Читать книгу Letters from Max - Sarah Ruhl - Страница 33

I have very little memory of that winter or spring. I was teaching graduate student playwrights that semester at Yale. I was also checking my children’s temperatures often, as they always seemed to have a cold. I was writing microessays because I felt incapable of writing a play while I was constantly checking my children’s temperatures. When the pediatrician saw me, she started to laugh, because I seemed to arrive at her doorstep every other day with one of my three children. I don’t know if my friendship with Max felt like an extension of my mothering, or a release from it, or both.

That March, I received a group missive from Max to his circle of friends updating us on his current condition:

Bleak news, though no immediate death sentence impending. My tumors remain unchanged, despite the new chemo. My lungs have been too irradiated due to my first cancer for a second attempt. The dosage would be too low to guarantee a response, and too high to not risk killing my lung tissue. Surgery also doesn’t seem to be a likely option given the subcentimeter size of my tumors, their deep enjambment in my lungs, and the slipperiness of Ewing’s cells. Surgery is also a little irrelevant as there are certainly microtumors saturating my lungs and perhaps the rest of my bloodstream. Systemic treatments are the only things that would give me a long-term chance of remission. And it doesn’t look like the systemic therapies (chemo) are doing what they ought.

It is more likely that I will embark upon a clinical trial, hoping that an experimental vaccine therapy treatment at the NIH will be able to give me a clean scan.

These trials are trials because they are promising, and they are trials because they are not proven science. I will be on the periphery of medicine. Empiricists (like Dad) love the sentiment that man’s reach should always exceed his grasp. My body is being fanned and fumbled by the gloved fingertips. I hope they can get a grip on me, but I can’t say the odds are very good.

Should the trial fail, my tumors will probably start growing again very quickly. We will try to find another trial, or we will consider nursing more chemo. I honestly can’t tell you.

That spring, Max underwent chemotherapy while trying to graduate from Yale. He had lung surgery at Sloan Kettering. I visited him after, in New York. We took a walk around the block. We took a selfie. Here it is: