jacoby patted Meg’s hand. “I shouldn’t dump my doubts and fears on you. Forgive me. There are people here at the hospital—psychologists—I should be talking to.”

“I don’t mind,” Meg said quickly.

“No, it’s not fair to you. My only excuse is that you’re so genuinely concerned about my son.”

“I am, Mrs. Jacoby. I care about him so much.” Meg felt her cheeks redden after her impassioned words. Donovan’s mother must think she sounded like a moonstruck child.

Mrs. Jacoby smiled with understanding. “He had a girlfriend back home. I wish she’d been half as caring and sensitive as you. I’m afraid she really hurt him.”

“It was
her
loss,” Meg said, realizing she wasn’t Donovan’s girlfriend in the sense Mrs. Jacoby meant. Still, she truly cared about him.

“I agree. Have you heard anything more about building that special house where parents can stay and be near their kids while they’re being treated here at Memorial?” Donovan’s mother changed the subject. “Believe me, I sure wished for one the
other night. I think that cab ride back to the apartment after I learned there would be no transplant was the longest ride I’ve ever taken. All I wanted to do was tuck Brett in and curl up and go to sleep myself, but I couldn’t. We had to traipse all the way back across town first.”

Meg shook her head. “Sorry … I haven’t heard anything yet.”

“Oh, well … It is a big undertaking.” She made a face. “Poor choice of words.”

Undertaking
. Meg caught the meaning. Undertaker. She shivered, even though the playroom was sunny and warm.

The next day, when Meg went to Donovan’s room, he was sitting up in bed, flipping through TV channels. Seeing him upright and alert caused a rush of relief. “You must be better,” she said, coming inside. “You’re scanning the TV wasteland.”

He flipped off the screen and held out his hand to her. “I’m better,” he said. “Whatever that means.”

She took his hand, noticing that his color looked strange—somewhere between yellow and pasty white. But his voice sounded strong and lucid once more. “It means that you’ll be hanging around until another potential liver donor comes along,” she said.

“I was pretty out of it, wasn’t I?”

“Do you remember anything?”

“I remember being awakened in the middle of
the night by some nurse promising me a wild and crazy time.”

Meg giggled. “She didn’t lie, did she?”

“They put me on a gurney and wheeled me down to the operating room. They did a bunch of tests and forced a Krom’s cocktail down me.”

“What’s that?”

“The most foul-tasting stuff ever invented by medical science. It’s a decontaminant for your intestinal area, you know—to kill off all the nasty germs lurking inside the body. That way, once you have the transplant, your body has a better chance of accepting the new organ.”

“Too bad it was for nothing,” Meg said.

“Yeah … too bad. But, then, I never did have much good luck.”

She braced herself against a wave of pity for him. She’d learned that patients don’t want pity, they want understanding. “You’ve had some good luck. You met me,” she quipped.

A smile softened Donovan’s face, and in spite of his gauntness, she felt her pulse quicken. “Okay, so I’ll give you that one.”

“What else did they do to you?”

“They gave me a preop shot that sent me off to never-never land, so I was kind of spaced out. I remember my mom coming in to see me. Then I don’t remember anything else for the next twenty-four hours. I just woke up in ICU. It took me a while to figure out that something had gone wrong with the transplant, because I knew I’d have big staples in my side from the operation
and I didn’t.” He shook his head, as if clearing out the memory.

His grip had tightened on her hand. She wanted to say so many things to him, but recalled Alana’s advice to simply listen. “I was disappointed in a
major
way,” he said. “And mad. I was trapped in medical purgatory, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it. There’d been no operation, and what was worse, I have to go through the whole thing all over again when they do find me a liver.”

He glanced up at her, and his intense inner struggle with self-pity was written on his face. “Anyway, here I am. Still waiting.”

“All of us felt bad for you,” Meg said softly. “I talked to your mother, and now more than ever, I think we need that family guest house.”

“Maybe so. But now more than ever, I think she needs a home of her own. How’s your search coming along? Any prospects yet?”

Crossing her fingers and hoping he didn’t see how she was hedging, she mumbled, “Not yet.” In truth, she hadn’t looked at all. So many things were going on that she’d not done a thing about her promise to him.

“I don’t want this Wish Foundation money to go to waste,” Donovan insisted. “If anything, this check from JWC is what’s keeping me from going nuts.”

“How do you mean?”

“Because I know it’s there. Because I know it can buy my mom and Brett a future. It was all I
thought about when my head started to clear in ICU. I kept telling myself to hang on so that I could get well enough to get out of this place and take my mother to the house I’m going to buy for her.”

Meg swallowed guiltily. She was holding up his dream by not following through with her promise to find a realtor and go house hunting. “Well, you keep getting stronger, all right? I swear I’m going to find some houses for you to pick from.”

“Just think, I don’t have to recuperate from transplant surgery before I buy, do I? All I have to do is survive until the next time.” He looked directly into Meg’s eyes. “If there is a next time.”

That evening, as Meg wearily let herself into her house, her mother hurried up to hug her. “I’ve been waiting for you to get home. Guess what, honey? The Junior League board has approved your project. We’re going to work on raising money to build a home away from home for patients’ families. Isn’t that exciting?”