Alone in the bleak, white exam room, Olivia's clothes were carefully folded on the chair across the room. Once again, she found herself in a scratchy white gown with familiar blue patterns. Were they supposed to be flowers or polka-dots?
The doctor had walked out after the exam, leaving her a moment to re-dress herself and talk in his office. He was nice, Doctor Keller. That had to count for something given that she'd probably be seeing more of the man than she'd ever want to.
She briefly wondered who it was that designed the exam rooms and waiting rooms. Were the colorful and abstract paintings on the wall supposed to distract her from the crushing reality of why she was there in the first place? Were they meant to add cheer to a place that most reasonably sane people would consider a living Hell? At least it was a nice contrast to the sterility of the room.
Her thoughts began to wander again. Suddenly, she was reacquainted with the feeling of being dirty despite sitting in a room that stunk of bleach and betadine.
Cancer made her feel dirty. Disgusting, filthy, tarnished and polluted. She felt so polluted.
She finally conjured enough energy to push herself off of the exam table and rid herself of the harsh cotton gown. Throwing on the knitted grey sweater, she thought about how different of a person she was the last time she had worn those clothes. It wasn't about the clothes, but she had never looked at that stupid sweater and thought 'I'm not gonna be the same person next time I wear that.'
That was dumb. Who would think like that?
"Miss Benson?" came the sound of her name being called followed by a knock on the door. "I can take you back to Doctor Keller now." the nurse smiled sweetly.
Miss Benson.
Here, she wasn't a detective. Just like the last test. Alone in a hospital waiting room feeling naked without her badge and gun. It wouldn't change. Each test, each exam, each meeting, it would never change the fact that she was sitting there not as a detective, but as a fellow human being. Just as vulnerable and endangered as the next. She'd never get used to that. Her badge had a way of making her forget that she was just another person.
She followed the nurse down the center of the hallway, the walls passing her in perfect symmetry. Each step she took was more dizzying than the last. She wasn't new to the scene of a hospital, but she was new to the scenes of these kinds of hospitals. Balding heads, sickly patients of all ages, loved ones holding loved ones.
At that moment, it occurred to her again that she was alone. Truly, utterly alone. This time, thinking about it burned worse. The pain radiated from her stomach to her spine. When she had first realized she was alone, she was supported by the novocaine of shock, but it was wearing thin and reality was becoming louder. She didn't have to be alone, but at the same time, she did. It was the moral thing to do in her mind. She knew the offers would come, just as it had come from Casey. Shoulders to cry on had been offered, but she wouldn't accept them, thus absolving herself of any self-pity for now.
She fought a lot of battles alone, some even the fight for her life; this one didn't have to be any different.
She was seated across the desk of the doctor in a mahogany chair that was probably older than her. He flipped over the charted manila folder, examining the words, sparing no detail. His long-lived silence coming from careful diligence was at her expense only — pure anxiety as each moment crashed into the next. In front of his eyes, he was deciding her fate. Examining her chances on a preliminary basis.
Finally, he set down the paperwork, crossed his hands and leaned forward towards her. "Before we dive into treatment options and how we plan to combat this condition, I'd like to run a few more tests. Just to cover all of our bases and get a better understanding of what we're dealing with and what to expect. Over the next few days, I'm going to order an MRI, CT scan, another ultrasound, and mammogram, as well as another biopsy."
She was waiting for the other shoe to drop. For his exhale to come heavy with the weight of telling one more person their fate. Doctors always seemed to do this; to stop halfway through as if they were in some sort of dramatic movie scene. He'd breathe deeply, give her all of the sympathies he could evoke and then try to find some way to relieve her heartache.
But, there wasn't much heartache to relieve. She was still relatively numb.
"From what I've seen so far in your exam as well as your workup and ultrasound, my firsthand assumption would be that you have Invasive Ductal Carcinoma. I also believe it may have become lymph-node positive, meaning it's spread to your axillary lymph nodes. We won't know the full extent until we're able to examine further. I will, however, say that strictly looking at your ultrasound, the cancer that has spread to your lymph nodes is still in the early stages which makes it easier to tackle."
She sat as still as stone, her lips pressed together in a straight, emotionless line. Her blinking came slower, feeling as if she were sleepwalking.
What was she supposed to feel? Sad? The word spat incredulously in her mind. If she had spoken it aloud, her nose would've crinkled on the same side her lip would've quirked. But she didn't speak aloud, she couldn't even scream internally if she wanted to, let alone externally. Was anger part of the process? She couldn't remember.
The high pitched sound of tinnitus rang out to cover the silence. She'd forgotten that — her brain didn't understand silence anymore. Too many close-range gunshots and explosions had rattled her eardrums to the point where silence no longer existed. The longer she went without a response, the louder the ringing became.
"Miss Benson, do you have any questions?" Doctor Keller asked, a hint of fear in his voice. He had undoubtedly dealt with thousands of patients before her and he would continue to after her. He was a goddamn oncologist. So why did he actually look disconcerted? She knew what these sort of jobs required; the distancing and the disassociating. Patients were simply numbers on the charts and timestamps on the calendars. "I know how hard this can be to take in all at once."
Why was he looking at her like she was about to pass out?
She sat longer than she had hoped to, relishing in the silence before her lips opened at their own volition.
"A broken string of pearls drops to the floor at the same time the drops of rain will fall to the ground. But I am not infinite as the pattern repeats. The rain will continue to saturate the dirt, long after I am buried beneath it. The shock and awe will continue to paralyze, day after day, if not myself, then somebody else. Another finite source. Another life that is lived in the same amount of time that it takes from the necklace breaking until the last pearl falls. A moment. A moment lived, a moment lost. All but a moment it takes to live, to see, then to die."
She repeated the words as she remembered them, entirely verbatim.
With her eyes still hallow and empty, she started to speak again. "My mother read that to me several times. She was an English professor and one of her students wrote it for an assignment. Not sure why it stuck with me for all of these years — probably the same reason it stuck with her. Someday, she'd need it to explain how she felt when nothing else ever would. Maybe that's why she made sure it was ingrained into my mind; because someday it would explain the inexplicable."
"I'm not sure I understand," the doctor responded slowly, almost as weakly as she had sounded.
Her eyes fluttered up to him, narrowing with a knitted brow for a moment before returning back to normal. "I'm alone." she said as if it were the simplest statement in the world "I've always been alone. Just a solitary pearl dropping to the floor, and every moment in between. I'm not sure how it pertains to this, all I know is that it's the only way I can explain how I'm feeling. Not like the necklace has just broken and that I'm the pearl that is falling, but that I've been falling this entire time, entirely on my own. You're telling me that some part of this new beginning may be easier, harder, or different than the other parts. I'm telling you that I'm looking at the bigger picture. The timeline, the rain falling, the pearl dropping."
The doctor stared at her in silence, his brows softening but still holding the disconcerting look he had been wearing since she spoke. She watched the cogs turn in his mind, seeing the effect of her words rain down upon him.
"You don't have to be alone," he whispered.
He chuckled dryly, rolling her eyes as her head fell back. As if she hadn't heard that a hundred times before. "Yeah, right. I bet you tell that to all of your patients with husbands and wives. Children and grandchildren. Mothers and fathers. But you say it to them because you know they have a choice, you know they have a hand waiting for them to hold onto. To choose to hold onto. Next, you're gonna tell me that everything I'm feeling is normal, right? Stages of grief. The six degrees of separation from myself. Just do me a favor and schedule the tests so I can get this over with and get my life back."
She hadn't expected herself to lash out. In fact, every word felt entirely too foreign coming from her mouth. She wasn't used to being broken down by something that didn't have two eyes and a darkened soul. She couldn't look this demon in the eyes like she could with all of the other ones. She'd never had to fight something she couldn't see or hear or analyze. Even memories had eyes if they were given to her by a human embodiment of evil. If her assumptions were right, that was where the anger was coming from. The unfamiliarity with an entirely new wavelength was lighting a fire within her.
"Miss Benson," he said, right as she stood up and started heading towards the door. Olivia stopped, gulping silently as she watched his hands drop against his desk. "The life you had before isn't coming back. You'll have to stop chasing it eventually."
She stared through his crystal grey eyes for a silence-filled moment, allowing herself to remain quiet and stoic. "And what makes you think that?" she asked, her voice so low it became barely audible.
The doctor sighed, nonchalantly shrugging his shoulders. He was matching her energy; the attempt to be carefree in a situation that called for the most care. "It's different from here on out. I've been doing this job for over twenty years. I've met a lot of people, a lot of families, and a lot of cancer. I've seen every demon hidden behind every possible corner in this job. If I've learned anything at all, it's that after you hear the words 'it's cancer', everything changes, forever. No matter what happens, no matter who you have or don't have. No matter what life you lived before, there's no chasing the past because you can't go back."
Through the brimming of her own tears, she swore she saw something of a sparkle in his eyes. She wasn't sure what it was, or if it was just her mind playing tricks on her. Maybe it wasn't even there. She briefly wondered if he was anything like her. Did he go home and feel the undeniable urge to lay in the dark after losing a patient? What was it like when he had to close a file for the last time, a person he had tried so desperately to help. Where were the dark circles under the eyes that came with the burden of helping people who couldn't always be helped? Did he ever look in the mirror and wonder, just for a moment, who the hell was staring back at him?
Maybe it was exhaustion that was just pretending to be a sparkle in his eyes.
Maybe it was just pure pain in hers.