Page 92 of The Warmth of Our Closest Star

I knew what could go right. I simply wanted to hear Dr. Berger say it.

“You no longer have a meningioma pushing on your brain,” he said. “You get to stop taking your medication and never take it again. You lead a normal life.”

“What is normal?” I scoffed.

“Good question,” he chuckled. “I suppose it is whatever you want normal to be. Because you’ll be in control of that for once.”

“What if it grows back?” I asked.

“Well,” Dr. Berger patted my knee and let go of it so he could sit back, “after a successful surgery, we get you scanned six months after, and then after another six months. If they come back clear, you get scanned after another year. Then three. Then five. Eventually, we give up on the scans if they keep coming back clear—unless you begin having problems. You go on with your life. If they show growth, we can try surgery again. Radiation. Chemo. There are options. Or you may decide that you don’t want to go through any of that and go back to living with your new tumor.”

“What are the odds it will grow back? How quickly will we know?”

“Well,” he said, “meningiomas, if all of the cells are not removed, they tend to grow back within ten to twenty years without fail. Though evidence of them starting to grow back can be seen fairly soon after the surgery. Within months. That’s the reason for the scans so soon after the surgery.”

“Do you think it will grow back?” I asked.

“I can’t—”

“Please?”

He sighed, thought it over, and set his face sternly decisive. “I’m hopeful—considering your tumor hasn’t grown any since you were a child, its placement and size—that once it’s removed, it won’t grow back. I can’t promise anything, but that’s my hope.”

“Did you know that hope is not the belief that one decision or action will fix everything? Hope is the resolve to take one step after another, seeing things through to the end. Because you believe that, in the end, everything will be okay. Hope is, actually, possibility.”

Dr. Berger cocked his head to the side with a smile.

“I like that,” he said. “Yes. That’s what hope is.”

I sighed and straightened my back.

“I want to keep taking steps,” I said.

Dr. Berger patted my knee once more with a smile.

“I’ll take that step with you.”

At the end of summer, I found myself in Chicago at a surgical hospital. But I wasn’t alone. Alex had traveled from Texas to be with me for the surgery and to stay with me for the first two weeks of my recovery. We had checked into a hotel the night before my surgery, slept as best we could, all things considered, then checked out in the morning before the run had risen. We were checking in at the surgical hospital as it peeked over the horizon.

Over the next two hours, I was prepped. Removing my everyday clothes, I was given a backless paper robe to wear. Needles were stuck in my arm. My hair was covered with a cap. And I waited for Dr. Berger and his surgical team to take me into the surgical room. Alex stayed with me until the very last moment, holding my hand, telling jokes, and distracting me from what was to come. He did his best to keep me from being nervous.

However, I wasn’t nervous. I was determined.

I had made the decision to take a step, and I was going to take it.

As I looked up into my best friend’s eyes—my brother—as the nurses came to wheel me into surgery, I was struck with a thought. Until I had met Alex, I had resigned myself to living with my tumor until I had died. Whenever that would be. Alex had renewed my hope. Simply by being Alex. I didn’t know how to thank him at that moment. So, I squeezed his hand and stared into his eyes until he laughed and pried his hand from mine so that the nurses could wheel me away.

I know he thought anxiety was the reason I’d held onto his hand. And I never told him differently. However, it had been the only way I could think of to express my gratitude at that moment.

Inside the surgical room, everything seemed blindingly white. Cold. Sterile. Alien. Vaguely, I can recall Dr. Berger greeting me from behind a surgical mask and face shield. His hair was in a surgical cap and he was garbed in those horrible puke green scrubs that surgeons tend to wear. I’d barely had a chance to respond to his greeting before anesthesia was beginning to be administered.

Surely, that is not the truth. There had to have been time between being greeted and being put under, but that’s how it felt. Sudden.

I was thinking about how grateful I was for the hope Alex had extracted from me and how Dr. Berger was wearing those awful scrubs.

Peter entered my mind. I wondered if he was okay. If he knew what I was doing. The compulsion to tell him how much I loved him flooded my mind. Just in case.

Then the world was black.