PART 1: The Pills Without a Box
The night I found my fifteen-year-old daughter curled up on the bathroom floor, throwing up and clutching her stomach, my husband didn’t even rise from his recliner.
“Leave her alone, Paula. She’s overreacting again,” Curtis said, without looking up from his phone. “We’re not throwing money away on the ER over a tantrum.”
Something inside me snapped.
Sadie had been complaining for nearly a month. It began with nausea after breakfast. Then she quit finishing her meals, started coming home from high school pale, and spent her nights on her side with a heating pad pressed to her abdomen. Three times I had pushed to take her to a doctor.
Every time, Curtis came up with a reason to delay.
“It’s nerves.”
“She’s trying to get out of school.”
“At that age, everything hurts when they want attention.”
But that night Sadie did not look like a spoiled teenager. Her lips were dry, her T-shirt clung to her back with sweat, and she was breathing in short, ragged gasps.
I knelt beside her.
“Look at me, honey.”
Sadie raised her eyes.
“It feels like something is pulling me from the inside.”
Curtis showed up in the doorway and sighed.
“And now there are two of them.”
I didn’t fight him. I waited until Sadie could stand, helped her to her room, and stayed beside her until she fell asleep.
The next morning I told Curtis I was taking her to buy sneakers, since hers were falling apart.
“Nothing expensive,” he answered.
The moment we pulled out of our house in Dublin, Ohio, I drove straight to St. Luke’s Regional Medical Center.
Sadie caught on when I took the wrong exit.
“Mom, Dad’s going to be mad.”
“Let him be mad at me.”
“He said it wasn’t necessary.”
“Today a doctor is going to decide that.”
In the emergency room, the triage nurse stopped asking questions as soon as she touched Sadie’s abdomen. My daughter doubled over in pain.
They drew blood, started an IV, and ordered an ultrasound. Then, based on what it showed, they ordered a CT scan.
Forty minutes later, a pediatric gynecologist named Dr. Priya Raman walked in with another specialist. Neither was smiling.
The doctor pulled up a chair.
“Mrs. Dunleavy, we found a large mass in Sadie’s abdomen.”
I froze.
“A tumor?”
“It’s a possibility, but we don’t yet know what kind of lesion it is. It appears to originate near the right ovary. We need to run more tests and consider surgery.”
Sadie squeezed my hand.
“Is it cancer?”
“We can’t say that. There are benign masses that can grow very large. What’s urgent is understanding why it’s causing so much pain.”
The room seemed to close in around me.
“How long has she been like this?”
The doctor studied me carefully.
“Judging by the size, it didn’t appear this week.”
Sadie lowered her eyes.
“Dad knew it hurt before that.”
I turned to her.
“Before you told me?”
She nodded.
“When you went to take care of Grandma, he took me to a clinic.”
My heart skipped.
“What clinic?”
“I don’t know. It was out on Highway 33. They examined me and said I needed an ultrasound. Dad got upset.”
Dr. Raman stayed silent.
“And then what happened?”
Sadie began to cry.
“He told me not to tell you, because you’d make a big drama and spend money we didn’t have.”
Before I could take it in, my phone buzzed.
Curtis.
Three missed calls.
Then a text.
Where are you?
I typed: At the hospital. Sadie has an abdominal mass.
The reply landed almost instantly.
Don’t authorize anything until I get there.
I stared at the screen.
He hadn’t asked whether she was stable.
He hadn’t asked whether I was scared.
He hadn’t asked what exactly they had found.
All he wanted was to halt everything.
Dr. Raman saw the look on my face.
“Is something wrong?”
I showed her the message.
Sadie let go of my hand.
“Mom…”
Her voice trembled.
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
She glanced at the door, as though she expected her father to walk through it.
“Dad was giving me pills so the pain would go away.”
“What pills?”
“I don’t know. He said they were for my stomach. Afterward I got really, really sleepy.”
The doctor leaned closer.
“Do you still have them?”
Sadie shook her head.
“He gave them to me out of a bottle with no box.”
A brutal chill ran through me.
And then my daughter said, in a voice barely there:
“The last time I asked to go back to the doctor, Dad told me that if you found out what was going on, ‘it would sink all of us.’”
At that moment, the door swung open.
Curtis stood there.
And from the way his eyes went first to the monitor and then to Sadie, I knew he hadn’t come to learn anything.
He had come to measure how much we had uncovered.
