Gorgeous, lashy anime-sized eyes looked out in surprise, perhaps unsure what to make of the shiny flashing camera before her. She was out of her element, but nothing about her offered even the hint of a suggestion that she was suffering from a terminal disease with a 30-50% survival rate. Yet the more I found out about her story, the lower her odds crept.
I found out about the girl a little while ago from an emergency request sent out by my agency. “We have a little girl suffering from a life-threatening disease with an eighty percent survival rate in developed countries but that can’t be treated in country.” I double-checked the statistics in several medical journals, and sure enough, it looked like a pretty good shot. I sent off a message to Christian to find out if he minded if I requested more information on the girl. He thought 80% sounded like a pretty good shot, too.
The first parts of this girl’s story that were returned to me weren’t promising. She’d been given introductory treatment several months ago, a treatment that 95% of children respond to, and it didn’t take. With that information, her chances of surviving five years plummeted. I asked some questions about the tests they performed and what drugs were actually used in the treatment–afterall, she’s not in the West. I looked up studies run in India and China on the disease. I located a pediatric oncologist near us that had taken part in some interesting European trials. I found out stem cell transplants improve the prognosis somewhat, that Austria has the best cancer survival rate in all of Europe. I grasped at any little straw I could get. And then I made a mistake.
I asked to see her picture.
I knew better. You can’t be unbiased if you looked at a picture. The moment there’s a picture, numbers turn into a person. In this case, it was a bright-eyed, chubby-cheeked little girl with creamy milk chocolate skin. “How could this happen to her?” The voice in my head screamed, “She’s a fighter. Her odds of dying can’t possibly be 2 out of 3.”
Christian, who was spared the agony of the picture, read all the plummeting numbers and reports that I presented him with an engineer’s eyes. “I just can’t do it,” He said. “I can’t take that shot.” I knew it, and I couldn’t ask him to. It was crazy, a 50-70% chance of heartbreak.
Except that my heart was already cracked. When I finally accepted this wouldn’t be our daughter and sent the email to our agency saying such, I felt something slipping through my fingers. I had lost something that I never had. I can only hope that someone else picks it up, someone who can beat the odds.