Conception: Callie Douglas - Book Six

Chapter Twelve

"Hi, I'm Dr. Callie Douglas", I said to my first patient of the day as I entered the office and took the file from Addison's outstretched hand. "Thank you for waiting for me."

"Hi", said a woman holding a tissue to her nose as she sniffled, "I'm Margaret Mathis."

"It's nice to meet you, Margaret", I said, ushering her into my office. "How may I help you today?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know why you came to see me?"

"I know why I came to see you, I guess. My daughter asked me to come in to see you."

"Why did your daughter ask you to come in to see me?"

"It's just that my husband died six months ago and I've been having a hard time dealing with it." A sob burst forth that she quickly stifled.

"I'm sorry to hear that", I said gently. "How did your husband die?"

"Tom had cancer. Bone cancer."

"How long was he diagnosed before he died?"

"It was pretty quick. My husband had a bad back. It was causing him a lot of problems, so I took him to the hospital to see if they could do anything for him. He was in so much pain. When I got there they ran a lot of tests and, three days later, told us he had bone cancer. It was terminal. They gave him six months to live, but he didn't make it more than two weeks." Her shoulders shook with repressed tears.

"Did you get a chance to say goodbye?"

"No. I refused to believe that he would die. My husband tried to tell me that it was okay, that he loved me, that he was okay with dying. But I refused to tell him the same things because I was convinced that I'd be able to find a solution, that I'd be able to find him a cure. I believed that, if I could just make him believe it, he'd be okay and he'd be coming home with me a cured man. I was wrong and, because of my stubbornness, I never got a chance to say goodbye to him, to tell him how much I loved him."

"It sounds to me like he knew that. If you were fighting that hard to have him live, he would have had to have known that you loved him."

"Do you think so? I don't know. It seems like my world has slowed down. Everything I lived for died that day, and I haven't had a good day since." I passed her the tissue box as she sobbed again. "I can't stop crying. I know I should be angry, but I'm just so sad. I feel like I can't cope. My doctor put me on leave from work because I keep breaking into tears. All I want to do is sleep away my time until I die and join him. It sounds terrible, but I'm just not getting over this. I keep expecting to hear his voice when the phone rings, and I wake up looking for him in the morning, wondering where he is. Then I remember, and I feel like my world has come crashing down all over again."

After a few minutes, she said, "people say they've lost a loved one. I don't feel like I've lost him. It makes it sound like I've simply misplaced him, like if I just look around the corner I'll find him again. I haven't lost him. I've had my life ripped away from me."

"It sounds like you had a good marriage."

"We did. We only fought twice, in the whole twenty-four years we were married. And both of those times we made up right away. We didn't understand couples who argued all the time. What was the point, we would say. Our lives were too short to spend them unhappy. So we worked to have a happy marriage." She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. "One of my friends said that I got twenty-four years of happy marriage, and that was more than the vast majority of people got. She said that I should consider myself lucky. But I don't consider myself lucky. I'm greedy. I wanted more than twenty-four years. Is that too much to ask? I guess it was, because I didn't get it."