A Toss of the Coin
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Considering the labyrinth of successive waiting areas he'd spent the morning going through, his initial reaction was surprise that anyone had managed to track him down.
On the other hand, he reasoned, the dark, elegant hand on his shoulder and the soft voice saying, "Good morning, Spencer," did belong to a doctor, so really, who better to find their way around a hospital?
"Uh...hello, Savannah. What are you doing here?" She was dressed in casual clothes rather than scrubs, so he figured she was not on duty.
"Rossi called and asked me to come check on you."
"I thought you were working today."
"I was. I switched shifts."
"For me?"
"Why not for you?" Savannah said with a gentle smile.
He couldn't help but shrug. "I'm not sure, I suppose. I mean you're obviously a kind and caring woman," he said. Then a thought occurred to him: "I didn't just insult you, did I?"
"By calling me kind and caring?" Savannah teased.
"No, I mean by assuming you wouldn't go out of your way for me."
"No, Spencer. Not at all. May I sit down?" she asked, gesturing to the chair beside him.
"What? Oh, yes. Of course. I'm sorry."
Savannah sat down and for a few minutes an awkward silence lay heavy between them. Reid was hyper-aware his leg was jiggling almost frantically with nervousness, but since Savannah hadn't made him feel self-conscious about apologizing over nothing, he figured she understood. Probably sees it every day as a doctor, he thought. "So, Rossi, huh?" he finally asked to break the ice. "I take it them that the whole team has guessed by now?"
"That you lied about being too young to be tested?" She took a moment to think about it. "Honestly, I don't know," she eventually admitted. "They may have by now, seeing as you're missing a case. But I'm pretty sure Derek didn't know when he left this morning, and considering he wasn't the one to call me... As for the others, who knows? I'm not even completely sure Rossi has guessed the exact reason for your appointment; he just said it might be nice for you to have someone with you today. Specifically, someone who wasn't - and I quote - 'going to try and blow smoke up your ass.' I take it you've been enduring a lot of 'helpful' encouragement lately?"
Reid smiled weakly. "I love my team, and I know they truly mean well, but they keep feeding me some statistic or other - usually erroneous - that they've found after a five minute search on the internet. You know, as if I haven't read one hundred and eighteen books on the subject, or two hundred and thirty-seven of the latest research papers from the world's top experts, some of which are so recent they haven't even been published yet. But no, even with that, or my psych degree, or," and here it was a little hard to keep the rueful bitterness from twisting his voice, "the fact that I've been talking to psychologists, neurologists, biologists, and geneticists for either me or my mother for the last two decades, I might have overlooked this one little fact they 'tumbled onto' yesterday that makes everything better." He winced inwardly at the powerful wrench saying geneticist still caused inside his chest; he hadn't thought he could have felt any worse at this exact moment, but the universe did seem to love to go out of its way to prove him wrong.
If there was one woman who would have understood... One woman I would have still considered marrying even if the results today turned out badly...
"You know why they're doing that, don't you?" Savannah asked, pulling him back to the present moment.
"I do, yes. I don't blame them. I understand - they're my friends and they're scared to lose me. Of course they're going to seize on every little tidbit of information that gives them some hope. But, all the same, it hasn't been easy."
That was an understatement. One of the main reasons that he hadn't wanted to tell the team was that he needed some time to absorb the diagnosis himself, to let time distance him from those first devastating days, for the normal routine of everyday life to calm him and let him grow accustomed to 'normal' again before he had to deal with the others' reactions. After all, it's not as if he hadn't dealt with a similar threat before.
Well, no luck there. Almost everyday now there'd come a random moment - a moment where he'd usually just manged to push the whole thing to the back of his mind, hoping for an hour of peace, a moment where he'd feel on the verge of normal - when one of his team-mates would waltz up with another cheerful tip or misunderstood statistic (really, they should leave those to an expert, the hypocrites) along with a faux-playful admonition not to look so glum, and bring him right back to it. He, understanding their worry, would then smile dutifully and swallow down whatever new super-food or herbal supplement they insisted he try, and tell them how much better he felt. Then they would walk away, happy at thinking they'd cheered him up, but in truth leaving him feeling even more worn down and empty, and miserable at how little they understood.
"Is that why you snapped at Derek the other evening?"
Reid glanced at Savannah out of the corner of his eye. "This isn't some sneaky ambush to defend your man, is it?" he asked as a joke, then immediately worried if it sounded enough like a joke that Savannah would understand he didn't really mean to imply that's what he truly thought.
Savannah (luckily) laughed out loud. "No. I love the man, but Derek can be..." She waved a hand, trying to find the right word.
"Controlling, overbearing, pushy..."
She laughed again. "Pretty much. He... well, you know."
"He thinks that if he can run my life, he can protect me."
"Exactly. When he gets in protective mode, he's like a bear. A bear that will stomp you underfoot in his attempts to save you from the wolf."
"Funny, I always thought of him as a speeding train, one that will pull you along no matter what going that fast does to you. Or maybe a drill sergeant, who will steamroll over Italy just because you talked about getting a pizza."
"That too," Savannah agreed with a chuckle. Her voice was rueful, but as Reid looked at her, he saw that her eyes held nothing but love. Suddenly his chest was aching again and he concentrated on the flow of people brushing past their seats in the hospital corridor, hoping to distract himself. This wasn't the emergency room, or even the same floor, but he still felt conspicuous and in the way as the staff worked around them with the typical purposeful urgency of doctors and nurses, even those who were merely getting coffee or pinning things to the bulletin board.
It was then that his wandering eyes fell on a wild-haired, hospital-gowned figure shuffling drunkenly towards them, her scared, searching look betraying that she had no idea where she was. Reid froze. Two nurses quickly and competently intercepted the woman and lead her away, but not before Reid's mouth went impossibly dry.
Savannah said something, but Reid didn't catch it. "I'm sorry, what was that again?"
"Why didn't you ask any other members of the team to come with you today? I mean, Derek I get, but why not ask J.J. or Penelope?" she repeated calmly. From her micro-expressions, Reid could tell she'd noticed his distraction, but she didn't mention it, for which he was grateful.
"I don't know. Well, I suppose I do know. Garcia would be too emotional. If Blake was still on the team, I might have asked her, but not now, not after learning what she went through with her son. Hotch and Rossi would have ironically been too stoic, not emotional enough."
"Too stoic?"
"I can't explain it. It's just sometimes, when you're really nervous, someone else's calm can be extraordinarily nerve-wracking." He slumped a bit in his chair. "Who knows? Maybe it's nothing more than feeling the pressure to emulate the behaviour."
She put her hand on top of his and squeezed gently. He didn't know if anyone had told her about his aversion to touch - though she seemed to considerate of a person to ignore such a thing if she did know - but funnily enough, it didn't seem to matter. He didn't mind today. "And J.J.?" she asked softly.
"J.J..." he began, and then trailed off, unaware that he'd started drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair. "J.J. has this way of saying things as if they're a given. I don't know, maybe it's her 'mom' voice, though that's not quite it. She has good intentions, but she's sometimes a little too pat, if you know what I mean. A little too polished, maybe from her days of being the press liaison. She sounds so good, people don't realize that she may be lying or that she doesn't necessarily know what she's talking about. She goes for reassurance first, not honesty. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but it's the why of it that's a little aggravating."
He sighed. "You know what her own mother once said to me? She said that 'avoidance is a Jareau family trait', and I think that's what this is. Don't get me wrong, in most ways J.J. is an immensely strong woman, but at other times she's... well, an avoider. She can be comforting and has the courage to face most problems square in the face, but deep at heart, she doesn't like emotional messes and unconsciously seems to do her best to stay away from them. I wonder occasionally if it's something to do with her sister's death, but there it is.
"In any case, again, I get why she's doing it in this case - she doesn't want to face losing a friend - but that means she can't fully be there for me either, because she won't face what my odds actually are. For some reason, she thinks I only have a four percent chance of developing Alzheimer's. And she doesn't even say it like Garcia and Morgan do, who are sort of annoyingly hopeful. No, with J.J. once she's pointed something out like a kindhearted big sister, then it's almost as if I'm being slightly silly thinking of any other outcome.
"And she keeps talking about my having kids," he went on when Savannah merely looked at him patiently. "I understand what she means about leaving myself open to the possibility, and theoretically I even agree with her - I mean, it's not like I'm not going to consider it - but what she doesn't seem to consider is how much time I have spent thinking about. Or about how much I know of what all this entails."
He leaned back with a groan and wearily ran his fingers through his hair. "Or maybe she has and she just wants to make sure I see the other side."
Savannah was silent for a few moments, then she quietly asked, "So if you get bad news today, does that mean you've decided to never have children?"
He could feel tears threatening at his eyes. "I haven't decided," was all he said. "What do you think?"
"As your friend, I'm heartbroken at the idea of you closing the door on the idea, but as a doctor, I understand the logic. Derek's already making plans on how to get you through the adoption process, but - "
"But I'm a single man with a dangerous job and possibly two severe neurological conditions, either of which could render me incapable of taking care of myself, let alone a child, in as little as a year from now. The team talks about my adopting a child as if there's not still a process to go through, as if it's as easy as going to the mall and saying, 'Hey, can I have that kid on the top shelf? The one next to the peanut butter?' Whether or not they actually believe that, I don't know, but realistically speaking, the odds of any agency approving me are miniscule, and, even if they did, it's unlikely any mother putting her baby up for adoption would choose me."
Savannah nodded grimly.
"It's all right, you know. I mean, if I have the gene, I wouldn't adopt even I could."
"No?"
"No. What it comes down to isn't what genes I'd pass on to a child, but what kind of life I could give them. With a biological child, I could possibly get around the genetic dangers with pre-implantation screening, and with an adoptive child I would avoid it completely, but what good does that do them - either of them - if I end up being unable to raise them? Or if I end up trapping into the role of care-giver? Bad enough for a child I didn't plan on, but to knowingly choose that? Especially with an adoptive child who likely has already had a lifetime's worth of unstable homes? It's almost like those people in previous centuries who used to adopt kids for nothing more than cheap servants or unpaid farm hands instead of loving them as their new children."
"It wouldn't be like that with you. You don't have it in you to be that kind of person, Spencer."
"I wouldn't intend to, but practically speaking, what would be the difference? I can give you the stats, you know. How nearly sixty percent of Alzheimer's and dementia care-givers rate themselves as extremely stressed. How forty percent suffer from Depression. That in 2014, the physical and emotional toll on care-givers for these two diseases caused them to have an additional 9.7 billion dollars in additional health care costs of their own, even apart from the drain the patient puts on their finances.
"I also know that roughly two hundred and fifty thousand children between the ages of eight and eighteen provide some kind of help to people with Alzheimer's or dementia. Eight. Henry will be eight in November. Every time I look at him, I can't help but think: is this the life you'd want to give him?"
Reid's gaze rested on a poster advertising free flu shots on the wall across from him, but he didn't see it. "But forget the stats. The thing that really brings my dreams of a family to a crashing halt is that I know what the life is. I love my mother, I do, but I can't help but hate and resent her too. There's so much more I could have done, so much more I wanted to do but couldn't, and all because I was tied down to her.
"Most days I can live with that, but others..." He turned to look at Savannah. "If I had to pick the feeling most prevalent in my life, the one that defines my day-to-day experience, do you know what it would be?"
Savannah shook her head.
"Exhaustion. Every day, that's all I ever seem to feel. Sometimes there's accomplishment, or pride, or relief if a case has gone well, but underlying it all is always exhaustion and heartache.
"So how can I lay that on another human being? A child? J.J. asked me the other day if it shouldn't be up to the other person to decide what burdens they're willing to carry, and to some extent she's right - at least for a potential spouse - but it's up to me to decide what kind of man I should be, and frankly, I don't think I have it in me to be that much of a bastard."
His companion didn't know what to say to that, so she wisely kept quiet.
"And, like I said, that's really only true for a spouse - an adult who presumably can make an informed decision. But for a child? That's idiotic! What choice does a child have about what family it's born into? Or adopted into? No, the team can deal in potentialities and probabilities all they want, but I don't have that luxury. I already have one dependent, not to mention a possible ticking clock over my head. With a limited number of potential earning years, I have to think and plan for the future. And if I do have the gene, then bringing a child into this mess would just be cruel."
Savannah took his hand in both of hers. "But at least they'd be alive. They'd exist. Wouldn't that be worth it?"
"To whom, me or them?"
"Would you have rather never been born?"
"Yes."
The two sat quietly for a long time.
-x-
Savannah handed him a coffee, one from across the street and not the hospital cafeteria. "Who are you to decide who gets born?"
"Who decides how any child gets born? Either the child is conceived accidentally, or his or her parents made a consciously decided to try and have a baby. I'm the person to decide because I'm the person who's in place to make the decision in the first place. Saying I don't have the right not to have children is ridiculous. Everyone has that right. Abortion is a trickier question admittedly, but to decide before a child is conceived is just being responsible."
"But you don't know what their life would be like. Not for sure. All I meant is you shouldn't decide based on what you think their life might be."
"At this point in time, what other criteria do I have? I can only go with the odds. And I know the odds, Savannah. You do too. Look, with my mother being diagnosed, I've got a fifty/fifty chance of carrying the genes, correct?"
"And if you carry the genes, yes, there's a strong probability - "
"The medical journals I read called it a virtual guarantee," Reid interrupted.
"That's sloppy and misleading terminology," Savannah protested.
"Is it?"
She opened her mouth to argue automatically, but didn't. Realistically, he wasn't wrong. "All right, if you carry the gene, it's a strong probability that you will develop the condition," she finished.
"So essentially, I have close to a fifty/fifty chance of developing early-onset familial Alzheimer's disease or eFAD."
"Yes," Savannah grudgingly admitted.
"And Alzheimer's disease has a mortality rate of a hundred percent."
"Well, yes, now. But you don't know what will happen by the time you develop it."
"Perhaps, but since eFAD can hit as early as a person's late twenties, the fact is I could wake up tomorrow and start displaying symptoms. However, in any case, speaking of right now, I have a fifty/fifty chance of surviving the next twenty years. So, getting back to the odds, I only have a fifty/fifty chance of living long enough and being well enough to care for a child throughout his or her entire childhood, and that's providing of course that I father one pretty much today."
"Spencer..."
"And that's forgetting the fact that my odds are only fifty/fifty because, as of yet, I don't know if I carry the genes. If I do carry them, then those odds essentially go down to almost zero."
"There are things you can do..."
"Like exercise more? Eat more vegetables?"
"Well..."
"Savannah, let's be honest: Alzheimer's disease is the only cause of death in the top ten in America that cannot be prevented, cured, or slowed. You either die from it or with it. And eFAD is not like late-onset, which by the way, I'd be thrilled if you could make Morgan understand. Late-onset is more likely due to a gradual accumulation of age-related malfunctions, so yes, it is something that possibly could be altered with life-style changes. But eFAD is entirely the consequence of malfunctioning genes. And...and either I have them, or I don't." He could feel his Adam's apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed hard. "Please, Savannah..." His voice broke. "Please don't be like the team! I can't take pretending anymore! And I know they'd say I didn't have to if they were here, but they make it hard for me to do anything else."
He pulled his hand away from her, shifting in his seat to increase the distance between them. Wiping his eyes, he took a deep breath and got himself together. "So how, in good conscience, could I choose to foist that burden on a child? To steal their childhood away and force them to play nursemaid for years? To leave them penniless after years of medical bills? To knowingly give them a parent for only a handful of years, only to then leave them to the horrors of foster care? And worst of all, to gift them with the anguish of watching their very own father forget them, as if they never existed at all? That it's not just his life that would be lost, but the memories of their time together?"
"You might get married," Savannah lamely tried to argue.
"Spouses run out. Nobody knows how hard long-term care is until they do it. And even if she didn't, what would I be doing to her? Condemning her to years of caring for an invalid who no longer even remembers her name, all while she's trying to simultaneously raise a child? And while we can screen for Alzheimer's, we can't reliably screen for schizophrenia, which is also lurking around the corner waiting to jump out. And children as young as six are now being diagnosed, so it's theoretically possible that any wife of mine would have not only me, but my mother and a sick child to care for."
"You're focusing on the worst case scenario."
Reid grimaced. "I have to. I can't responsibly not consider everything before I think about bringing a child into this world."
He watched as Savannah regarded him closely for several minutes. He saw the realization dawn on her face. "But you haven't decided against it, have you?" She smiled. "All these arguments - you're trying to talk yourself out of what you really want. You still very much want a child."
He bit his lip. "Do you think that's a bad thing? Am I a selfish person for still even thinking about it?"
She put a hand to the back of his head and pulled him close to kiss him on the forehead. "No, sweetie. In fact, I think it's a good idea. As long as you have a chance to live, a chance to go on, things will work out one way or another. It may end in disaster, it's true, but it's the chance that's important.
"And let me tell you something, Spencer Reid: as long as Derek and I are together, no child of yours will ever go to foster care."
He couldn't trust his voice. Tears finally fell. "Really?" he whispered.
"We all may be clumsy with our comfort, but we're all here," she whispered back and hugged him close.
-x-
Later that night, Savannah Hayes was once again dealing with yet another of Derek's drunken team-mates. And the reason for this was every more happy than the last time.
Of course, that's not to say Morgan wasn't very confused when he called just before bed and was asked by a laughing and more-than-a-little-tipsy girlfriend that wasn't it wonderful that they'd never have to take Spencer's children!
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Okay, some notes:
First off, my apologies for the grim tone of the story. Hopefully, the ending made up for it, but if you or a loved one are facing this dread disease, please remember that I am no way a doctor, scientist, or smart person. Despite Reid's annoyance at his friends getting things off the net, that is in fact where I got all of my facts. The sites I used were the Alzheimer's Association and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services/National Institute on Aging.
So why did I write it? Well, there have already been a couple of truly excellent and inspiring stories written about this matter, but I wanted to present a story that featured more of what Reid was going through. I hope I didn't take away too much from the strength of his character (naturally he'd be more nervous on the day of getting results), because I truly believe, as he points out in the story, he would find his equilibrium with nothing more than a little time.
But mostly I wrote this because I think that Reid was lying on the show when he told Morgan he couldn't be tested now. I've got a few reasons that may later turn out to be moronic, but here they are:
1) He is old enough to get the disease, so it seemed strange to me that he would not be old enough to be tested for it. (Indeed, I once watched a very sad video of a woman who was several years younger than him and who died of the disease.)
2) Again, I'm not a scientist, and my research consists of an hour or two on the net (in which I didn't even look into chromosomes), but genes are genes. Either they're there or they're not. What would age have to do with it?
3) With what I did read on the net, I never saw any suggestion that you had to be a certain age to be tested. In fact, I believe on the Alzheimer's Association website there was the story of a thirty-six year old man being tested. There was also a mention of pre-implantation screening, suggesting every zygotes (embryos?) can be tested even before they're placed in the womb, possibly even before fertilization, so how could Reid possibly be too young?
4) It fits his character to want privacy. And,
5) How old is old enough? Forty? That's another six years for the character. I doubt the show is going to last that long, so either Reid is lying OR the show's writers are heartless scumbags who are going to leave us with a devastating dilemma THAT THEY KNOW WILL BE UNRESOLVED WHEN THE SHOW ENDS. Now, I won't rule out Hollywood callously leaving us with such a crappy payback for eleven years of emotional investment, but if that happens, I want to let the show know that I WILL BURN TELEVISIONLAND TO THE GROUND! (Metaphorically, but still!)
Anyway, I hope you're not too traumatized by all this! And I promise that my next chapter only has a thirty percent chance of being about Alzheimer's.