I realized that for years I had been measuring my worth by being involved, important, and indispensable, saying “yes” to things not only because I wanted to be helpful, but because I wanted to be looked up to, admired, and loved. I had poured myself into maintaining an illusion of perfection in every aspect of my life. And I had been so busy “doing the right thing” for the benefit of everyone else that I had lost track of what really mattered to me.
Now, lying in the half-dark, my priorities seemed incredibly clear; this was where I wanted and needed to be. I felt so certain about it that, for the first time in a long time, I forgot to worry about what anyone else thought.
I STRUGGLED TO ROUSE MYSELF FROM A DENSE, DREAMLESS sleep. My alarm clock was beeping. Reaching for the snooze button, my arm brushed against a cold metal rail. My eyes flew open. The beep wasn’t coming from an alarm clock; it was coming from the pump of an IV.
I sat up slowly, feeling as if I had passed through an invisible fold in the universe and landed in some altered state of reality. Hannah was still asleep. I glanced around, wondering what time it was. The light coming through the slatted blinds looked early-morning gray, but the clatter and conversation in the hall suggested it might be later than I thought.
A nurse strode purposefully into the room, followed by a heavyset young woman in blue carrying a tray of flying saucers. While the nurse busied herself with the beeping IV, the young woman set the tray down and lifted the flying saucers to reveal our breakfast: colorless oatmeal, lukewarm scrambled eggs, and cold toast.
“The first day of meals is the worst,” she explained apologetically. “Since you weren’t here yesterday to choose, we have to give you what’s left. Tomorrow’s menu is under the plate. Circle what you want. I’ll be back in a while to pick it up.”
She glanced at Hannah’s sleeping form. “We can only bring one tray per patient, so you might want to circle extra items. We’ll do our best to bring what we can.”
She turned to leave, squeezing through a crowd of white-coated residents that had congregated in the hallway outside our door. Three of them came in. Each wore a stethoscope and carried a clipboard. As they approached Hannah’s bed, two of them cleared their throats at the same time and then laughed self-consciously. The nurse, who was finished with the IV pole, nodded to them as she left.
I eyed the residents suspiciously. One of the things I was beginning to understand about the hospital was that we rarely saw the same person twice. It was disconcerting, too, that while they knew so much about us, we knew almost nothing about them. Hannah opened her eyes and sat up.
“Mommy, who are all these people?” she asked, frowning.
One of the residents spoke. “We need to examine her,” he said efficiently. “It’ll only take a minute.”
“My name is Hannah,” Hannah said quietly.
“Yes, of course,” he answered. He stepped closer, reaching for his stethoscope. As he did, the two residents next to him moved in, and then those in the hall entered and formed a semicircle around the bed.
“Stop!” Hannah yelled, holding out her arm like a policeman in traffic. The resident with the stethoscope froze. Hannah turned to me.
“Mommy, please ask these people to leave. They aren’t my friends; they didn’t even tell me their names!”
I paused. The residents were looking at me. I knew they were counting on me to tell Hannah to be a good little girl and let them do what they needed to do. I remembered the Michigan doctor’s diagnosis: manipulative, overindulged two-year-old. I realized these doctors might think the same thing. I didn’t care; if any person in this world deserved respect, it was Hannah. I looked at the guy with the stethoscope.
“She’s right,” I told him.
The resident frowned and tapped a finger absently on his clipboard. The other residents shifted their gaze to him.
“I have to examine you, Hannah,” he said finally. “Will you let me do it if I tell you my name?”
Hannah narrowed her eyes and looked first at him and then at me.
“Okay,” she said finally, “but all those other people have to leave.”
He nodded. The others turned and filed out of the room. When the last person had left, the resident raised his stethoscope and leaned over Hannah. She stopped him.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Dr. Fiorelli,” he said, smiling.
“No, your real name,” she said, totally exasperated.
“Tony,” he replied, grinning now from ear to ear.
“Oh, Dr. Tony,” she said, settling back on the pillows. “That’s a nice name.”
Dr. Tony must have spread the word. From that day on, no more than three or four residents entered Hannah’s room at a time, and everyone who did introduced themselves to her using their real names.
DR. MARKOFF CLEARED HIS THROAT AND ADJUSTED HIS glasses. He was Dr. Edman’s partner, one of Hannah’s pediatricians. He was sitting on the edge of his chair across from Claude and me. His shoulders were stooped, his face gaunt and strained. His wiry hair was disheveled, two-day-old creases wrinkled his trousers, and his shirt was missing one of its buttons. He didn’t seem to notice or care.
“I’m speaking to you as a father, not as a pediatrician,” he began, leaning forward so his elbows rested on his knees. He cleared his throat again; I studied him more carefully. He looked as if he was about to cry.
Claude and I exchanged glances.
“My daughter Danielle was diagnosed with leukemia last year. She’s two years old. My wife is with her now at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where she’s getting a stem cell transplant. We’re trying to save her life.”
In one breath we went from a gathering of two parents and a doctor to two fathers and a mother who belonged to a club no one wanted to be in.
“You are going to have to make thousands of decisions from now on that no one but the two of you can make; some of them may make a difference whether Hannah lives or dies. The best advice I can give you is this.”
He looked directly at Claude and me.
“Make the best decision you can with the information you have at that time.” He leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair.
“‘At that time’ is the critical part. You’ll see what I mean. You can drive yourself crazy saying, ‘If only we had known this, if only we had known that.’ The point is, you didn’t know, so just keep telling yourselves, ‘We did the best we could with what we knew. We did the best we could with what we knew.’”
I could hear a deep truth in his words. As I let them seep into my heart, something softened in me and fell away. I realized that Dr. Markoff’s rule applied not only to the decisions we had to make about Hannah’s treatment, but to every other area of my life as well. My fear of making mistakes could no longer paralyze me; from now on, it would be enough to do the best I could with what I knew.