We Own the Sky(40)

Would you like one?”

Jack nodded nervously.

“I thought you would. But to get it, you have to help me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Right, Jack. Can you close your eyes and count for me, from one to as high as you can go?”

Jack closed his eyes and started to count. “One, two, three, four...” He had been able to count to twenty since his third birthday, but now when he got to eleven he paused. “One and two, one and four,” he said and then stopped, looking ashamed as if he had done something wrong.

“Well done, Jack, good boy,” the doctor said. “Now, can you come around

here and try to find the lollipops? They’re in my desk somewhere.” Jack walked toward her and started looking around the desk, touching Dr. Flanagan’s paperweight, her calendar. She was watching him intensely, how he walked, what he did with his hands.

“You’re very close now. Maybe it might be somewhere here?” she said,

opening up her drawer.

Jack’s face lit up when he looked inside. “Wow, there’s so many.”

The doctor reached into the drawer and held out a red lollipop. “There you go.

Now, can you tell me what color it is?”

“Red,” Jack said quickly.

“Excellent,” she said. “Now, can you remember what we call these? What is this, Jack?” she said, holding the lollipop under his nose.

Jack looked at the lollipop, thinking it might be a trick question. “It’s a lollipop.”

“Well done,” Dr. Flanagan said, giving Jack the lollipop. He beamed and put it carefully into his pocket.

“Now, Jack, can you see this line?” She pointed to a taped line on the floor

covered with little fish stickers. Jack nodded. “I want you to walk along the line, okay?”

Jack didn’t move. He looked at Anna and me for encouragement and we

smiled at him, urging him on. He dithered, chewing his fingernails, and it was as if we were asking him to walk along a precipice. Finally, he slowly started walking, but he couldn’t keep straight, weaving his way along the line like a drunk.

“Well done,” the doctor said. “Now, the last thing. Can you stand here, Jack?”

She touched him gently on both cheeks and then examined his head, the little bumps that had appeared under his skin.

“Wow, you’re an amazing little boy. Would you like to go and play with Suzie out in reception?”

Jack didn’t move, looked nervously at me and Anna.

“We have a PlayStation,” the doctor added, “and no one’s playing right now.”

“Really?” Jack said, his eyes lighting up.

“Really,” Dr. Flanagan said, and she held out her hand and led Jack outside.

“It always gets them,” Dr. Flanagan said, when she came back to her office.

“My nephew has one, and it’s like we don’t even exist half the time.” She looked at her watch. “Right, we have eleven minutes left. So I have looked at all the scans and the reports, and I do agree with Dr. Kennety’s and the radiologist’s assessment. It almost certainly is an astrocytoma. However, looking at the shape on the images, I think the tumor might be a little more advanced.”

I felt breathless, like that first meeting in Dr. Kennety’s office. Despair in the pit of my stomach, like feeling homesick as a child. “So it could be a more advanced tumor? A glioblastoma?” I asked, my voice shaking. I had read about glioblastomas on  Hope’s Place. They were the astrocytoma’s uglier cousin, a tumor so complex, so aggressive it could kill people in weeks.

“No, I don’t think so,” the doctor said, picking up one of Jack’s scans from her folder. She typed something on her computer and then turned the screen toward us. “That’s what glioblastoma looks like. There, you see all those white areas around the outside. Now compare that to Jack’s.”

We looked at the image. There were no white parts, just an amorphous black blob.

“No, I’m almost certain it’s an astrocytoma. It just might be more advanced than we thought.”

“And could that affect Jack’s prognosis?” Anna asked.

The doctor paused, which was unusual for her. “It could, but I don’t want to

speculate or talk numbers until after the surgery. Believe me, I do understand the need—your need to know—but really, it doesn’t help anything.”

I wanted to say something, but my vocal cords had seized up. Dr. Kennety had said 80 or 90 percent. He had said that Jack would be cured.

The doctor looked at her watch. “Right, time is getting tight now, so how much did Dr. Kennety tell you about the operation?”

“A little,” Anna said. “We’ve both read up on it since. He gave us some

handouts.”

“Good,” she said. “So the goal is to remove everything. That’s the best chance of a cure for Jack. And from looking at the scans, the location isn’t toooo bad, although I am a bit worried about this part,” she said, pointing to one of the shadows.

I felt that fog descend again, the sense that I was here but not here, that I was floating, looking down on myself. I had been secretly hoping for good news from Dr. Flanagan, that the tumor was in fact benign, or that it wasn’t a tumor at all. I wasn’t expecting to hear that Jack’s prognosis might be worse.