Living Proof, стр. 29
“It’s malignantly progressive. Soon I’ll be in a wheelchair, and after that…” After a pause, her voice dropped to a hard note. “I like you, Trent, but you’d be wasting your time to date me.”
He took a deep breath, trying to loosen the shock that was lodged in his throat like a clot. “I don’t care,” he said, trying to sound brave and supportive, and not as rotten as he felt. “I still want to keep seeing you for as long as I can.”
“You do?”
“Yes. But isn’t there any treatment that could help you? Any drug?”
“There are some drugs that slow its progress,” she said. “But no, right now, there’s no cure.”
No cure.
Right now, there’s—
And then, flabbergasted, he latched on to the wildly glaring connection— Can it be? His head began to throb as if from an ice freeze, oversaturated with information.
“I don’t know what to say,” he finally said.
“I need to go, anyway. You probably need some time to digest this. You can call me later if you want. And needless to say, we can’t bike together anymore.”
He closed his phone and stared out the window, barely perceiving the dark treetops below. Time passed—a minute or ten—before his hand mechanically dialed a number on his phone.
Dopp’s voice sounded incongruously normal, even pleasant, when he answered. “Hey, Trent, how did it go?”
Something deep within him, unacknowledged and unwanted, recoiled against his words as he answered:
“I think I found her motive.”
SEVEN
Arianna dropped her cell phone onto the starchy hospital sheet as Trent’s voice dissipated in the silence. She closed her eyes, trying to retain the timbre of his voice, but its distressed tone magnified her worry. I won’t be surprised if I never hear from him again, she thought. In fact, I would completely understand.
Her throat clenched for tears, but she knew that indulging in self-pity was its own side effect of MS, and one that was more detrimental than a numb foot or a wave of dizziness. Even though some other doctors denied it, she believed that attitude played an important role in the rate of a disease’s progression—a staunch belief that compelled her to focus on the joyous aspects of life, and to savor even its smallest pleasures, like crisp air invigorating her lungs.
She breathed in deeply, expanding the tightness in her throat, but the air was stale and reeked of disinfectant. She surveyed her surroundings in dismay, glancing from the paper blue curtains hanging dismally on either side of her bed to the tiny television mounted on the opposite wall that betrayed its age by its DVD player.
She tried to swing one leg onto the floor—and was stunned, not by the expected shock of pain, but by the sensation of nothing at all. Her leg had not moved. She threw off the faux-wool blanket, thrashing her bandaged legs until she felt a viciously sweet pain pulse in her knees, hardly noticing the screech of the curtain as it was yanked along its steel rod.
“Arianna!” exclaimed a voice. “What are you doing?”
The kind face of her own doctor, an MS specialist, instantly stilled her.
“Oh, Dr. Morris, thank God! My legs just went completely dead. I thought for a second…”
He nodded knowingly. His wire-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of his nose like a filter of emotion: the only one that ever showed was calm.
“But you can move and feel them now?”
“Yes.”
How much easier it was to remain calm when you were the one at bedside and not in it, she thought. But she knew that it made her a better doctor, at least. Sympathy was the crux of the job at times, as barren couples cried in her office, and understanding the depth of their suffering was a trait that seemed to inspire more goodwill than her degree from Columbia.
She swung her legs over the edge of the bed, and he tested her reflexes with a small hammer. Her feet kicked up weakly.
“I saw a copy of your admit report. You must have taken quite a spill.” His words were not judgmental; if anything, his tone was sympathetic. It was one reason why she had stayed with Dr. Morris since her diagnosis two years ago: He understood her fundamental need to lead a normal, active life at whatever the risk, never scolding her for testing the limits of the disease.
“I know what you’re going to say,” Arianna said. “And I guess I have to agree.”
“The Novatrone drip is the right course of action at this point, Arianna,” he said gently. “And I think we should get you started on it as soon as possible, since your legs are already showing symptoms of preparalysis. We’ll start it with a course of antibiotics to prevent infection in your cuts. It seems that the shock to your system from falling is expediting the degeneration of myelin in your lower spinal cord.”
She nodded reluctantly. I took what I wanted and I’m paying for it, she thought. The key to the progression of her disease was myelin: the fatty protective membrane layered around nerve fibers in the brain and spinal cord, which increases the speed at which impulses are conducted. The thicker the myelin sheath, the faster impulses can travel. Arianna’s own body had inexplicably begun to attack her myelin, disrupting the electrical impulses conducted to and from her brain, resulting in nerve damage. As more and more areas of myelin scarred, it felt like watching herself drown; soon she would be left paralyzed.
Novatrone was a last-resort drug, a powerful immune-suppressing medication to delay paralysis in rapidly worsening patients, and Arianna was more aware of its risks than most: It could be tolerated by the body for only a limited time before causing heart damage.
“Let’s do it,” she said, wishing more than ever that she could confide in him.
She had hinted at her secret a year ago, when the group was first coming together, but Dr. Morris had been skeptical of its