Dead Tomorrow

kidney transplant, but not with a failing liver. There is no other option. I’m frightened for her, Sue. This is a massive operation. So much could go wrong. And Dr Hunter said he couldn’t guarantee it would be successful. I mean, shit, she’s only fifteen , for Christ’s sake!’
    ‘So what’s the alternative?’
    ‘That’s the point, there isn’t one.’
    ‘Your choice is simple, then. Do you want her to live or to die?’
    ‘Of course I want her to live.’
    ‘So accept what has to happen and be strong and confident for her. The last thing she needs right now is you throwing a wobbly.’
    Those words were still ringing in her ears five minutes later as she ended the call, promising to meet Sue later in the day for a coffee, if she was able to leave Caitlin.
    Be strong and confident for her .
    Easy to say.
    She dialled Mal’s mobile, unsure where he was at the moment. His ship moved around from time to time and recently he had been working out of Wales in the Bristol Channel. Their relationship was amicable, if a little stilted and formal.
    He answered on the third ring, on a very crackly line.
    ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Where are you?’
    ‘Off Shoreham. We’re ten miles out of the harbour mouth, heading to the dredge area. Be out of range in a few minutes–what’s up?’
    ‘I need totalk to you. Caitlin’s deteriorated–she’s very ill. Desperately ill.’
    ‘Shit,’ he said, his voice already sounding fainter as the crackling got worse. ‘Tell me.’
    She blurted out the gist of the diagnosis, knowing from past experience how quickly the signal could fade. She was just about able to make out his reply–the ship would be back in Shoreham in about seven hours, he would call her then, he told her.
    Next, she phoned her mother, who was at a coffee morning at her bridge club. Her mother was strong, and seemed to have become even stronger in the four years since Lynn’s father had died, once admitting to Lynn that they really had not liked each other very much for years. She was a practical woman and nothing ever seemed to fluster her.
    ‘You need to get a second opinion,’ she said right away. ‘Tell Dr Hunter you want a second opinion.’
    ‘I don’t think there’s much doubt,’ Lynn said. ‘This is not just Dr Hunter–it’s the specialist too. What’s happening is what we’ve feared all along.’
    ‘You absolutely must have a second opinion. Doctors get things wrong. They are not infallible.’
    Lynn, with some reluctance, promised her mother she would ask for a second opinion. Then, after she had finished and was driving back home, she churned it over in her mind. How many more second opinions could she get? During these past years she had tried everything. She’d scoured the Internet, looking at each of the big US teaching hospitals. The German hospitals. The Swiss ones. She’d tried all the alternative options she could find. Healers of every kind–faith, vibration, distant, hands-on. Priests. Boluses of coloidal silver. Homeopaths. Herbalists. Acupuncturists.
    Sure, maybe hermother had a point. Maybe the diagnosis could be wrong. Perhaps another specialist might know something Dr Granger did not and could recommend something less drastic. Perhaps there was some new medication that could treat this. But how long did you keep looking while your daughter continued to go downhill? How long before you had to accept that surgery was perhaps, in this case, the only option?
    As she turned right at the mini-roundabout off the London Road, into Carden Avenue, the car heeled over, making a horrible scraping sound. She changed gear and heard the usual metallic knocking underneath her from the exhaust pipe, which had a broken bracket. Caitlin said it was the Grim Reaper knocking, because the car was dying.
    Her daughter had a macabre sense of humour.
    She drove on up the hill into Patcham, her eyes watering as the immensity of the situation started to overwhelm her. Oh shit . She shook her head in bewilderment. Nothing, nothing, nothing had prepared her for this. How the hell did you tell your daughter that she was going to have to have a new liver? And probably one taken from a dead body?
    She turned up the hill into their street, then made a left into her driveway, pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As usual it juddered on for some moments, spluttering and shaking the car, and banging the exhaust pipe beneath her again, before falling silent.
    The house was a semi