Let Him Live (2 page)

A
T THE END
of the hall, the boy with the IV stand halted. “You beat me, Mark,” he said to the boy in the wheelchair.

The child grinned up at him. “I told you I could.”

“How about best two out of three? Give me a day to rest, and we’ll try it again tomorrow.”

“You got it.”

The older boy ruffled Mark’s hair, and Meg watched him approach her, pushing his IV stand. “Sorry I yelled at you,” he said. “I didn’t want you to get mowed down. I’m Donovan Jacoby.”

“Meg.”

He glanced at Alana, and his eyes danced mischievously. “You two look like twins.”

“Maybe it’s the uniforms,” Alana joked.

Donovan was tall and thin, with curling brown hair, gorgeous blue eyes, and a fabulous smile, but Meg saw that his skin had a yellow cast and that he appeared slightly stooped. He leaned against his IV stand. “Excuse my friend here, but we’re very attached.”

“Maybe you should be in your bed,” Meg suggested nervously, after a quick smile at his joke.

“That’s where I’m supposed to be, but it’s pretty boring in my room. I was walking the hall looking for action when I saw Mark. Now, I’ve met you two, and things are really looking up.”

“This is Dr. Charnell’s daughter,” Alana announced proudly.

Meg cringed inwardly.

“No lie?” Donovan asked. “He’s awesome.”

My father?
Meg thought. “We’re working here this summer,” she said hastily, “and according to our training, we’re supposed to help patients. Why don’t I help you back to bed?”

“You do sound like your father,” Donovan said. Yet, he didn’t protest returning to his room.

Meg followed as he led the way, half afraid he’d keel over and she wouldn’t know what to do.

“I’ll meet you at the nurses’ station,” Alana called.

Donovan’s room was sunny and bright. Although it contained two beds, only one looked as if it had been occupied. “Yours?” she asked.

“How did you guess? I lost my roommate last Friday.”

Meg’s heart squeezed. “Lost?”

Donovan saw her look of distress. “He went home.”

She realized she’d been a doctor’s daughter too long. In her father’s world, “lost” meant died. “Can I help you?” she asked as Donovan climbed in the bed, trying to keep his IV lines from tangling.

“Can you hold the stand steady for me?”

She gripped the cold metal and parked it beside his bed. He lay back on the pillow, and she saw a flash of pain cross his face. “Should I call a nurse?”

“No. It’ll pass. I—um—guess I overdid things.”

Meg’s training had taught her to be helpful and polite, but not personally involved. “Now that you’re settled, I think I should be going,” she said. “I haven’t even officially reported in yet.”

His hand reached out for hers. “Can you visit just a minute?”

“Maybe for just a minute.” She found it difficult to say no. She glanced around at the bed, desk, windowsill, and curtain that separated his bed from the other one. She saw a child’s drawings pinned to the curtain and taped to the bottom of the sill. There was a photo on the bedside table of a gap-toothed, brown-haired boy and a pretty woman with green eyes. “Your family?” she asked.

“My mom and my brother, Brett. Those are Brett’s drawings all over the place. He’s six and draws me a new picture for every day I’m in here.” Meg’s eyes grew wide. She began to quickly count
the drawings. “Fifteen,” Donovan said, as if reading her mind. “Where do you go to school?” he asked.

“Davis Academy. I just finished my sophomore year. And you?”

“Actually, I’m not from the Washington area. Mom and Brett and I lived in a small town on the border of Virginia and North Carolina. When I got sick last March, Mom was determined to find the best doctors possible for me. She sold our home and moved us here because Memorial has one of the best liver specialists in the country on staff. She’s rented an apartment, but it’s miles away, and she has to ride the bus just to visit me.”

“You have something wrong with your liver?”

“You could say that. I had to drop out of school, but I would have been a senior if we’d stayed.”

“Can’t you be a senior here when school starts in the fall?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged. “So, tell me, what’s it like living with a doctor?”

It took Meg a moment to adjust to his shift in subjects. “It’s like living with a god. Occasionally, Zeus comes down from Mount Olympus to mingle with us mere mortals.” Her own candor shocked her. Why was she saying such a thing to a guy she didn’t even know? She giggled nervously. “Just kidding. Dad’s a pretty busy man, so sometimes it seems like he’s hardly at home. How about your dad?” she asked. “Did he come with you?”

“My dad skipped out five years ago. Address unknown. There’s only the three of us.”

“He doesn’t know you’re sick?”

“No, but so what? Mom, Brett, and I are making out fine by ourselves. When this is all over with, maybe I’ll look him up and tell him we made it without his help.”

“I think I’d better go check in at the nurses’ desk,” she said, glancing at her watch.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to keep you so long.”

“Want me to turn on the TV?”

“No, there’s nothing worth watching.”

Meg felt sorry for him and felt a silent tug-of-war with her conscience. “I’m scheduled to work until three. Maybe I can stop by later and see how you’re doing,” she finally told him.

“I’d like that. Mom doesn’t come by with Brett until after six because she has to work.”

She thought his eyes looked tired, and in the sunlight, his skin, as well as the whites of his eyes, looked quite yellow. “I’m not going to see you in the hall racing any more wheelchairs, am I?”

“Not today.” A grimace of pain crossed his face, but he still managed one of his illuminating smiles. “No promises about tomorrow though.”

Meg left Donovan and found her way to the nurses’ station. At the desk, an older nurse, Mrs. Vasquez, said, “So, there you are. I’ve sent your partner on an errand, but I need both of you to help with activity time in the playroom for the children under age ten.”

“I was with a patient named Donovan,” Meg explained even though Mrs. Vasquez hadn’t asked for an explanation.

“Alana told me. He’s one nice kid. Has a friendly word for everybody and a special affinity for the smaller kids. We don’t get many as nice as him.”

Meg itched to ask more about him, but just then Alana came down the hall. “Mission accomplished,” she told Mrs. Vasquez.

“Then it’s to the playroom for both of you.”

Inside the playroom, Meg discovered twelve kids ranging in ages from four to ten preparing for a session with an art therapist. Some were in wheelchairs, others were in casts, a few were bald. “From chemotherapy, I’ll bet,” Alana whispered.

Meg felt overwhelmed. She realized how isolated she’d been from her father’s world. The hospital was like a separate city, with a hierarchy of people in charge. But in this city, people were sick, some of them sick enough to die. Seeing the children, small and vulnerable, carrying around basins in case they had to vomit, and with apparatuses attached to their arms or protruding from their chests, made Meg queasy. And it brought back the memory of Cindy much too vividly. Meg didn’t see how she was going to last the summer in such an environment.

“You all right?” Alana asked. “You look a little green.”

“Too many doughnuts,” Meg mumbled. “Doesn’t this bother you?” she asked.

“Lonnie was on dialysis so long, I got used to coming to the hospital. I saw lots of sick people. Now, I want to help them.”

Meg wished she could feel the same way, but all she really wanted to do was go home. She began to think she’d made a mistake by agreeing to work at the hospital. She really wasn’t up to the task. She made up her mind that at the end of the day, she’d tell her father that she couldn’t manage it. That it was too painful for her emotionally.

At the end of her shift, she stopped by Donovan’s room. He was sound asleep, and she didn’t wake him. She studied his drawings from his brother carefully. There were many of a house with the words “Our Home” and “Where the Jacobys Live.”

Nervously, she approached her father’s office, where she discovered him hunched over his desk, doing paperwork. He looked up and beckoned her inside. “How was the first day?”

“I’m not so sure this is such a good idea for me,” she said.

“Sit and tell me about it.”

“I tried to help with activity time, but I didn’t do a very good job. The art therapist had to help me more than the kids.”

“You’ll catch on.”

She felt cowardly, wishing she could simply come out and tell him the truth. “I also met a boy named Donovan.”

Her father nodded. “He’s one sick kid.”

“What’s wrong with him? I know it’s something to do with his liver.”

“I’m afraid his liver’s shot. That’s really why he’s here. His physician referred him to me because our program is his only hope.”

Meg felt her hands turn clammy. “Your program?”

“Donovan needs a liver transplant. Without one, I’d say he has less than six months to live.”

“D
ONOVAN’S GOING TO
die? But he’s not much older than me.”

“He’s almost eighteen, but age has nothing to do with it. He’s in advanced stages of cirrhosis brought on by a non-A, non-B strain of hepatitis. Cirrhosis is deadly.”

“How did he get such a thing?”

“His hepatitis is idiopathic.” She looked perplexed, and her father added, “That’s medical talk for ‘We don’t know how he got it.’ Frankly, at this late stage, it doesn’t matter.”

“There must be some kind of medicine for it.”

“I’m afraid not. And the virus has all but destroyed his liver. Sometimes, cirrhosis can be reversed, but not in Donovan’s case. The liver filters out toxins—poisons. Once it begins to fail, toxins
build up. Eventually, the liver atrophies altogether and the victim dies. The only hope is a transplant.”

“Will he be able to get one?”

“Only if we can locate a compatible donor.”

“What’s that mean?” Meg’s head began to swim with the complexity of Donovan’s circumstances.

“A donor has to match in blood type, plus be about the same weight and height as the intended recipient. The liver is a large organ and can’t be expected to function properly if it’s mismatched. And there simply are not enough donor organs to go around to all the patients needing them.”

“Why not?” Meg recalled how her dad would hurry off to perform surgery whenever an organ would be specially flown in for one of his patients. He was on virtual twenty-four-hour call.

“Ah, Meg,” her father said with a sigh. “That’s a complicated issue. To be of any use for transplantation, organs need to be free of disease and injury, so donors are most often healthy individuals who die unexpectedly and traumatically—often with a massive head injury. Anyway, families have to be approached about donation when their loved one is on life support, when he or she is declared brain dead. It’s a very trying time for everybody, and families are in shock.

“It’s not always easy for them to accept what’s happened, much less agree to donate organs. Yet, people working with transplant services attempt to help families see that organ donation is sometimes the only positive thing to come out of such
tragedies as premature death. The best way for a family to deal with the issue is to know how members of the family feel about donating their organs. That requires discussing it
before
a tragedy happens.”

“Does Donovan know how sick he is?” Meg asked.

“His mother’s aware of the gravity of his condition, but even though I’ve had several talks with him, I’m not sure he’s totally accepting it. Kids, especially you teens, believe you’re invincible, bigger than death. Also, the condition itself often brings on bouts of confusion and extreme fatigue that dulls a victim’s perceptions about his illness.”

Had Cindy thought she was invincible
? Meg wondered.
Didn’t everyone have the right to grow up and grow old?
“So, once you find him a donor, he’ll be all right, won’t he?”

Again, her father shook his head. “It doesn’t always work that way. The transplantation operation and recovery period aside, he’s not the only person here at Memorial awaiting a liver transplant. I have a list of patients.”

“But you said he’d die without one.”

“They’ll all die without one.”

Meg felt as if she’d wandered into a maze. “Still, there’s hope, isn’t there?”

“There’s always hope. That’s what keeps us going.” His beeper sounded. “Excuse me.” He picked up his phone and dialed his exchange.

Meg had grown to hate the sound of the beeper, and she felt particularly irritated now that
she had so many questions about Donovan and his necessary liver transplant. She waited while her father carried on a clipped conversation and hung up. He stood. “Meg, tell your mom I won’t be home this evening.”

“What’s wrong?” She looked up at him, watched as he removed his lab coat and slipped on his suit jacket.

“That was a colleague in Baltimore. He’s got a donor heart for us, and I’ve got a thirty-three-year-old mother of two who desperately needs it. According to the National Network for Organ Sharing, the two of them are a match.”