Winners (6 page)

When they got to the hospital, Lily had been moved from the recovery room to the ICU. The breathing tube was out, and she was sedated, but she was awake. And medically she was doing well. Her father had been in to see her, and the nurse with Lily said he had gone to the cafeteria to get something to eat. Jessie checked Lily’s chart and prescribed several medications. She was satisfied with her progress, and Ben promised to check on her again that night.

They were just leaving, when Lily’s father stepped out of the elevator and looked at them both with a distraught expression, but he spoke to Jessie, not Ben.

“I don’t believe what you told me this morning,” he told her firmly. “You may have gone as far as your capabilities, but that doesn’t mean that someone else, with greater skill, can’t repair the damage that was done.” For a moment Jessie didn’t answer, and then she nodded. She was willing to let it go at that. She knew full well that no doctor was going to be able to restore full function to Lily, but Bill Thomas wasn’t ready to accept that yet. In time he would—he would have no other choice. “I’m lining up consultations with other doctors in London and New York. I heard about a neurosurgeon in Zurich who specializes in spinal cord injuries. And I want to take her to Harvard.”

“I understand,” Jessie said with a nod. “I probably would too. Dr. Steinberg will come back to see her later.” He saw that Jessie looked vague and distracted, and he interpreted it as fear of the other consultations and what they would say.

“And what about you? You’re not coming back tonight?” He looked outraged, and Jessie was apologetic.

“I’m sorry, I can’t. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

“Don’t you think that as her neurosurgeon, you should see her tonight too?” He was instantly hostile and aggressive.

“If she has a problem, I will,” Jessie assured him. “I’ll call in and speak to the resident, and Dr. Steinberg will come in immediately if anything comes up. I think she’ll be fine. I’m sorry, I have to be with my children. I’ll be back tomorrow, as soon as I can.” Bill was furious as he pushed past her, and without a word, she got into the elevator with Ben, and looked like she was going to collapse. Jessie knew it had been a mistake to come in. Although she had wanted to see Lily, Jessie wasn’t up to it, or to dealing with Lily’s father’s implications that she hadn’t done a good job and didn’t know what she was doing.

“You should have told him,” Ben said through clenched teeth. It had taken all his restraint not to grab the guy and tell him what he thought of him. He acted like he could control the world, and he couldn’t. He had been incredibly rude and hard on Jessie, but all she wanted to do now was go home to her kids and comfort them. She wanted to lie on her bed and cry for the husband she loved so much and would never see again. Ben drove her home, and she thanked him when she got out of the car. He watched her walk into the house, and cried all the way home himself. He couldn’t believe Tim was gone, and he couldn’t even imagine how hard Jessie’s life was going to be now without him, and how empty. All she ever did was work and spend time with her husband and kids. They hadn’t had time for a social life in years, and rarely saw friends, just each other. Tim had been her best friend. Ben’s heart ached for her and her kids. It was a terrible time for all of them.

Bill Thomas was still steaming when he walked back into the ICU. He had convinced himself that Jessie was incompetent, and now she was being negligent too, not planning to visit Lily again that night. It was the least she could have done, as far as he was concerned. He noticed the nurses talking in hushed whispers with a serious expression as he passed the desk.

“Is Lily okay?” He was worried that something had happened and they were talking about her.

“She’s fine,” one of the nurses reassured him, and she could see how angry he was. He had already told them that he would see to it that his daughter would walk again. “We were just talking about Dr. Matthews,” one of the nurses explained, and seemed upset.

“What about her?” he said unhappily. “She’s not even coming back to see Lily tonight. She says she has to be with her children,” he said with contempt. “Maybe she should decide if she’s a mother or a doctor. Being a neurosurgeon isn’t a part-time job.”

The nurse was shocked by what he said, and it was obvious he didn’t know what had happened, and she thought he should. “Dr. Matthews’s husband was killed in an accident last night. A car accident. He was an anesthesiologist here, and a very dear man. It happened when she was operating on Lily. She only found out this morning when she left. Her youngest son was injured too.” Bill looked startled by what she said, and then embarrassed. He had no idea how to respond.

“I’m sorry … I didn’t know …” He remembered what he had said to her. He believed it, but he recognized that his timing had been awful. “I’m very sorry,” he said again, and went back to see his daughter. He was haunted by what the nurse had said and remembered how he had felt the night Lily’s mother died. And competent or not, which remained to be seen, his heart went out to Jessie. And as he looked down at Lily, sleeping peacefully in her hospital bed, for the first time he forgot about whether or not she would walk again and was just grateful she was alive.

Chapter 6

As promised, Jessie came back to check on Lily in the morning, after having breakfast with her kids. She couldn’t eat, but they picked at the cereal she put on the table. She hadn’t slept all night, and she looked it, when she arrived in Lily’s room in her white coat, looking pale with dark circles under her eyes. She smiled as soon as she saw Lily, who was mildly sedated for pain, but awake. She was responding well to the medications.

“How are you feeling, Lily?” Jessie asked her gently as she stood next to her. She had read all the entries in her chart carefully at the nurses’ desk before she came in. Lily had had a few minor problems, and some discomfort, but she was doing remarkably well. She was young and strong. And it was much too soon to tell her the implications of her injuries, so she didn’t know yet, and Bill hadn’t said anything to her either. She needed time to recover from the surgery. She didn’t know either that she would have to go to rehab when she was released from the hospital, to learn a whole new way of life, and adjust to her injury. Jessie was not planning to broach the subject with her for some time, although she had been candid with Lily’s father. What Lily needed now was time and healing. Jessie used all her energy and discipline to focus on her patient.

“I’m okay,” Lily said quietly. She was alert enough to know that she had sustained a very serious injury—she just didn’t know the realities of her future. “Thank you for everything you’re doing for me,” she said, and Jessie was touched.

“That’s what I do.” She asked about some pain the chart said Lily had had the night before, but it was normal for her to have considerable discomfort, despite the paralysis in her lower trunk and limbs.

“How soon can I go home?” Lily wanted to know, which Jessie thought was a good sign.

“Not for a while. Let’s get you feeling better first,” she said noncommittally. But she also knew that it was typical of patients with any illness or injury to feel that if they could just get out of the hospital, they could leave the problem there. Lily was going to be taking this problem with her, for the rest of her life. But what Jessie planned to tell her, when she was ready to hear it, was that in spite of her complete spinal cord injury, she could still lead a full life in almost every possible way, and others had done it before her. She needed to be shown what she could do, not just what she obviously couldn’t, and she would learn all that in rehab. Jessie was going to recommend that she stay at Craig Hospital in Denver for three or four months. She knew it would come as a blow to Lily and a shock to her father, but Jessie wanted her to make the best possible adjustment. She hoped to have her there within a month, if all went well.

Jessie spent nearly an hour with Lily, just talking and observing her for small medical details while seeming to just be casually chatting, and then she left and Lily dozed off. Jessie ran into her father at the elevator as she was leaving, and Bill was getting off, on the floor of the ICU. He seemed surprised to see Jessie, and mumbled awkwardly for a moment, which was unlike him, as he looked into her eyes, which were two deep pools of pain. She was far less cheerful now that she was not at her patient’s bedside, and he could see how distraught she was. Jessie was deathly pale.

“I … the nurses told me about your husband yesterday … I’m really sorry … and about the things I said … I was just upset about Lily. I still am, and I want to get all the consultations I can for her when we leave here. Someone, somewhere must have some new space-age, state-of-the-art procedure that will help her walk again. We can’t just give up and let her sit in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. That would be a tragedy for her,” he said grimly, but his tone with Jessie was considerably gentler than it had been the day before.

“It’s only a tragedy if we treat it that way,” Jessie said firmly. She was stronger than she looked, even in her own dire situation. She was still a supremely competent medical practitioner, and her patient’s needs and best interests were at the forefront of her mind at that moment. “Her life doesn’t have to be a tragedy, Mr. Thomas.” She wanted him to see that too, not just Lily, because he would inevitably influence how Lily felt about herself. If she lived in an atmosphere of despair, it would affect her deeply, and Jessie didn’t want that for her, or for any of her patients, no matter how catastrophic their accidents had been, or their injuries as a result. And an upbeat attitude about what lay ahead was essential to her recovery now. It was part of why she wanted Lily to go to Craig Hospital, to get her life going again, in the best possible way. “She can still lead an amazing life, and we want her to, Mr. Thomas. There is a huge range of things she will be able to do—drive a car, go to college, learn a profession, go into politics, marry, and have babies. The only thing she can’t do is use her legs. The rest of her is still intact. We just need to refocus her goals.” There was more to it than that, but Jessie wanted to stress a glass-half-full theory, or even entirely full or close to it, rather than a glass-half-empty mood of catastrophe, which Lily would pick up on rapidly and respond to, either way.

Bill’s face looked tense and angry again when he answered, “She’s not going to be skiing again, or going to the Olympics. She will never win a gold medal now, and she’s been training for that for five years. She’ll never dance or walk again, she won’t walk down the aisle at her wedding, and how many guys do you think are going to marry a girl in a wheelchair, no matter how beautiful she is?” There were tears in his eyes. It had been all he could think of since Lily had been in the accident, and even more so after Jessie’s prognosis after the surgery that she would never walk again.

“The right one will marry her. I did my residency at Stanford with a man who had a spinal cord injury similar to Lily’s. He was in a wheelchair, and he wanted to do neurosurgery because of what had happened to him. He got married around the same time I did, and last I heard he had six kids. He married a wonderful woman, also a physician, who is crazy about him. She’s at the forefront of SCI research, probably because of him. Great lives can still happen after an accident like this.

“I’m not telling you it’s easy, and I won’t lie to Lily either, but I have seen personally what people can achieve. With the right attitude and training, Lily will be able to do great things. And it could have been even worse. She’s paraplegic, not quadriplegic, she has full use of her upper body and upper limbs. She won’t have to run a wheelchair by using a breathing tube, although some of the people who have to do that are remarkable too. And more important, she’s alive.” A number of people on the chairlift hadn’t been as lucky, and there would be several funerals in town in the coming days. Others had been killed who had come to Tahoe just to have some fun and ski, as Lily had.

“I’m not going to just let it end there,” Bill said with determination. “I’m starting to contact the experts in spinal cord injury around the world.” The implication was still there that Jessie was a small-town doctor, and others were more capable than she. But Lily’s injury was what it was, and no one would be able to change that or reverse it, until research came up with new solutions, hopefully in Lily’s lifetime since she was so young, but not yet. Jessie had already done, and was doing, all that anyone could, whether Bill recognized that or not. He still was in denial, and wasn’t ready to give up. Jessie knew that ultimately it would be hard on Lily if he was not able to accept the realities of his daughter’s life. But she also knew that it was early days yet, and sooner or later he’d have to face the truth.

Bill Thomas was a fighter and used to getting what he wanted. He had achieved remarkable things and was not ready to give up on this. And he would have done anything in the world for Lily. Jessie admired that in him, no matter how rude and disagreeable he was to her. Unlike Ben, she understood his motivations and his feelings and sympathized with him. He was fighting for Lily, not for himself, and he thought he was doing the right thing, even if it meant riding roughshod over Jessie. She was the bearer of bad tidings, and he didn’t want to hear bad news. No one did, and some people accepted it better than others. Bill didn’t. He wanted the very best recovery he could get for Lily. He wasn’t malevolent, he was just rough around the edges when things didn’t go his way.

“I’m sorry about your husband,” he said again, and Jessie nodded, trying not to cry at what he said. It was easier to talk about Lily than herself. And she was exhausted after two nights without sleep, which made everything even worse. “I lost my wife in a car accident when Lily was three. It’s a terrible thing,” he said gently. “I know how you feel.” Her emotions overwhelmed her then, and in spite of her best efforts, tears spilled from her eyes and ran down her cheeks. She wiped them away with one hand, as he looked at her sympathetically. “I hear you have four kids. I’m sorry for all of you. At least you have them. All I have is Lily. She’s my whole world.” His eyes were damp as he said it, and they stood looking at each other for a long beat, momentarily partners in loss and grief. It was a singular kind of pain, and Jessie had never hurt so much in her entire life. Her whole being had been intertwined with Tim. They had spent every waking hour together when they weren’t working, and had been perfect partners in raising their kids. She couldn’t even imagine a life without him. And every time she thought about it, she wanted to scream in terror. How was she going to live without Tim?