Disclaimer: Sadly, Crossing Jordan does not belong to me.
A/N: I blame my last seminar class for this one. I realize that any sane person, confronted with Jordan's situation, would get a second opinion. However, Jordan doesn't exactly fall into the 'any sane person' category. Besides, then the story would have been shorter and much less angsty.
Glioblastoma multiforme: the most common and aggressive type of primary brain tumor, accounting for 52 percent of all primary brain tumors symptoms of the disease include seizure, headache, hemiparesis, impairment of sensation and/or balance, nausea, vomiting, and personality change...the 5 year survival rate of the disease has remained unchanged over the past 30 years, and stands at less than three percent…even with complete resection of the tumor, combined with the best available treatment, less than 25 percent survive more than 5 years.
Jordan closed her old Neuropathology textbook, setting it down numbly on her coffee table. She'd remembered correctly. GBM had been the topic of one of her seminar classes in medical school, but it had been so long ago…she'd hoped maybe she'd remembered it as being worse than it actually was.
She sank down onto the couch, pulling her knees up to her chest and remembering how all of this had started. She'd been stressed out at work due to the rash of homicides in East Boston over the past three weeks, and when she was stressed she tended to get tension headaches. Garret had finally caught her in the break room, downing three times the recommended dose of Excedrin, and had insisted that she see a doctor. She'd laughed, telling him that she was a doctor and she could handle herself. Three days and two bottles of asprin later, he'd bullied her into getting an MRI done on her lunch hour, just to make sure there wasn't anything really wrong with her. She'd agreed, but on the condition that she was the one who read the MRI film and not some random radiologist over at BUMC.
She was staring at that film now, holding it up to her lamp with trembling fingers as she tried to come to terms with the image depicted on it. On the film, nestled against the dark shadow of her brain, were twelve white lesions, differing in shape and size but sharing one crucial identifying factor: they were tumors. Her best guess for a specific diagnosis was glioblastoma multiforme, although the gold standard for determining that diagnosis was actual dissection of the tumors in a pathology lab.
Jordan snorted at the thought, darkly amused. They'd be able to confirm her self-diagnosis soon enough. From the infiltration of the tumors shown by the scan, she was pretty sure she wouldn't live much longer. She'd seen milder cases send patients to the morgue. If she managed to stay alive for another month, she'd consider herself lucky.
"Lucky," she said aloud, and a hysterical giggle escaped her at the sheer irony of it. Lucky. She had cancer. She was dying. How lucky could she possibly be?
She looked at the MRI film again, as though if she looked hard enough, she might find some answer, some explanation, some reason for it.
"I'm going to die." The words rang hollow in her ears. She was only thirty-three years old. How could she just – just die, just like that?
But people did, she knew. They died all the time, just like that. Jordan knew that better than anyone. It was part of her job.
Throwing down the film and pushing away the mental image of herself on an autopsy table, Jordan leapt off of the couch, stalking back and forth across the room. She was full of pent-up emotion, not sure if she was angry or shocked or horrified or terrified by the incontrovertible truth depicted in black and white on the flimsy sheet of MRI film.
"What now?" she whispered to herself, realizing suddenly how small her voice sounded in the still silence of her living room. How insignificant…how fragile. "God, what am I supposed to do now?"