The hospital internist is his wife's first line of defence. It's Saturday morning and the internist has summoned him to hear the results of a brain scan they did when she was admitted after her stroke. It now seems that something half the size of the internist's thumb is lurking in her brain.
'A lump? Un tumor, a tumour?'
The internist nods non-committally: 'It could be.'
He stares at the internist, trying to absorb what he's just been told. He protests: they thought she'd had an ictus, a stroke? Devastating news enough, surely.
'Yes indeed, and it might just be an area of damage from the stroke,' the specialist continues in slow, clear Spanish to be sure this anxious foreigner takes it in. 'We see the shadow on the scan but we can't be sure what it is. I'm sending her to Tenerife for more extensive testing.'
He walks back from this consultation in a renewed fever of anxiety, while his wife waits at home. As he walks he tells himself it's better to know these things than not to know. If there's a thumb-sized shadow in her brain it's far better that we know about it, find out what it is…
It might be just damage from the stroke. That's the most probable, he tells himself. Damage from the ictus. Would a tumour provoke convulsions just once then do nothing else? Wouldn't she be dizzy or incoherent or something?
She's had a stroke, he decides firmly. He pushes the threat of tumour into a dark, silent corner where it can't be detected. His wife, naturally anxious to hear the outcome of his visit, the results of the scan, accepts the explanation that he parrots from the internist: 'He's sending you to Tenerife for more extensive testing.' They can see that something's happened in there, he explains, pointing to her head, but can't be sure what it is yet.
Well, it's obvious something's happened, she's not the picture of health and vitality that she was before. She can barely walk unaided. They already know something's happened inside her head, and the important thing is to find out what it is. The other important thing is to remain positive, to view developments with hope and to whistle happy tunes.
The trip to Tenerife is almost, very nearly, enjoyable. It's a new experience. An ambulance arrives in the darkness of early morning. A friendly medic trundles his wife to the back of the vehicle in a wheelchair, providing him with a fold-out seat beside her. They pick up another passenger, a lady on a stretcher, also bound for Tenerife. They pal up en route, exchanging comments about the weather, still cold in the mornings but of course, it's still winter, what can you expect? Trivial nonsense, an enforced bonding.
They already know the ambulance driver because his aunty lives in the same village. He drives them right to the car deck of the ferry where the ship's crew takes over, wheeling her into a lift and up to the passenger deck.
He fetches coffee. It's like going for a little holiday, a weekend away. Live for the moment and do not start thinking, that's the secret.
His wife is doing brilliantly, he recognises. She hasn't sunk into depression or denial, she's coping remarkably well with this catastrophic blow. Does something get numbed inside you, protectively, he wonders, when terrible things happen?
Another ambulance is waiting for them at the ferry port in Tenerife. This whole transport operation is deeply impressive. He resolves to tell everyone and anyone how excellent the ambulance service is. He tells the Tenerife ambulance driver, who smiles. Perhaps he's used to people prattling on like this. The ambulance whisks them to a large hospital not far away and the driver pushes the wheelchair all the way to the reception desk for magnetic resonance imaging, before leaving them with friendly good wishes.
She's booked in for an MRI scan, but first she must have her nine o'clock injection and it's already nearly half past. He trundles her wheelchair into a toilet for the disabled where he makes a pig's ear of the injection for the first time, producing a livid bruise considerably larger than her navel. Confined space, difficult angle. Or perhaps he's just nervous.
A nursing orderly arrives to wheel her into the Hall of the Machine. The hall is vast and the magnetic resonance scanner is a house-sized doughnut. Through a glass partition he watches his wife being fed slowly into the central hole as though getting minced. He thinks briefly of that classic sci-fi film Soylent Green, in which deceased loved ones get recycled into food pills.
Monitor screens display the inside of her head, slice by slice. He can see them through the open door to the control room. When the slices reach the insides of her eyeballs he turns away and heads back to the waiting room where he engages a pleasant elderly lady in conversation. She's waiting for her husband to return from another mincer.
Waiting has become a new feature of life. Waiting for hospitals to phone with appointment times, waiting to be called into consulting rooms, waiting for the results of tests. They get home swiftly and safely from Tenerife then have to wait a couple of weeks to hear what the doughnut has seen inside her head.
The internist tells them - they're both in his consulting room this time, he wants to see the patient in person - that the shadow at the base of her brain is damage from the stroke, nothing more.
'Nothing more?' There is a world of meaning in this innocuous phrase and he wants to be sure.
The specialist nods. 'Nothing more.'
There's a lot of other stuff in the report, medical analyses and descriptions of this feature and that, but the main thing is that the shadow is just a shadow, nothing more. Before lunch they have a glass of wine to celebrate the shadow, because their home doctor has said it's okay to take a little wine, and in present circumstances anything worth celebrating must be celebrated.
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