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Saving Graces

Broadway

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ISBN: 0-7679-2537-8

Chapter One

October 21, 2004

My face was tilted toward the stream of water from the shower-head. Water
spilled from the corners of my closed eyes as my fingers outlined the unfamiliar
lump in my right breast. Around and around again, I traced its edges. Try as I
might, it wouldn't go away. How could I have missed something this size when I
showered yesterday? Or the day before? Or ... but it didn't matter. I'd found
it today, this lump, firm and big on the side of my breast. I kept my eyes
closed and finished rinsing my hair.

Until that moment-until the lump-October 21, 2004, was meant to be an ordinary
day, if such a thing can exist on a campaign trail two weeks before a
presidential election. An 11:00 A.M. town hall meeting at the Kenosha United
Auto Workers hall. A rally later that day in Erie, Pennsylvania. Scranton in
time for dinner, and Maine by sunrise the next morning. I would speak to at
least two thousand people, prepare to tape a segment for Good Morning
America, discuss Medicare premiums with senior citizens, talk college
tuition with parents, and, if it was a very good day, influence at least a few
undecided voters. Just another ordinary day.

But I had learned long ago that it was typicallythe most ordinary days that the
careful pieces of life can break away and shatter. As I climbed out of the
shower, I heard the door to my hotel room click shut. I knew instantly who it
was, and I was relieved. "Hargrave," I called out from the bathroom, wrapping
myself in a towel, "come feel this." Hargrave McElroy was my dear friend of
twenty-three years, my daughter Cate's godmother, a teacher at the high school
my children had attended, and now my assistant and companion on the road. She
had agreed to travel with me after John had been named the Democratic vice
presidential nominee. I had previously chased away a couple of well-intentioned
young assistants who aroused my desire to parent them instead of letting them
take care of me, which was wearing me out. I needed a grown-up, and I asked
Hargrave to join me. She had no experience on campaigns, but she was a teacher
and what's more, the mother of three boys. That's enough experience to handle
any job. Choosing Hargrave was one of the best decisions I would make. She
instinctively knew when to buy more cough drops, when to hand me a fresh Diet
Coke, and, I now hoped, what to do after one discovers a lump in her breast.

Hargrave pressed her fingers against the bulge on my right breast, which felt as
smooth and firm as a plum. She pressed her lips together and looked at me
directly and gently, just like she was listening to a student in one of her
classes give the wrong answer. "Hmmm," she said, calmly meeting my eyes. "When
was your last mammogram?"

I hated to admit it, but it had been too long, much too long. For years, I had
made all the excuses women make for not taking care of these things-the two
young children I was raising, the house I was running. We had moved to
Washington four years earlier, and I had never found a doctor there. Life just
always seemed to get in the way. All lousy excuses, I knew, for not taking care
of myself.

"We better get that checked out as soon as we can," Hargrave said.

I had a feeling she meant that very morning, but that was not going to be
possible. We had less than two weeks before the election. Undoubtedly people had
already gathered in the union hall to listen to the speakers scheduled before
me, and there were young volunteers setting up for a town hall in Erie, and-as
the King of Siam said in the musical-"et cetera, et cetera, et cetera." My lump
would have to wait; the ordinary day would go on as scheduled. Except for one
thing. Today, I planned to go shopping.

The previous evening, I had spotted an outlet mall on our way to the hotel. We
had spent the night in a Radisson-a fact I discovered that morning when I read
the soap in the bathroom. Since I started campaigning, it had been a different
hotel in a different city each night. We would arrive late, traveling after it
was too late to campaign, and we would enter and exit most hotels through the
same back door used to take out the trash. Unless the trash dumpster bore the
name of the hotel, I'd figure out where we were only if I remembered to look at
the soap in the bathroom.

As soon as we spotted the outlets, Hargrave, Karen Finney-my press
secretary-and I started calculating. The stores would open at ten, and it was a
ten-minute drive to the UAW hall. That left about forty-five minutes to shop. It
wasn't a lot of time, but for three women who hadn't been shopping in months, it
was a gracious plenty. Despite the lump and everything it might mean, I had no
intention of changing our plan. We had all been looking forward to the
unprecedented time devoted to something as mindless, frivolous, and selfish as
shopping. The clothes I had in my suitcase that day were basically the same ones
I had packed when I left Washington in early July, and it was now nearing
November in Wisconsin. It was cold, I was sick of my clothes, and, to be honest,
I wasn't particularly concerned about the lump. This had happened before, about
ten years earlier. I had found what turned out to be a harmless fibrous cyst. I
had it removed, and there were no problems. Granted, this lump was clearly
larger than the other, but as I felt its smooth contour, I was convinced this
had to be another cyst. I wasn't going to allow myself to think it could be
anything else.

In the backseat of the Suburban, I told Hargrave how to reach Wells Edmundson,
my doctor in Raleigh. With the phone pressed to her ear, she asked me for the
details. No, the skin on my breast wasn't puckered. Yes, I had found a small
lump before.

At the Dana Buchman outlet, I looked through the blazers as Hargrave stood
nearby, still on the phone to Wells. I spotted a terrific red jacket, and I
waved to Hargrave for her opinion. "The lump was really pretty big," she said
into the phone while giving me a thumbs-up on the blazer. There we were, two
women, surrounded by men with earpieces, whispering about lumps and flipping
through the sales rack. The saleswomen huddled, their eyes darting from the
Secret Service agents to the few customers in the store. Then they huddled
again. Neither of us looked like someone who warranted special
protection-certainly not me, flipping through the racks at manic speed, watching
the clock tick toward 10:30. Whatever worry I had felt earlier, Hargrave had
taken on. She had made the phone calls; she had heard the urgent voices on the
other end. She would worry, and she would let me be the naive optimist. And I
was grateful for that.

She hung up the phone. "Are you sure you want to keep going?" she asked me,
pointing out that our schedule during the remaining eleven days until the
election entailed stops in thirty-five cities. "It could be exhausting."
Stopping wasn't going to make the lump go away, and exhaustion was a word I had
long ago banished from my vocabulary.

"I'm fine," I said. "And I'm getting this red blazer."

"You're braver than I am," she told me. "From now on, I will always think of
that blazer as the Courage Jacket." Within minutes, she was back on the phone
with Kathleen McGlynn, our scheduler in D.C., who could make even impossible
schedules work, telling her only that we needed some free time the next Friday
for a private appointment.

While I bought a suit and that red jacket, Hargrave set up an appointment with
Dr. Edmundson for the next week, when we were scheduled to return to Raleigh.
Through the phone calls and despite her worry, she still found a pale pink
jacket that suited her gentle nature perfectly. All the plans to deal with the
lump were made, and the appointments were days away. I wanted to push it all
aside, and thanks to Hargrave and the thirty-five cities in my near future, I
could. We gathered Karen and headed out for that ordinary day.

The town hall meeting went well-except at one point I reversed the names of
George Bush and John Kerry in a line I had delivered a hundred times, a mistake
I had never made before and never made after. "While John Kerry protects the
bank accounts of pharmaceutical companies by banning the safe reimportation of
prescription drugs, George Bush wants to protect your bank account...." I got
no further, as the crowd groaned, and one old man in the front good-naturedly
shouted out that I'd gotten it backwards. "Oops." I said it again, right this
time, and we had a good laugh. I looked at Hargrave and rolled my eyes. Was this
how it would be for the next week? Fortunately, it was not. We flew to an icy
Pennsylvania, where the two town halls went well enough, or at least without
event. I had my legs again. And then on to Maine for the following day.

I could tell by the look on the technician's face that it was bad news. Hargrave
and I-and the Secret Service agents-had ridden to Dr. Edmundson's office as
soon as we landed back in Raleigh the following week, just four days before the
election. I had told Karen and Ryan Montoya, my trip director on the road, about
the lump, and the Secret Service agents knew what was going on because they were
always there, though they never mentioned a word about it to me or to anyone
else. Ryan had quietly disappeared to my house in Raleigh, and the Secret
Service agents respectfully kept a greater distance as Hargrave led me inside. I
was lucky because Wells Edmundson was not only my doctor, he was our friend. His
daughter Erin had played soccer with our daughter Cate on one of the teams that
John coached over the years. His nurse, Cindy, met me at the back door and led
me to Wells' office, dotted with pictures of his children.

"I don't have the equipment here to tell you anything for certain," Wells said
after examining the lump. Ever the optimist, he agreed that the smooth contour I
felt could be a cyst, and ever the cautious doctor, he ordered an immediate
mammogram. His attitude seemed so very positive, I was more buoyed than worried.
As Hargrave and I rode to a nearby radiology lab for the test, I felt fine. One
thing I had learned over the years: hope is precious, and there's no reason to
give it up until you absolutely have to.

This is where the story changes, of course. The ultrasound, which followed the
mammogram that day, looked terrible. The bump may have felt smooth to my touch,
but on the other side-on the inside-it had grown tentacles, now glowing a
slippery green on the computer screen. The technician called in the radiologist.
Time moved like molasses as I lay in the cold examining room. I grew more
worried, and then came the words that by this point seemed inevitable: "This is
very serious." The radiologist's face was a portrait of gloom.

I dressed and walked back out as I had walked in, through a darkened staff
lounge toward a back door where the Secret Service car and Hargrave waited for
me. I was alone in the dark, and I felt frightened and vulnerable. This was the
darkest moment, the moment it really hit me. I had cancer. As the weight of it
sank in, I slowed my step and the tears pushed against my eyes. I pushed back.
Not now. Now I had to walk back into that sunlight, that beautiful Carolina day,
to the Secret Service and to Hargrave, who would be watching my face for clues
just as I had watched the image on the ultrasound monitor.

"It's bad," was all I could manage to Hargrave.

As the Secret Service backed out onto the road for home, Hargrave rubbed my
shoulder and silent tears snuck across my cheeks. I had to call John, and I
couldn't do that until I could speak without crying. The thing I wanted to do
most was talk to him, and the thing I wanted to do least was tell him this news.

I had mentioned nothing to John earlier, although I spoke to him several times a
day during the campaign, as we had for our entire marriage. I couldn't let him
worry when he was so far away. And I had hoped there would be nothing to tell
him. Certainly not this. I had promised myself he would never have to hear bad
news again. He-and Cate, our older daughter-had suffered too much already. Our
son Wade had been killed in an auto accident eight years earlier, and we had all
been through the worst life could deal us. I never wanted to see either of them
experience one more moment of sadness. And, after almost thirty years of
marriage, I knew exactly how John would respond. As soon as he heard, he would
insist that we drop everything and take care of the problem.

Sitting in the car, I dialed John's number. Lexi Bar, who had been with us for
years and was like family, answered. I skipped our usual banter and asked to
speak to John. He had just landed in Raleigh-we had both come home to vote and
to attend a large rally where the rock star Jon Bon Jovi was scheduled to
perform.

He got on the phone, and I started slowly. "Sweetie," I began. It's how I always
began. And then came the difference: I couldn't speak. Tears were there, panic
was there, need was there, but not words. He knew, of course, when I couldn't
speak that something was wrong.

"Just tell me what's wrong," he insisted.

I explained that I had found the lump, had it checked out by Wells, and now
needed to have a needle biopsy. "I'm sure it's nothing," I assured him and told
him that I wanted to wait until after the election to have the biopsy. He said
he'd come right home, and I went there to wait for him.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Saving Graces
by Elizabeth Edwards
Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Edwards.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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