Last Dance, Last Chance

compassionate woman, but she wasn’t afraid to speak up when something bothered her. There came what she called “a defining moment” when she had to say something.
    It was Sunday, August 8, when Rose came to see Debbie again. She was horrified to see her friend propped up in a recliner chair in the corner of the living room. Anthony was lying on the living room couch with the TV remote in his hand.
    “I looked at Debbie, and my heart just sunk. It was like looking at my mother-in-law, whom I had just lost,” Rose said with a shudder. “It was the look of death—that’s the only thing I can say to you. She was swollen, puffy.”
    As Rose moved closer to Debbie she saw that she was chalky pale, with huge purple circles beneath her dark eyes.
    Debbie made no move to get up and offer her a cup of coffee or an iced tea—something she always had done. Rose realized that Debbie probably couldn’t get up, but she insisted on giving Rose a check for her Tupperware order.
    “She couldn’t even hold a pen,” Rose remembered. “It was just awful. She spoke to me, but her words were slurring, and I had trouble understanding her.
    “I was so worried about her; she was so sick,” Rose said. “I asked Anthony if she shouldn’t be in the hospital, and he told me that she was better off at home, because hospitals weren’t very well staffed over weekends. He said, ‘I’m a doctor. Don’t you think I would know what’s best for her? She’s much better off under my supervision.’”
    Rose tried to argue with Anthony a little, but he dismissed her concern.
    “When I went home, I cried,” Rose recalled. “I told my husband that Debbie looked so bad that I was scared. I said, ‘She looks like Ma did—just before…And I was scared. Debbie looked so bad, so bloated and funny, and she wasn’t at all like herself.”
     
    Anthony’s lack of concern was remarkably similar to his response to Connie Vinetti, the woman who developed a dangerous infection after he performed a tummy tuck on her, and not that different from his slow response when Sarah Smith stopped breathing. But this was his own wife. And still he lay on the couch watching television as Debbie sat so still in the recliner. To everyone else who saw her, she appeared to be dying, but he brushed their fears away. He was not concerned, and he refused to be rushed into taking her back to the hospital.
    Debbie could barely walk. Her legs, feet, and hands were alternately numb and painful. Her stomach screamed with pain, and she was beyond nauseated.
    Finally, finally, Anthony agreed to take her to see a doctor the next day. Caroline stayed with the children, anxious to hear from Debbie what the doctors had said. But Anthony came home alone. He told Caroline that Debbie was having tests at the hospital and he’d pick her up later. He did—but as Debbie tried to walk to her front door, she fell heavily. Caroline was frightened to see how she had failed over the space of a few days.
    “I called her brother to tell him something was wrong,” Caroline said. “Debbie was crawling because she couldn’t walk. She was wobbling when she tried to stand up.”
    Caroline Rago was frantic, and so was Debbie’s brother, Carmine. Anthony thought they were all overreacting. He greeted Carmine with his usual joking: “Hi, big guy!”
    Anthony explained that Debbie probably had only the flu or something like it, and the tests would prove that. He didn’t seem at all alarmed and thought everyone else was being somewhat hysterical.
    Dr. Jahangir Koleini was Debbie’s attending physician for the tests she had done that Monday in August 1999, with Dr. M. Reeza Samie consulting. Dr. Samie was called in because Debbie was having new symptoms: numbness and clumsiness in her right hand. After Dr. Samie examined her, she encouraged Debbie to return to the hospital.
    But Anthony didn’t want her to be admitted. He assured the examining physicians in the ER that all she needed was more pain medication. He would take her home and see that Debbie took her pills. He was sure she would be fine.
    But she wasn’t. Even Anthony’s aversion to having Debbie hospitalized was overcome that night, and she was back in Buffalo Mercy the next morning.
     
    What Anthony didn’t know was that another doctor had been monitoring Debbie’s condition for weeks. Dr. Michael Snyderman, a hematologist whose specialty was the blood and the blood-forming organs, had done a bone marrow test on