Two Halves of One Whole

Fall Out

Logan never really understood the term "deafening silence." In his house growing up, you either yelled and screamed or kept a chilly silence while Rolexes continued to both tick and tock, precious silver scraped against priceless china and maids hurried about trying to remove themselves from the tense atmosphere as quickly as possible.

But then, "this is all consistent with a diagnosis of Hodgkin's Lymphoma." Well, the room- with Chris, Lorelai, Rory, himself, two doctors and a nurse, was deafeningly silent. Tears instantly came to everyone's eyes, Lorelai turned into Chris's body and he held her close to him- the look in his eyes was one of incomprehension. Rory simply stared straight ahead, unblinking- her mind usually whirring at a thousand miles a minute seemed to have completely stopped. And for once, Logan was right there, picking up the slack.

Cancer? That couldn't possibly be right. She was young- she was 23, she was brilliant- God, she had graduated Magna Cum Laude from Yale University, she was a Gilmore and a Hayden- she couldn't possibly have cancer. She was too young and on the brink of real greatness, she had an entire life ahead of her- they finally had a whole life ahead of them; what kind of deep, sick and twisted cosmic joke was this? Because it had to be a joke, there was absolutely no way that this could be real, right?

But he looked at the doctors and they were looking back, serious but sympathetic as they retreated into the background, wanting to be unobtrusive in this emotional family scene. He wondered how long it took for them to learn and perfect that demeanor after giving such life shattering news to complete strangers. How does someone come into a room like this and deliver this kind of information to people- shattering worlds so entirely while just standing there, calmly?

Finally it was Rory who spoke- she had gone from staring at the wall across the room to her hands in her lap. But, ever the intrepid reporter, she had questions, she needed to get to the bottom of the story. This was the woman who had asked Barack Obama, point blank, if he thought he was being treated differently by Fox News more for his race or his politics- right there in the press pool, sitting next to the reporter from Fox- she was fearless when she wanted answers.

"Well, ok then- I have cancer." That word sounded so weird coming from her lips. "So, what do we do now? I mean... is it surgery or chemo or what? Or..." She got very quiet, her voice trembling and she looked down at her hands again, "Or... am I going to die?" Wow, she didn't pull any punches did she? Dr. Sanchez stepped in to answer her questions with a reassuring smile that, honestly, made Logan want to punch him- he felt like he couldn't breathe, like his world was falling apart and the doctor was acting like everything was fine.

"Well, here's the good thing- this is honestly one of the most treatable cancers out there- for someone your age, even the more advanced stages have a 5-year survival rate between 90-95%- we can absolutely beat this. This is scary, I'm not going to deny that, and we still have some tests to do to determine exactly the type and stage, how advanced it is- but I have absolutely no reason to believe that you won't be in that majority." Rory took that in, not looking at anyone else in the room- Logan was desperate to meet her gaze and knew her parents probably were as well, but she needed to process and he needed to give her the space to do so.

"So, do I need to have surgery or something? What's going to happen next?"

"We rarely do surgery on a lymphoma- things like radiation and chemotherapy are honestly much more effective forms of treatment. But we need to do more tests to assess where we are in the staging of the disease- we're going to do a functional imaging scan- we'll inject a form of barely radioactive sugar to the bloodstream, it will rush to any cancer cells so that we can see the exact location and the size of the mass. We'll also run a few more blood tests for some other markers and try to determine where you stand and how aggressive a treatment regimen we need. I'm sorry I can't tell you all of that right now- but I have you on the waiting list for the PET Scan, unfortunately we only have one working right now, but we should get you in this afternoon and that will give us a lot more information." Finally, Christopher could do something!