Tears Ran Down Our Faces

It had been three days since the surgery. Three days on a hospital bed hooked up by various kinds of plumbing to bags and pumps and beeping things. It was Thursday morning, and the doctors were making their rounds.

The surgeon came in the room carrying notebooks and charts in his arms. It was not so long ago that he was sitting behind his desk explaining the results of a biopsy to us, and now he seemed determined to tell us something equally blunt. His eyes were grim, and he stared straight ahead as he made his way into the room, not looking up, tossing his notebooks and charts onto a chair. The pathology results were back, he said.

He was avoiding eye contact. I steeled myself to bad news.

The cancer was contained completely in the prostate, he said. The nodes were negative, and the seminal vesicles were negative. And the surgical margins were completely negative. The pathology report showed a more aggressive cancer than had the biopsy, but the negative results suggested that he had removed it all.

He asked if we had questions, and I suppose we did, for I seem to remember he talked with us longer. But after a while there was nothing more for him to say, so he gathered his papers, smiled and left the room.

Trudy and I were momentarily quiet, and then we looked over at each other. As we tried to speak, tears ran down our faces.

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