She cannot stay. (updated)

She is not coming home. She will not leave the hospital.

Her parents said that she wanted to break it to me, and, when I got there, she did… though she was so groggy that she let her mom speak for her through most of it.

It was what I had expected ever since her mother told me that she wanted to tell me herself… She’s too weak for surgery for the suspected abscess or for the tumors in her liver. And she’s too weak for surgery because of those very things. And she is too weak for chemotherapy, and they certainly couldn’t start chemo with an abscess reservoir of infection in her. So – they are going to do nothing.

They asked her the DNR questions, and Gwen said she didn’t want them to resuscitate her if her heart stopped during the night.

She said she did want to continue the intubation, though, because people were coming into town to say goodbye and she didn’t want to miss them.

The doctor says: weeks.

Maybe weeks, or it could be sooner.

So that’s it.

They will continue antibiotics for the abscess. A question I will ask is whether, if the antibiotics did work enough on the abscess infection, that would then change this frozen circle of rock-paper-scissors checkmate. I expect the answer to be no. Because of her liver. They have never seen a liver that big. It must be full of tumors.

I asked her to marry me. She was really too sleepy for the grand gesture; her dad talked to her a little, and they said that they were worried that I might be liable for her debts. I said that did not signify. Maybe it will come back up later.

(I would also want her to know that if she turned me down I would not be hurt. It’s a thing where, if she said no, that would mean nothing to me, but if she said yes, that would mean everything to me. We are who we have been; we need nothing else to finish us.) (But I would be so proud to marry her. So proud.)

She is so tired and groggy – and, with her heart rate up so high from the calcium (will they continue the drug that lowers the calcium? I don’t know; I’ll find out tomorrow when all the doctors talk to us), caffeine or a stimulant will not be possible, and then there’s pain relief on top of that. I want to have ten, or fifty, or five thousand conversations with her before the end, because it is us, it’s us, but I don’t know if she and I will have even a single real conversation ever again. I don’t know if I will ever see her awake again. It is like I’m locked outside the door, as I stand next to her bed.

So fast. But apparently that is ovarian cancer. The symptoms are like nothing, or like constipation, for ages and ages, and when it finally sticks a toe into view you are riddled with it. She had it all spring. (All her glorious triumphant active spring, gym-going, working with Rahab’s Sisters, churchgoing, taking classes toward her MBA with a focus in nonprofit management, coming into her own.) Had it earlier even. Must have.

And something else, of course. As I stand and stroke the flaxen hair away from her damp brow…

Did you read my entry three entries back?

I am alive in horror and wondering anger at the knowledge:

Her brain is fine.

I look at her face, the slit of whites of her eyes (she has always slept like that), her lips open and now blameless of the blood that stained them a day ago when her platelets disappeared. And it is true, it is a fact. Her body is sick, her body below the neck, but her head is fine, her brain is fine.

Her brain is fine.

Her brain is fine.

HER BRAIN IS FINE!

And they are not going to do that. They are not going to save her. And I cannot save her. While her brain is fine.

And it may be technically possible that she would not have to die now. This sweet girl here. But that does not matter.

While her brain, my Gwen’s brain and head, IS FINE.

She is 34.

I howl.

Oh, poor you and me… poor you and me, sweetie…

***

Update:

It’s not weeks, it’s days. The oncology doc said he hadn’t wanted to drop the whole load of bricks on Gwen and her parents at once.

So, days. And he recommended that people who wanted to say goodbye should get here, well, he recommended today. Though he doesn’t know, it’s still days. Gwen says she will try to be here a while.