Free The Cost of Hope by Amanda Bennett

flushed and triumphant from the operating room, and I am summoned to a tiny consultation cubicle. He is still dressed in scrubs. The operation has been a success, he says. He has removed the diseased kidney, and has done so laparoscopically, through a tiny hole in Terence’s abdomen. His recovery will be much faster and much less painful than it might otherwise have been, Dr. Turner says. He has sent the tumor off to the lab—he calls it a tumor this time—for looking at it up close, it appears almost certainly to be cancer. An hour or so later, I am allowed in the recovery room. Terence is lying under the bright lights. “You are going to be fine,” I tell him. He is too drugged and groggy to register what I am saying. “Everything is going to be fine.”
    Dr. Turner is right. The operation is physically less taxing than his earlier one; Terence is released from the hospital just three days later; on January 25, just a week after surgery, Terence is well enough to be brought into the doctor’s office. At his visit, Dr. Turner tells us that the cancer is an odd type. “Of unknown origin,” he says. He tells us that he’ll call just as soon as he knows more.
    Still, he is reassuring.
    “We got it all,” he says.
    Terence tears up.
    “Thank you for saving my life,” he says. They shake hands. Terence never sees him again.

5
    My memory is clear on just how much Terence and I had riding on that operation. Until I track Dr. Turner down again, I have no idea what it had meant to him as a young doctor.
    Twelve days shy of a decade after the operation and three years after Terence died, I fly out to meet Dr. Turner in Oregon. I have faxed him the pages of his notes and records. When he calls back, he is excited. He remembers Terence. He remembers us both. He remembers Terence’s kidney. He’s done hundreds of operations since that day, yet he remembers this one very clearly.
    What I want to know from Dr. Turner is this: Was Terence’s thank-you for saving his life misguided? Was it the romantic and wishful sentiment of a frightened and deluded couple? How badly were we mistaken at the time, in thinking that the operation had “cured” Terence’s cancer? Had Dr. Turner been sending out some other, more subtle message that we had—willfully or accidentally—failed to hear?
    Not at all, Dr. Turner says. In fact, he is surprised to hear that Terence has died. The literature on kidney cancer is very clear. On average, he reiterates, if a small tumor is removed before the cancer has had a chance to fling its microscopic cells into the bloodstream and implant other places, then surgery can be considered as close to a cure as possible. At 7 centimeters, Terence’s tumor was just on the edge.
    I also learn from Dr. Turner just what an opportunity Terence presented him at that moment in his surgical career. Terence wasvery ill. His insides were still roiling from the intestinal surgery just two weeks earlier. Another major surgery would be debilitating. I remember how Dr. Turner explained to us that he would try to remove the kidney through a small hole, to spare Terence the pain and weeks-long recovery of a cut. It was a relatively new technique, he says.
    Had I known just how new the surgery was and how new Dr. Turner was to it, my waiting room time would have been completely different. As it is, it isn’t until I look over the medical records I have collected that I realize I have no idea how we even got to Dr. Turner in the first place. A polite note in the file from Dr. Turner thanking Dr. David Luallin for the referral is the only clue. Dr. Luallin is the surgeon who removed Terence’s colon. But how did we get to Dr. Luallin? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps Terence knew. I doubt it. What a level of blind trust we had! We did more research before picking out our real estate agent.
    What Terence and I didn’t know was that Dr. Turner was new to Oregon. He had just arrived six months earlier, in July. He was also