Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. This semi conscious
Speaker 1: woman moaning loudly on the bench wasn't just anyone. This
Speaker 1: was Jane, my partner of thirty years. What was happening?
Speaker 1: Was she dying? She sure looked like she was dying.
Speaker 1: I desperately wanted to help her, but I couldn't suppress
Speaker 1: my fear and confusion long enough to think straight. All
Speaker 1: the usual tricks we doctors used to create a self
Speaker 1: protected distance between an acubely suffering patient and our own psyches,
Speaker 1: the space that allows us to make an objective, rational
Speaker 1: plan to help. They weren't working. They couldn't work. This
Speaker 1: was Jane.
Speaker 2: That's doctor Barrett Rowlins, oncologist, cancer researcher, professor at Harvard
Speaker 2: Medical School, an author of the recent memoir In Sickness,
Speaker 2: Barrett is a stunning story of love and subterfuge, secrecy
Speaker 2: and honor, loyalty and heartbreak, and the way that two
Speaker 2: brilliant people worked over time to keep themselves in the dark.
Speaker 2: I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family Secrets. The secrets
Speaker 2: that are kept from us, secrets we keep from others,
Speaker 2: and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Usually I start
Speaker 2: by asking my guests to tell me about the landscape
Speaker 2: of their childhoods. But in your case, I'm going to
Speaker 2: start in a different place, which is tell me how
Speaker 2: you and Jane met oh.
Speaker 1: I would love to. I was a medical resident at
Speaker 1: the Boston Hospital, one of the Harvard Teaching hospitals, and
Speaker 1: Jane was a third year medical student at Harvard Medical School.
Speaker 1: So Jane was doing her internal medicine rotation, one of
Speaker 1: the core rotations that medical students are required to take,
Speaker 1: and she was doing it at the hospital where I
Speaker 1: was working. The way that the hierarchy goes in the
Speaker 1: hospital is that a resident like myself at that time,
Speaker 1: as a senior resident, I was in charge of two teams,
Speaker 1: one of which I ran, another one was run by
Speaker 1: a junior resident, and then we had some interns working
Speaker 1: with us, and then the medical students would be right
Speaker 1: at the bottom of the totem pole. So there were
Speaker 1: two female medical students who are going to be on
Speaker 1: our joint team, one of my team, one or the
Speaker 1: other team. So I hadn't met my students yet. But
Speaker 1: one of my jobs at the hospital as the senior resident,
Speaker 1: the nights that I was on call. I needed to
Speaker 1: figure out how many beds were available in the intensive
Speaker 1: care unit. In case anybody on the regular wards got
Speaker 1: really sick, I would know what the capacity was for
Speaker 1: transferring them. So I was walking through the intensive care
Speaker 1: unit counting beds that I looked up and walking into
Speaker 1: the intensive care unit was this tall, willowy, gorgeous woman,
Speaker 1: you know, decked out in a short white coat, which
Speaker 1: is the humiliating sort of costume that the third year
Speaker 1: medical students have to wear. But she superseded the limitations
Speaker 1: of her uniform and she walked up to me and
Speaker 1: started asking me about some patient who was in the
Speaker 1: intensive care unit. And you know, I didn't really know
Speaker 1: who was in the intensive care unit because I wasn't
Speaker 1: running the unit. I was only in their counting bits.
Speaker 1: And her intern or resident had sent her into the
Speaker 1: unit to find out how their patient was doing that
Speaker 1: they had transferred the night before. A perfect thing for
Speaker 1: a medical student to go do. But you know, again,
Speaker 1: she was talking to the wrong person. So I said
Speaker 1: to her, do you understand my role here? Thinking that
Speaker 1: I would then sort of instruct her about what the
Speaker 1: various roles are with the people that she would meet whatever.
Speaker 1: Jane would tell this story, and she dined out in
Speaker 1: this story a lot. She would say that I asked
Speaker 1: her that question in the following way, do you understand
Speaker 1: my role here? In other words, supercilious, obnoxious, And it
Speaker 1: didn't matter how many times I tried to sort of
Speaker 1: fight against that story. When she would tell it, she
Speaker 1: told it so well that nobody ever believed that. It
Speaker 1: wasn't a jerk when I talked to her about this.
Speaker 1: But eventually, you know, I explained to her what the
Speaker 1: roles were, and that was that. But our eyes had locked.
Speaker 1: I don't want to say love at first sight, but
Speaker 1: there was certainly a lot of interest at first sight.
Speaker 1: And from that moment on we tried to find ways
Speaker 1: to flirt with each other. If she was writing a
Speaker 1: note in the chart, I would find some reason to
Speaker 1: write a note in another chart, and we'd stand next
Speaker 1: to each other and our hands would brush against each other,
Speaker 1: you know, stuff like that. The most striking sort of
Speaker 1: flirtation story, and this one we both agreed on, was
Speaker 1: that another one of my jobs as a senior resident
Speaker 1: was to work in the emergency room and see acutely
Speaker 1: ill patients in the site who gets admitted. And one
Speaker 1: of the jobs of a third year medical student to
Speaker 1: sort of learn the ropes of medicine, was for every
Speaker 1: patient that they admitted it were taken care of, they
Speaker 1: were supposed to look at the urine from that patient
Speaker 1: under a microscope. And in those sort of benighted times,
Speaker 1: there was exactly one microscope in the whole hospital that
Speaker 1: students could use, and it happened to be in the
Speaker 1: emergency room, and Jay knew that, and she knew that
Speaker 1: I was working there, so she kept trying to get
Speaker 1: urine from her patients. And what she didn't remember was
Speaker 1: that she was actually assigned to a ward of patients
Speaker 1: who had chronic renal failure. In fact, they weren't making
Speaker 1: any urine, and the word they were on didn't have
Speaker 1: any bathrooms because nobody was making any urine. So after
Speaker 1: three or four days of frustration and coming to this realization,
Speaker 1: she went into a bathroom in another part of the
Speaker 1: hospital and peed into a cup herself and brought her
Speaker 1: own urine down to the emergency room so that she
Speaker 1: could look at pretending it was one of her patients.
Speaker 1: And she ran into me and we sort of bonded
Speaker 1: over this really romantic little cup of urine that she
Speaker 1: was looking at under the microscope. Things just sort of
Speaker 1: snowballed from there. I didn't actually ask her out until
Speaker 1: she had rotated off the service, but that's where it began.
Speaker 2: When Barrett meets Jane, they both come to the relationship
Speaker 2: carrying their histories. Barrett has an ex wife and a
Speaker 2: three year old daughter named Anna, who he adores, and Jane.
Speaker 2: Jane has her quirks. During their courtship, they're quick to
Speaker 2: fall into young love. They find one another extraordinary, but
Speaker 2: there are other forces at work. Barrett writes festooned with
Speaker 2: bright red warning flags plus sirens flashing lights, but I
Speaker 2: didn't see them. I was too far gone to let
Speaker 2: it keep us apart.
Speaker 1: Jane lived in Cambridge, and when I went to her apartment,
Speaker 1: I was kind of flabbergasted to see that it was
Speaker 1: utterly infested with cockroaches. I mean it was like something
Speaker 1: out of a David Cronberg movie. It was really frightening,
Speaker 1: and I was, let's say, put off by the environment.
Speaker 1: Jane acted as if there was nothing wrong, and she
Speaker 1: had this odd habit of, yeah, we'd be in the
Speaker 1: middle of the conversation or watching TV or something, and
Speaker 1: cockroach would go across the wall and she'd just reach
Speaker 1: out with her bare hand and crush it. And I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, okay, So I had a balance that ad
Speaker 1: against all the good stuff, and the good stuff went
Speaker 1: out there. Another example was in those days, Jane was
Speaker 1: still smoking cigarettes and the sheets on her bed were
Speaker 1: just riddled with these holes that cigarette ash had made.
Speaker 1: And then when I asked her what it was, she said, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, they smoke it in bed, and you know,
Speaker 1: the ash falls and it burns a little hole. She
Speaker 1: never changed, she never did anything about this. This was
Speaker 1: just sort of part of her thing and she just
Speaker 1: didn't think about it. And then there was the night
Speaker 1: before I began my fellow ship at Dana Farber in
Speaker 1: medical oncology. You know, I completed my residency and now
Speaker 1: I was going to do some specialty training, and it
Speaker 1: was pretty high stakes for me, this sort of shift
Speaker 1: to doing the fellowship, especially at a place like Dana
Speaker 1: Farber with its reputation, and so I was a little
Speaker 1: on edge. But still the night before I started, there
Speaker 1: was a party that we were going to go to,
Speaker 1: and Jada's didn't show up. She just never came and
Speaker 1: I was getting more and more sort of worried about her.
Speaker 1: And finally, you know, it got to be like eleven
Speaker 1: or twelve o'clock at night and I needed to get
Speaker 1: to sleep before starting my fellowship and got home called
Speaker 1: her a bunch of times, you know, no answer. Then
Speaker 1: finally she did answer the phone around one in the morning,
Speaker 1: and it turned out that that night she had gone
Speaker 1: to her ex boyfriend's house. One of these flashing red
Speaker 1: lights was that when she started going out with me,
Speaker 1: she was still involved in this relationship with an older guy.
Speaker 1: Guy was older than both Jane and myself, and she
Speaker 1: hadn't stopped that relationship when she started with me, and
Speaker 1: she was going to use that night to stop the relationship.
Speaker 1: But you know, one thing led to an other, she
Speaker 1: said to me, and she ended up going to bed
Speaker 1: with a guy, and I was floored. We had sort
Speaker 1: of planned all this stuff, we were going to move
Speaker 1: in together. I thought things are moving forward, and then
Speaker 1: she does this. And her explanation to me was, you know,
Speaker 1: she was having breakup sex. And I may be not
Speaker 1: the most sophisticated guy in the world. And one of
Speaker 1: the pieces of evidence for that is that I hadn't
Speaker 1: heard of breakup sex. I mean, I now understand that
Speaker 1: it's a thing, but at the time, it didn't feel
Speaker 1: like a thing, and I was really fear as I
Speaker 1: felt betrayed. I thought that she was sort of playing
Speaker 1: with me and playing with this guy. I was pretty
Speaker 1: angry and ended up trying not to have any contact
Speaker 1: with her, and that lasted all of about forty eight hours,
Speaker 1: and then we got back together and I just decided,
Speaker 1: as I decided about so many things in the future,
Speaker 1: I decided, I'm just not going to think about this.
Speaker 1: Everything's flying now.
Speaker 2: And it's funny. It's something that I've heard over the years,
Speaker 2: which is that everything that you need to know about
Speaker 2: somebody's marriage can actually be discerned on the first date
Speaker 2: they're somewhere. Yeah, of course, with the twenty twenty hindsight,
Speaker 2: but still it seems like there was, you know, this
Speaker 2: intoxicating combination of great love and admiration. And also one
Speaker 2: of the taglines for this show is the secrets we
Speaker 2: keep from ourselves. In a way, you were already, it
Speaker 2: seems to me, beginning with kind of a secret that
Speaker 2: you were keeping from yourself, which was there are these
Speaker 2: bright red warning lights, and I am going to ignore them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's exactly accurate.
Speaker 2: Barrett and Jane move in together. Both of their careers
Speaker 2: are in a state of ascendancy. Jane lets Barrett know
Speaker 2: right from the start that she does not want to
Speaker 2: have children. She's entirely focused on her work and wants
Speaker 2: to keep it that way. The idea of making a
Speaker 2: family together is a non starter.
Speaker 1: When I think about that time, I think of sort
Speaker 1: of three threads that we were following. The most straightforward
Speaker 1: one is career. I was climbing the academic ladder as
Speaker 1: first a fellow and then a junior faculty member at
Speaker 1: Dana Farberton Harvard. And you know, that requires a fair
Speaker 1: amount of focus to stay on the track and a
Speaker 1: fair amount of accomplishment to be able to stay on
Speaker 1: the track. And I was lucky enough to be able
Speaker 1: to do that. And I do that's not false modesty.
Speaker 1: I really do think that I was lucky. I'm not
Speaker 1: as smart or as naturally gifted around sciences so my
Speaker 1: colleagues were, but I was able to make career for myself. Jane,
Speaker 1: you know, was several years behind me, still trying to
Speaker 1: decide where she was going to do her internship and residency,
Speaker 1: what sub specialty she was going to be on. But still,
Speaker 1: because she started late, she really had her eye on
Speaker 1: where she wanted to go, and so she was working
Speaker 1: very hard to make sure that she was sufficiently accomplished
Speaker 1: so that all options would be open to her at
Speaker 1: Harvard or wherever she decided she wanted to go. And
Speaker 1: Jane was incredibly smart, incredibly quick, and would be able
Speaker 1: to do that as long as she performed well. So
Speaker 1: we were both really focused on career and advancement, and
Speaker 1: that was one threat. A second threat was I learned
Speaker 1: very very early on that the rules of our relationship
Speaker 1: were going to be that Jane would be dependent upon
Speaker 1: me for every practical matter. She didn't drive, I'd have
Speaker 1: to drive her wherever she'd wanted to go. I was
Speaker 1: responsible for doing the grocery shopping. I was responsible for
Speaker 1: the laundry. I was responsible for finances. You know, you
Speaker 1: could just go down the list of everything that's required
Speaker 1: to maintain a household, and that all ended up being
Speaker 1: my responsibility. She really liked to just lie in bed
Speaker 1: when she wasn't busy working. You know, she was an
Speaker 1: Olympic level sleeper and napper, and that left all the
Speaker 1: practical stuff to me. Jane and I worked at the
Speaker 1: same place she was at. Dana Farber also is incredibly
Speaker 1: wonderful to be able to be working at the same
Speaker 1: place and we knew all the same people. We went
Speaker 1: into work together and went home together. We worked very
Speaker 1: hard during the week, and again another domestic chore is
Speaker 1: making meals, and so I made all of our meals.
Speaker 1: But on Friday night we had eight night. On Friday nights,
Speaker 1: it was my job to make a reservation at a
Speaker 1: restaurant somewhere in Boston or Cambridge, and we would go
Speaker 1: out to yat and we would sort of review the
Speaker 1: week's events and gossip a little bit, and we wouldn't
Speaker 1: linger over dinner because Jane wanted to get home. And
Speaker 1: the reason she wanted to get home was because as
Speaker 1: soon as she walked into the apartment, she would say,
Speaker 1: almost every week, she would say, guess what time it is?
Speaker 1: And I'd say, what time is it, deer, and she'd say,
Speaker 1: it's bedtime, and she would start shedding her clothes as
Speaker 1: she was walking to the bedroom, crawl into bed. And
Speaker 1: listeners may think that I'm exaggerating, but she would not
Speaker 1: pretty much get out of bed until Monday morning when
Speaker 1: she had to go back to work. She watched TV.
Speaker 1: She played Solitaire later you know, computer of games. I
Speaker 1: would bring her her meals in bed and she would
Speaker 1: just sleep, wake up, watch little TV or have a meal,
Speaker 1: sleep again, you watch movies, sleep again. That was really
Speaker 1: essential for her. I think had nothing to do with
Speaker 1: the physiology of sleep. I'm still not quite sure what
Speaker 1: it had to do with, but it was an essential
Speaker 1: part of her personality that she be disconnected as much
Speaker 1: as she could from the real world when the opportunity
Speaker 1: presented itself.
Speaker 2: And the third thread in this complex braid was Jane's
Speaker 2: attitude toward Barrett's very young daughter Anna. Early in their relationship,
Speaker 2: when Jane had learned about Barrett's previous marriage and daughter,
Speaker 2: she had said, I waited for you. Why couldn't you
Speaker 2: have waited for me? A nonsensical question, But as their
Speaker 2: relationship continues, this is a feeling Jane maintains, and it
Speaker 2: manifests in her not wanting to have anything to do
Speaker 2: with Anna. Not only does she not want children, she
Speaker 2: doesn't want a stepchild either. She has no interest in
Speaker 2: Anna and is actively dismissive, always finding a way to
Speaker 2: get out of seeing her when Barrett tries to get
Speaker 2: the family together.
Speaker 1: There was a real effort on Jane's part to deny
Speaker 1: that I had had any other life, and this is
Speaker 1: one of the parts of the story that I am
Speaker 1: most deeply ashamed of. You know, there is a lot
Speaker 1: of complicity in the kinds of secrets that couples keep,
Speaker 1: but in this particular case, a lot of Jane's secrets
Speaker 1: could not have been kept had I not been complicit.
Speaker 1: And to my undying shame, I suppressed my underlying desire
Speaker 1: to spend time with my daughter so that I wouldn't
Speaker 1: make Jane angry or any more jealous than she had
Speaker 1: to be. And I can't begin to tell you how
Speaker 1: terrible I feel about that, but it's what I did.
Speaker 2: What I'm thinking about right now, Barrett, is it's almost
Speaker 2: like the emotional arc of how you held all this
Speaker 2: and how it made you feel. Because what you're describing,
Speaker 2: and this is earlish in your relationship was the initial
Speaker 2: red flags, and then the degree of being taken care
Speaker 2: of that Jane required, and then her inability and complete
Speaker 2: lack of desire to have anything to do with with
Speaker 2: your child during those years. How did you hold that?
Speaker 2: Where did you put that? And how did it make
Speaker 2: you feel about Jane during that time?
Speaker 1: Early in the relationship, I would be angry. I would
Speaker 1: try to suppress it, but it would bubble up, and
Speaker 1: when it did bubble up, I would be frustrated. One
Speaker 1: of these things happened. I just made Jane her lunch
Speaker 1: and give it to her in bed, and then she
Speaker 1: asked me to do something, or maybe she had refused
Speaker 1: to see Anna the next day. And then as I
Speaker 1: walked back to my little home office, I kicked a
Speaker 1: huge hole in the drywall. And I surprised myself because
Speaker 1: I'm not a demonstrative kind of guy, and when I
Speaker 1: get angry, I really don't yell on screen and pound
Speaker 1: the table. But clearly there was a lot of feeling
Speaker 1: in there that came out in my right foot. I
Speaker 1: think I remember sort of thinking to myself, Oh, holy shit,
Speaker 1: this stuff is really bothering me. But I didn't do
Speaker 1: anything about it. What I worked at, instead of dealing
Speaker 1: with the anger like a healthy person, what I want
Speaker 1: work that was suppressing it even more so that I
Speaker 1: wouldn't have.
Speaker 2: Said, Jane, We'll be right back. Years pass as Barrett
Speaker 2: tamps down his feelings of anger, and the couple stays
Speaker 2: deeply immersed in their very intense work. What could be
Speaker 2: more intense than the work of saving lives. Eventually they
Speaker 2: moved to a beautiful apartment in Boston's Back Bay, overlooking
Speaker 2: the spot where fireworks are set off each fourth of
Speaker 2: July at Dana Farber. Barrett and Jane have lunch together
Speaker 2: every day. They're attached to the hip, and though they
Speaker 2: have a world of colleagues and friends, and though a
Speaker 2: kind of hero worship surrounds Jane, it's really just the
Speaker 2: two of them. Even when they seem sociable.
Speaker 1: We were very much in a bubble, which is kind
Speaker 1: of ironic because this business, the lunch table, sort of
Speaker 1: looms large in James legend. In fact, some of the
Speaker 1: senior faculty members used to derisively call it Jane's high table.
Speaker 1: There were lots of our contemporaries, and especially a younger
Speaker 1: junior faculty, who would love to sit with us and
Speaker 1: have lunch. And Jane, she was clever, and she was witty,
Speaker 1: and she actually cared quite a lot about junior faculty.
Speaker 1: You know, one of the reasons she was revered is
Speaker 1: that she was just an outstanding mentor. She took incredible
Speaker 1: care of the junior faculty that some of whom she
Speaker 1: was responsible for, some of whom she wasn't. It's just
Speaker 1: so obvious that these were surrogates for the children she
Speaker 1: didn't have. So the lunch table, which involved a lot
Speaker 1: of laughing and a lot of stories, and there was
Speaker 1: a rule that you couldn't talk about your works, which
Speaker 1: meant that anybody could then be there. Nobody was trying
Speaker 1: to jockey for position based on the kind of stuff
Speaker 1: they were working on. That was very, very social, and
Speaker 1: people felt like they were our friends because we were
Speaker 1: sitting around the lunch table having these raucous times. But
Speaker 1: Jane would adamantly refuse, for the most part, to have
Speaker 1: contact with people like that, colleagues, friends outside of that environment.
Speaker 1: When she was home, she was home.
Speaker 2: And also her family of origin, her mother, her brother,
Speaker 2: her sister, you describe as Jane really not feeling close
Speaker 2: to them.
Speaker 1: She really pushed them away. There was sort of no
Speaker 1: objective rationale. Her family was lovely. She would tolerate calls
Speaker 1: from her mother she would tolerate calls from her brother.
Speaker 1: She actually would not tolerate calls from her sister. From
Speaker 1: my point of view, these were all lovely people, but
Speaker 1: I was team James, so I really couldn't do much
Speaker 1: about them.
Speaker 2: Barrett and Jane have their occasional friction, as every couple does,
Speaker 2: but for the most part, they've built a fulfilling life
Speaker 2: together professionally and personally. In many ways, their relationship from
Speaker 2: the outside is enviable. It's twenty twelve. They are about
Speaker 2: three decades into their marriage, both at the pinnacle of
Speaker 2: their careers. Jane is sixty. One week they head to
Speaker 2: their usual lunch in the hospital cafeteria. That evening, they'll
Speaker 2: go on their usual Friday date, business as usual, but
Speaker 2: in an instant, the ordinary instant, as Joan Didion has
Speaker 2: called it, catastrophe strikes.
Speaker 1: It was just a typical day. In fact, it was
Speaker 1: a Friday, and I had made reservations at our favorite
Speaker 1: Mexican restaurant for date night. And what we would do
Speaker 1: on you every day is I would come by Jane's
Speaker 1: office and pick her up, and then we'd walk to
Speaker 1: lunch together. So we're walking down the hallway to lunch,
Speaker 1: and Jane Jay was very tall. She's feet even sometimes
Speaker 1: sixty one when she was really standing up straight, but
Speaker 1: she had this sort of loping gait like tall people have,
Speaker 1: and it was always a little slower than I was.
Speaker 1: But that day she was even slower than usual. You know,
Speaker 1: I had the sort of what I called a Jane
Speaker 1: adjusted gate that I would adopt, but she was even slower.
Speaker 1: And I remember turning to her and saying, you know, Hun,
Speaker 1: are you okay? And she said, yeah, yeah, it's fine.
Speaker 1: And we turned the corner to the cafeteria and she
Speaker 1: just plopped herself down on a little bench and her
Speaker 1: lips were blue. She was breathing very hard, her eyes
Speaker 1: were closed, and you know, I said, what's going on?
Speaker 1: Are you all right? She said she just looked at
Speaker 1: me and said, you know, really couldn't tell me what
Speaker 1: was going on. So I was scared to death, and
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, I've got to get her to
Speaker 1: an emergency room. She obviously can't walk anywhere anymore. And
Speaker 1: I look around for a wheelchair, and you would think,
Speaker 1: of course, in a hospital he'd find a wheelchair at
Speaker 1: every corner, but none. So I told her, you just
Speaker 1: stay right here and do not try to get up.
Speaker 1: We were in the building that has the cafeteria also
Speaker 1: has in the upper floor. So I jump into an
Speaker 1: elevator and go up to an upper floor to try
Speaker 1: to find a wheelchair. Still can't find one. So by
Speaker 1: that I'm still worried about Jane. So I run back
Speaker 1: downstairs and sort of retrace the path we had been
Speaker 1: walking on to get to the cafeteria, and I turned
Speaker 1: that corner and now Jane is lying down on this
Speaker 1: little bench which is way too short for her, heads
Speaker 1: hanging off one end, theater hanging off the other, and
Speaker 1: now she's unconscious. With every exhale she moans, and she's
Speaker 1: having an hard time inhaling. One of my colleagues, one
Speaker 1: of our colleagues, happened to walk by and saw this
Speaker 1: and realized that Jane was, you know, having some sort
Speaker 1: of cardiac or pulmonary arrest, and called you know, a
Speaker 1: code a code red or a good It's actually called blue.
Speaker 1: You know. I can't sort of overstate how surreal this
Speaker 1: was that, you know. I then hear over the loudspeaker
Speaker 1: code blue cafeteria, and I'm thinking, you know, part of
Speaker 1: my brain is thinking Oh, that's an odd place to
Speaker 1: have a code, And the other part of my brain
Speaker 1: is thinking, you dumb assd this is what's happening right
Speaker 1: in front of you. So, you know, the code team
Speaker 1: arrives on the site, crash cart there with all the
Speaker 1: equipment they need to resuscitate somebody. A colleague of ours
Speaker 1: who was, you know, running the code team that week,
Speaker 1: starts barking orders. They start intravenous lines, putting EKG on her.
Speaker 1: Her heart hadn't stopped, so nobody had to do CPR,
Speaker 1: but she was unconscious and the friend or colleague who
Speaker 1: was running the code sort of turned to me and said,
Speaker 1: what's going on? And I said, I have no idea.
Speaker 1: At that point, we've looked down at there's this little
Speaker 1: trickle of blood that's started, you know, coming from under
Speaker 1: Jan's shirt and it's tracking up towards her neck. And
Speaker 1: this woman looks at me again and said, basically, what
Speaker 1: the fuck is going on here? And I just said,
Speaker 1: I don't know. I have no idea. So Jim gets
Speaker 1: transferred to the emergency room, and it's complicated because Dana
Speaker 1: Farber didn't have its own emergency room. She had to
Speaker 1: be taken to a hospital next door, and believe it
Speaker 1: or not, they actually had to call an ambulance to
Speaker 1: take her across the two hundred yards to the other hospital,
Speaker 1: which meant that I couldn't ride with her. Craziest situation.
Speaker 1: I just sort of felt buffeted. But I found my
Speaker 1: way to the emergency room in the other hospital through
Speaker 1: a series of bridges and got there. And by then
Speaker 1: she had already been intubated, so she's on a ventilator.
Speaker 1: They've removed her clothes, and she's in a hospital gown
Speaker 1: and Johnny and I'm standing at the entrance to the room,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe ten or twelve feet away from her,
Speaker 1: and I notice that there's this huge lump underneath the
Speaker 1: right side of her Johnny, on her chest, and part
Speaker 1: of it is down a little bit, and I see
Speaker 1: that there's this enormous mass, it's like the size of
Speaker 1: a football, sitting on her chest. And all I can
Speaker 1: think of it to myself is what the fuck is this?
Speaker 1: And I gradually realized that what is growing on her
Speaker 1: chest is an enormous, neglected, untreated breast cancer. It was black,
Speaker 1: you know, the technical term is necrotic. That the tissue
Speaker 1: was dying. It was oozing blood, it was oozing pus.
Speaker 1: I just don't have the words to describe how shocking
Speaker 1: and awful this was. And just at that moment, the
Speaker 1: doc who was running the er who I know and
Speaker 1: Jane Duke, came up to me and said, so, what's
Speaker 1: the story. And I said, well, you know, we were
Speaker 1: walking down the hallway and Jane suddenly collapsed head. Oh,
Speaker 1: I know that she's had a huge pulmonary embulance. She
Speaker 1: had a clot that traveled from her veins and her
Speaker 1: legs and got lodged in her lungs and that's what
Speaker 1: was She actually said, I know she had a palmarenesis
Speaker 1: what's her cancer story? And I had to stand there
Speaker 1: like the idiot I was and say to him, I
Speaker 1: have no idea. You know, I'm her husband. She has
Speaker 1: this thing growing on her chest that had to have
Speaker 1: been there for years and years, and I had to
Speaker 1: stand there and tell this guy, I don't know what's
Speaker 1: going on. It was just awful. And then you know,
Speaker 1: she gets taken to see t scan to take a
Speaker 1: look at the plot. And then when she comes back,
Speaker 1: the guy for the emergency and takes me back into
Speaker 1: the office with a radiologist me. Now he's dealing with
Speaker 1: me like I'm radioactive because he knows the story is
Speaker 1: just too weird for him to handle. And he says, well,
Speaker 1: the radiologist will tell you about the findings and the
Speaker 1: clots there he got. But what he really points out is,
Speaker 1: you know, whether there's this fifteen centimeter mass replacing her
Speaker 1: right breast and it looks like there are a tasta see,
Speaker 1: so the spread of the cancer to her ribs, her
Speaker 1: spinal bones, there are metastatic deposits in her lungs and
Speaker 1: in her liver. I'm just standing there. So in the
Speaker 1: space of an hour, I discover she's got this thing
Speaker 1: growing in her chest. But now I also discover that
Speaker 1: the cancer has spread throughout her body, which means that
Speaker 1: she's good to die at this and went from making
Speaker 1: reservations at our Mexican restaurant I'm going to lunch together
Speaker 1: a few hours later, I'm dealing with the fact that
Speaker 1: my wife has had this secret breast cancer that is
Speaker 1: now going to kill her and probably less than a year.
Speaker 2: Many times on this podcast we've talked about the secrets
Speaker 2: we keep from ourselves, or another way of putting it
Speaker 2: is the unthought known, what we know but don't allow
Speaker 2: ourselves to consciously hold in our minds. When asked by
Speaker 2: the doctor about Jane's cancer story, Barrett believed himself to
Speaker 2: be in the dark. But later Barrett realizes he did
Speaker 2: have a story. He did have information, information about something
Speaker 2: that had happened four years earlier, something he'd agreed to
Speaker 2: bury deep and never speak of again.
Speaker 1: I think this is a perfect example of the unthought known,
Speaker 1: because it didn't occur to me to talk about this
Speaker 1: with the doctor who ask me the question. Even later,
Speaker 1: when the unthought numb became a little sought, I didn't
Speaker 1: want to talk about it because it would have been
Speaker 1: involved betraying Jane's secret, and so I had two reasons
Speaker 1: not to sort of face that. One was that I
Speaker 1: just didn't want to face it. The other was I
Speaker 1: didn't want to betray Jane. And it really wasn't until
Speaker 1: hours later, when Jane was in the intensive carry unit
Speaker 1: and I'd finally gone home that I had to try
Speaker 1: to get sleep that I began to face the fact
Speaker 1: that I really didn't know what was going on, but
Speaker 1: didn't want to think about it. In our twentieth year
Speaker 1: of marriage, Jane suddenly became very withdrawn. All sexual intimacy stopped. Suddenly,
Speaker 1: with no explanation. She began wearing to bed a kaftain
Speaker 1: that went from her chin to her toes and you know,
Speaker 1: just zipped up right below her chin, and you know,
Speaker 1: it was a pretty potent symbol of, you know, don't
Speaker 1: touch me, don't get anywhere near. And when I would
Speaker 1: try to talk to her about any of this, she
Speaker 1: would clamb up and not talk about it. And you know,
Speaker 1: among her many quirks was the fact that she couldn't
Speaker 1: fall asleep unless the TV was on. And up to
Speaker 1: that point, you know, I would kind of lie there
Speaker 1: and tolerated, and if I could hear her breathing that
Speaker 1: suggested that she was asleep, I could turn the TV
Speaker 1: off and roll over and I could sleep. Now, she
Speaker 1: was also having trouble falling asleep, and I just every
Speaker 1: time I try to turn off the TV, shees sort
Speaker 1: of growl to me, not yet, And so you know,
Speaker 1: it was this loss of intimacy, that's sort of refusal
Speaker 1: to talk about things that not yet with keeping the
Speaker 1: TV off. I have to tell you, I think I
Speaker 1: have watched every episode of Law and Order at least
Speaker 1: five times. That was her favorite show. But I finally
Speaker 1: got to the point where, you know, I wasn't getting
Speaker 1: any sleep, and so I started maybe once or twice
Speaker 1: a week sleeping in our guest room, and then it
Speaker 1: got to be three and four times a week, and
Speaker 1: then finally I just threw in the towel and we
Speaker 1: began to sleep in different rooms. And again, this was
Speaker 1: something we just didn't talk about, just not discussed. So
Speaker 1: there was this bizarre behavior that just came out of
Speaker 1: nowhere in year twenty, you know, and I just adapted
Speaker 1: to it, like I adapted to everything else with Jane.
Speaker 1: And I think listeners have to understand how important her
Speaker 1: approval and love was to me, and it continued to be,
Speaker 1: and I continued to make these compromises. I thought that
Speaker 1: these were rational decisions I was making for myself.
Speaker 2: And you also didn't talk to anybody about it, because
Speaker 2: to talk to anybody about it would be a betrayal
Speaker 2: of Jane. And one of the things that was really
Speaker 2: striking to me was there was so much that was
Speaker 2: so much about control, so much about her need for
Speaker 2: order in all the different ways, whether it's the weekend
Speaker 2: long naps, or the way that she would travel with
Speaker 2: headphones on from a minute that the cab pulled up
Speaker 2: to the minute that she got to the hotel wherever
Speaker 2: she was going to do whatever, Like she would have
Speaker 2: music in her ears the entire time going through security
Speaker 2: getting on the plane. There was this way in which,
Speaker 2: for whatever reasons, she desperately needed to control her environment
Speaker 2: and to upset That Apple card just came with such
Speaker 2: risks like your anger was no match for her anger.
Speaker 1: That's exactly right, and I really needed help. And I
Speaker 1: wasn't averse to therapy. I had gone through six years
Speaker 1: of analysis when I was in medical school and graduate school.
Speaker 1: I knew how helpful it could be. But the fear
Speaker 1: of betraying Jane and having her be angry at me
Speaker 1: was really sufficient to keep me from seeking any outside help.
Speaker 2: In his fear of inciting Jane's anger, Barrett had buried
Speaker 2: a certain incident which had become part of the landscape
Speaker 2: of his unthought known. This incident occurred on a Saturday morning,
Speaker 2: about six years into Jane's withdrawing from intimacy and about
Speaker 2: four years before her collapse.
Speaker 1: So Jane was ensconced in bed and I was sort
Speaker 1: of puttering around the apartment and I heard her call
Speaker 1: my name, which she never did, and she was in
Speaker 1: the bathroom and the door of the bathrooms closed, and
Speaker 1: she called my name again, and I said through the bathroom,
Speaker 1: what's going on? And she said you need to come in,
Speaker 1: which you know I never did when she was in
Speaker 1: the bathroom, so I knew something was serious. So I
Speaker 1: walked in and the site I was met with was
Speaker 1: was Jane lying on the floor and she had her
Speaker 1: klftin on but it was partially unzipped and over her
Speaker 1: right shoulder. She had a towel under the klftan and
Speaker 1: I could see there was a little bit of blood
Speaker 1: on the towel and I said, my god, well, you
Speaker 1: know what's going on and she said, I'm bleeding to death.
Speaker 1: Said you know, tell me what's going on. She said, listen,
Speaker 1: I have breast cancer. It's invaded my skin and it's
Speaker 1: invaded a blood vessel and I'm bleeding to death. I said, okay, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to call by to one one and she said,
Speaker 1: don't you dare? And I said I was going to
Speaker 1: do it again. And one of the only times she's
Speaker 1: raised her voice at me. She screamed, don't you dare
Speaker 1: do that. I will never forgive you do that. And
Speaker 1: I said, what do you want? I just don't want
Speaker 1: to die alone. And I again I capitulated to my shame,
Speaker 1: but I did, and I said, well, what do you want?
Speaker 1: And she said, well, read to me. And she had
Speaker 1: been doing the New York Times crossword puzzle. So the
Speaker 1: Times was in the bathrooms. I picked up the Times
Speaker 1: and I started reading the first section to her. You know,
Speaker 1: a bunch of stuff that neither of us was interested in,
Speaker 1: but it was enough to distract. It was kind of like,
Speaker 1: I guess I was fulfilling the role of law and
Speaker 1: order on TV. It was something that kept her from
Speaker 1: thinking about herself. And after about an hour she still
Speaker 1: wasn't dead. And she said, okay, well looks like a
Speaker 1: stop leading. You can go now. And I said, no,
Speaker 1: I can't go now. You know what is going on.
Speaker 1: She said, I'm not going to talk about it, just
Speaker 1: go And I tried a couple more times and just impossible.
Speaker 1: So I ended up walking out of the bathroom and
Speaker 1: about a half an hour later, she had cleaned herself up,
Speaker 1: or she had put on some kind of a dressing
Speaker 1: onto the wound, and she came back out of the
Speaker 1: bathroom and went back into bed and turned on TV
Speaker 1: and told me what she wanted for lunch.
Speaker 2: And we never spoke of it again in those years,
Speaker 2: those four years between that night and then the day
Speaker 2: that she collapsed, you never spoke of it again. Where
Speaker 2: did it reside in you? Was it something that broke
Speaker 2: through your thoughts, Was it something that you thought about
Speaker 2: in the middle of the night, or did you successfully
Speaker 2: put it away for yourself?
Speaker 1: It would come up at really odd times. For example,
Speaker 1: in those days, I used to run the Boston Marathon
Speaker 1: every year, and I would raise money for Dana Farber,
Speaker 1: and I think in retrospect, this was my attempt to
Speaker 1: control my life. The training schedule for training for a
Speaker 1: marathon is wrote. You know, your schedule is set for
Speaker 1: eighteen weeks, And it was really a way for me
Speaker 1: to put some order into what felt like a very
Speaker 1: disordered life. I didn't start doing that until James withdrawal,
Speaker 1: So I think the connection is pretty clear. And in
Speaker 1: the early years when I would run the marathon, she
Speaker 1: and a couple of people from her office would walk
Speaker 1: down to a place along the marathon route that was
Speaker 1: near where Data farmers, and she would sort of cheer
Speaker 1: me on and I would stop and I would you
Speaker 1: give her a big, sweaty kiss on the cheek and
Speaker 1: then keep running. And I would always tease her about
Speaker 1: the fact that she ruined my marathon times because I
Speaker 1: always stopped to give her a kiss. And after a
Speaker 1: while she stopped doing that. In retrospect, it was because
Speaker 1: she was getting weaker and weaker, but I didn't really
Speaker 1: know at the time why she had stopped doing that.
Speaker 1: But after that episode on the bathroom floor, whenever I
Speaker 1: would think about Jane coming down to see me running
Speaker 1: in the marathon, I would have this thought, you know,
Speaker 1: she's got breast cancer. She's going to die of this,
Speaker 1: and there's going to be a time when I'm running
Speaker 1: by there and she's not going to be there. The
Speaker 1: rare times that she was tender were so meaningful that
Speaker 1: her absence and the loss of those few really tender
Speaker 1: moments was something that would allow me to think about,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of the dire consequences of what she
Speaker 1: had confessed.
Speaker 2: To We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets.
Speaker 2: About two weeks after Jane's clapse. In twenty twelve, Barrett
Speaker 2: makes yet another discovery. While Jane is still in the ICU,
Speaker 2: Barrett goes home to prepare for her discharge. He's cleaning
Speaker 2: the bedroom and getting everything ready for her homecoming and
Speaker 2: recovery when a new secret presents itself.
Speaker 1: I go to the top tower and addresser, which is
Speaker 1: her underwear drawer, and I start to clean it out,
Speaker 1: and then in the back behind her underwear, my hand
Speaker 1: hits these something that I didn't recognize. So it turned
Speaker 1: out to be a pile of maybe twenty five or
Speaker 1: so pill bottles. Some are empty, some are full, some
Speaker 1: are half full. And I looked at the labels and
Speaker 1: they were all versions of either hormonal therapy for breast
Speaker 1: cancer or she was giving herself. But far worse were
Speaker 1: oral versions of toxic chemotherapy. You know, chemotherapy that would
Speaker 1: lower your blood counts, that you ill, would make you
Speaker 1: susceptible to infections and bleeding and so on. There are
Speaker 1: several times in this story where I stood and looked
Speaker 1: at something for twenty seconds, thirty seconds, a long time
Speaker 1: before I could really figure out what I was looking at.
Speaker 1: And this is one of those examples. Jane had been
Speaker 1: treating herself, and she'd been doing that without monitoring things
Speaker 1: like blood counts, things that we all do as in
Speaker 1: colleges that she did as not colleges. She was flying blind.
Speaker 1: It in retrospect explained some things that there were times
Speaker 1: when Jane would just be a lot sicker than usual,
Speaker 1: a lot paler than usual, and she'd probably given herself
Speaker 1: a little bit too much of this chemotherapy. But you
Speaker 1: know another profound secret that was life threat. That one
Speaker 1: I was not complicit in. That one she had completely
Speaker 1: kept from me successfully.
Speaker 2: One of the things among Jane's quirky behaviors is that
Speaker 2: when it came to her own physical health, she never
Speaker 2: ever went to the doctor. She didn't have an internist,
Speaker 2: she didn't have a primary care physician, she didn't go
Speaker 2: to the dentist, she didn't get pap smears. She had
Speaker 2: what seems like was a phobia of being a patient herself,
Speaker 2: which is so profound and ironic given that she was
Speaker 2: an oncologist.
Speaker 1: Yes, I think the best explanation is a phobic response,
Speaker 1: maybe partly a phobic response to the pain or discomfort
Speaker 1: of interventions like going to the dentist. Is uncomfortable, you know,
Speaker 1: or it's uncomfortable to get a mammogram. But it's also
Speaker 1: I think a phobia about loss of control. If you're
Speaker 1: a patient, there's almost definition a loss of control or
Speaker 1: at least some control that you're seeding to a physician,
Speaker 1: and I think she was phobic about that too. And
Speaker 1: you're right the irony of her going into oncology, which
Speaker 1: is sort of nothing but serious medical problems. I mean,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons that I went into oncology, I'll confess,
Speaker 1: is that I'd love taking care of patients, but I
Speaker 1: did not like taking care of the worried well. I
Speaker 1: think there's an important role for doing that. But what
Speaker 1: I liked about oncology was the first question in the
Speaker 1: decision tree, is the patient sick or not? It's always yes,
Speaker 1: the patient's sick until proven otherwise. A headache is not
Speaker 1: always a headache, you know, A cough is not always
Speaker 1: a cough. And I just liked being able to know
Speaker 1: that whatever was going on was serious. And for Jane
Speaker 1: it would have been exactly the opposite that It's one
Speaker 1: of the reasons that she decided right away when she
Speaker 1: was a faculty member that she just wasn't going to
Speaker 1: see patients anymore. And when she was honest about that,
Speaker 1: she would say one of the things that scared her
Speaker 1: the most was how in our field at that time,
Speaker 1: where every treatment was toxic and potentially life threatening, as
Speaker 1: life threatening as the disease was, she was deathly afraid
Speaker 1: of harming her patients. So, yeah, the whole thing is
Speaker 1: just gripping with ironies.
Speaker 2: Well and with paradoxes too, because you're not describing a
Speaker 2: person who, on the surface of things, is tremendously empathic.
Speaker 2: I mean, certainly she wasn't to you, you know, with
Speaker 2: some exceptions, and yet what you're describing is as a physician,
Speaker 2: the degree of empathy that she felt for her patience
Speaker 2: made it unbearable for her to treat them.
Speaker 1: It's also what made her a great doctor. Her patience
Speaker 1: loved her. I mean, her office when she was still
Speaker 1: seeing patients for that brief period was just filled with
Speaker 1: Chachke's and little gifts that her patients with her, and
Speaker 1: they would, you know, desperately try to contact her all
Speaker 1: the time. And I think it's because there were settings
Speaker 1: in which she allowed herself to be empathic. Couldn't do
Speaker 1: with my daughter, but she could do it with these patients,
Speaker 1: and they really responded to her.
Speaker 2: Barrett spends a great deal of time trying to understand
Speaker 2: why why did Jane treat herself? Why did she make
Speaker 2: such a herculean effort to keep her illness a secret.
Speaker 2: Near the end of her life, she tells Barrett a
Speaker 2: heartbreaking story about the lengths she went to to hide
Speaker 2: her cancer. She had made a day trip to New
Speaker 2: York for a conference, and at the time Barrett had
Speaker 2: wondered why she'd taken the train rather than a quick flight.
Speaker 2: Now she tells him the truth. She had stopped flying
Speaker 2: because on a previous work trip, she had been flagged
Speaker 2: by a TSA agent because the dressing she'd rigged up
Speaker 2: around her tumor had looked suspicious. She just so desperately
Speaker 2: did not want to be seen as sick. She couldn't
Speaker 2: bear the idea that people would respond to her with,
Speaker 2: as Barrett puts it, a condescending mixture of indulgence and pity.
Speaker 2: She wanted nothing to do with being a brave fighter
Speaker 2: or engaged in a battle, or being a warrior or
Speaker 2: fighting the good fight. All the awkward and sometimes damaging
Speaker 2: language around cancer.
Speaker 1: Even now, when I think about episodes like, you know,
Speaker 1: being flagged by TSA and her being forced to reveal
Speaker 1: her deepest, darkest secret to a bunch of strangers in
Speaker 1: taddy uniforms, it just makes me want to cry. And
Speaker 1: when she did go to New York and it was
Speaker 1: to give a talk, it was part of the thing
Speaker 1: that made her think that her life was worthwhile. And
Speaker 1: when she forced herself and go to New York in
Speaker 1: the train, you know, she'd also fallen on the street
Speaker 1: and scraped her palms and she just about collapsed in penestation.
Speaker 1: It just tears my heart out that she ended up
Speaker 1: being subjected or subjected herself to those kinds of horrible
Speaker 1: episodes because she couldn't control how she felt about her disease.
Speaker 1: Is just the saddest thing in the world. You know,
Speaker 1: her thing about the fighter, I think is really important,
Speaker 1: and she convinced me of this really early on, long
Speaker 1: before she ever got sick. But you know, the trump
Speaker 1: of the fighter the reason that bothered her, especially for
Speaker 1: something like breast cancer. Survival in breast cancer have gotten
Speaker 1: much much better for most of our training. You know,
Speaker 1: you could treat early stage breast cancer, but metastatic breast
Speaker 1: cancer was simply not curable. You could make people feel better,
Speaker 1: if you're very lucky, you could make them a little
Speaker 1: bit longer, but you can't cure it. And the problem that,
Speaker 1: as Jane saw it, with somebody with metastatic breast cancer
Speaker 1: putting on a pink ribbon and saying that to fight
Speaker 1: this thing is it gives the illusion that a patient
Speaker 1: with metastatic breast cancer has agency when she actually doesn't.
Speaker 1: It gives her the illusion that if she just fights
Speaker 1: hard enough, she'll be able to overcome the breast cancer.
Speaker 1: And when the inevitable occurs, because she doesn't have agency,
Speaker 1: she and her family are at risk of feeling like failure.
Speaker 1: What's worse than simply suffering from breast cancer dying of it,
Speaker 1: it's thinking that you're doing this because you have somehow failed.
Speaker 1: And this is I think an example of Jane's empathy
Speaker 1: that she had empathy for patients with intractable diseases. In fact,
Speaker 1: all of her research was about, I think, based on
Speaker 1: empathy for patients with intractable diseases and how there are
Speaker 1: social constructs that are in one form another kind of
Speaker 1: like victim blaming. So I think these were actually important
Speaker 1: concepts that she brought to the practice of oncology.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's heartbreaking, and that was like so lucid what
Speaker 2: you just said. And at the same time, she couldn't
Speaker 2: extend that empathy for herself.
Speaker 1: Now she was if you think about her career, she
Speaker 1: made it to the pinnacle of academic medicine at the
Speaker 1: time when there weren't very many women who were able
Speaker 1: to do that, and her career was probably the most
Speaker 1: important thing in her life. But I think she was
Speaker 1: worried that if she were ever perceived as being sick,
Speaker 1: especially if she had cancer, that she would be perceived
Speaker 1: this week and not taken seriously by the powerful men
Speaker 1: in academic medicine, and she just couldn't let that happen.
Speaker 2: These stories about collapsing in New York are about the
Speaker 2: horror of having to be taken aside at TSA and
Speaker 2: reveal to total strangers what was going on with her.
Speaker 2: These are stories that she didn't tell you until she
Speaker 2: was quite near the end of her life. It sounds
Speaker 2: like once she was out of options and you know,
Speaker 2: came to understand that she wasn't going to be going
Speaker 2: back to work and life was not going to be
Speaker 2: getting back to quote unquote normal. It sounds like she
Speaker 2: was more able to share with you some of what
Speaker 2: her process had been.
Speaker 1: More able, but not totally able. One of the most
Speaker 1: tragic comic episodes in her last year was about eight
Speaker 1: or nine months after her collapse, and so only about
Speaker 1: four months before she died. Jane was sick enough and
Speaker 1: you know, requiring intravenous antibiotics and sometimes requiring intravenous narcotics
Speaker 1: for her difficulty breathing because her lung metastases had grown.
Speaker 1: The oncologist who has taken care of her said, you know,
Speaker 1: what you really need is an indwelling venus access line.
Speaker 1: That's something called a portocaf that gets put in one
Speaker 1: of the large veins in the chest, and then a
Speaker 1: little port a little area that has a rubber stopper
Speaker 1: in it that you can put a needle through to
Speaker 1: inject things. Is put underneath the skin, almost like a pacemaker,
Speaker 1: so it sort of you know, goes underneath somebody's just
Speaker 1: lateral to somebody's shoulder. And she didn't want to do
Speaker 1: this because you know, in our experience, especially in the
Speaker 1: years that she was training, when somebody needed a portocaf
Speaker 1: an indwelling line. That was sort of a sign that
Speaker 1: things had gotten bad enoughs that you know they were
Speaker 1: on their way out. And she never wanted to surrender,
Speaker 1: and it took a lot of convincing to say, no,
Speaker 1: this is really about improving your quality of life. And
Speaker 1: she finally agreed to do it. And it required going
Speaker 1: back into the hospital, which was a big deal because
Speaker 1: she didn't want anyone to know that she'd come into
Speaker 1: the hospital. So we were actually on a maternity board
Speaker 1: way down at the end so that nobody could visit
Speaker 1: see her. And she goes down for her surgery to
Speaker 1: have the thing put in, and I wait for her
Speaker 1: and she comes back and she's a little broggy. We
Speaker 1: get back out to her room and she sits up
Speaker 1: as the anesthesia wears off, and she feels for where
Speaker 1: the portocath is and she screamed at me, no, how
Speaker 1: could you let this happen? I said, well, you knew
Speaker 1: you were going to get a portocath. No, no, no,
Speaker 1: how could you let them put this where it was?
Speaker 1: What she was complaining about was that it was too
Speaker 1: close to the center of her chest, so that she
Speaker 1: were to what she finally explained to me was that
Speaker 1: to go back to work and wear a shirt that
Speaker 1: was open or addressed, that even the slightest bit low
Speaker 1: cut people could actually see this. And I thought to myself,
Speaker 1: this is maybe the single most delusional thing that she's done.
Speaker 1: You know, she was so clearly never ever going back
Speaker 1: to work, but it gave me a window into her
Speaker 1: soul and what was propelling her day to day even
Speaker 1: at that late date was the idea that she'd be
Speaker 1: able to go back to work and do the things
Speaker 1: that made her life meaningful. And again, that was one
Speaker 1: of the saddest things that I've ever experienced, the revelation
Speaker 1: that she thought she could go back to work.
Speaker 2: After this sad and seminal moment, Jane finally seems to
Speaker 2: accept the reality of her fate. This acceptance extends to
Speaker 2: a willingness to see her elderly mother and siblings. She
Speaker 2: hadn't had a relationship with them in years, but she
Speaker 2: agrees to see them now to say goodbye. But still
Speaker 2: she refuses contact with Barrett's daughter Anna.
Speaker 1: So, my daughter is an incredible person. She is saint
Speaker 1: like she really is. I couldn't really hide from her
Speaker 1: that Jane was not interested in her. That began when
Speaker 1: she was three or four years old and continued until
Speaker 1: she was in her thirties. And I just kept waiting
Speaker 1: for her to be angry at me for letting this
Speaker 1: happen and feeling alienated and not wanting anything to do
Speaker 1: with me, and God damn it, she never behave that way.
Speaker 1: We are closer now than we ever have been. Just
Speaker 1: as every year goes by, we just get closer and closer.
Speaker 1: And part of her saintliness was that when the whole
Speaker 1: thing came out, she knew Jane was my wife, and
Speaker 1: because of Anna's love for me, she said, I would
Speaker 1: really love to come by the house and say goodbye
Speaker 1: to Jane, which is just the most touching thing if
Speaker 1: you think think about what she was doing. And I
Speaker 1: wanted to say about is somebody who wanted nothing to
Speaker 1: do with her, And so I thought, this is, you know,
Speaker 1: the most amazing thing. This will even melt Jane's heart.
Speaker 1: And so I went to Jane and said, listen, most
Speaker 1: amazing thing, Anna would like to come and see you,
Speaker 1: and Jane said absolutely not, no way, again breaking my
Speaker 1: heart and breaking Anna's heart.
Speaker 2: I wonder, I mean this is just occurring to me.
Speaker 2: But I wonder whether somewhere in Jane's own psyche the
Speaker 2: idea that there was this other person that you love
Speaker 2: in the picture, your daughter, that was so sort of
Speaker 2: impossible for her to tolerate that, the idea that she's
Speaker 2: dying and that you're going to continue to have You're
Speaker 2: going to live and have an ongoing relationship with this
Speaker 2: other person, this other woman in the picture, that's just
Speaker 2: my armchair.
Speaker 1: Oh, I think that's absolutely right. I think you know,
Speaker 1: prior to Jane's mortal illness, you just sort of disc
Speaker 1: but pretty accurately, as jealousy. Here's this female that I'm
Speaker 1: clearly in love with and James jealous of her. But
Speaker 1: then once clear that Jane is dying, then you add
Speaker 1: on to that this notion that, in a way, if
Speaker 1: you're really a jealous and angry person, you might think,
Speaker 1: of shit, she won. She's going to be alive and
Speaker 1: have him, and I'm going to be gone. So I
Speaker 1: think there was some anger there. Seven or eight years
Speaker 1: into the marriage, I had tricked myself into thinking that
Speaker 1: I had come to terms with james demands and any
Speaker 1: affect that might have been associated with my frustration really
Speaker 1: never rose again. No anger, I had no interest in
Speaker 1: other women. I was all in in the marriage and
Speaker 1: just figured this is it, and I've made this deal,
Speaker 1: and it's great because she's really wonderful and I feel
Speaker 1: really good when she directs her attention to me. And
Speaker 1: you know, I do not doubt for a minute that
Speaker 1: Jane loved me in her way. That was just never
Speaker 1: a question. When things started to get tough twenty years in,
Speaker 1: my challenge was not feeling anger. My challenge was how
Speaker 1: to deal with the resignation. And I've had suicidal thoughts.
Speaker 1: They were very concrete for a while. Work was difficult
Speaker 1: at the time for a variety of reasons, and Jane's
Speaker 1: alienation was also very difficult, and I just remember very
Speaker 1: concrete notions of which window I was going to in
Speaker 1: our tel floor apartment I was going to jump out
Speaker 1: of and where I'd end up. When sometimes I would
Speaker 1: as I was falling asleep, I would close my eyes
Speaker 1: and imagine lifting up the sash and then lifting up
Speaker 1: the storm window and lifting up the screen and perching
Speaker 1: on the ledge and launching myself. Well, I know that
Speaker 1: those are pretty scary signs, and I just didn't realize that.
Speaker 1: In retrospect, I think about how dangerous that all was.
Speaker 1: Once Jane collapsed, the energy flowed in a very different way.
Speaker 1: I became, to a really striking degree just sort of
Speaker 1: all in in taking care of her. And a huge
Speaker 1: part of what necessity the complicated multi step procedures that
Speaker 1: were required to take care of her tumor. And initially
Speaker 1: they were once a day. After a while, it was
Speaker 1: twice a day, and it was very complex, and that
Speaker 1: had to be taken care of every day without fail,
Speaker 1: whether the visiting nurses showed up or not. So it
Speaker 1: invented all sorts of ways that I could do with myself.
Speaker 1: She needed to be on blood thinners, and the most
Speaker 1: effective ones were ones that you know, were injected under
Speaker 1: the skin, and so every morning I had to give
Speaker 1: her her injections in the skin of her abdomen. All
Speaker 1: of my waking moments were spent thinking about taking care
Speaker 1: of Jane. I think I see in retrospect that it
Speaker 1: was a very convenient way not to think about anything
Speaker 1: bigger than that, like, you know, what is this relationship?
Speaker 1: What does this all mean? How am I going to
Speaker 1: feel when she dies? I just had to spend all
Speaker 1: of my mental energies were focused on taking care of
Speaker 1: that was, as horrible as it was, was a luxury.
Speaker 1: Oh and then when she was really having trouble breathing,
Speaker 1: I was giving her intravenous narcotics through her port through
Speaker 1: that porticath that we talked about. All these things were
Speaker 1: just really convenient ways to keep from having to think
Speaker 1: about her dying.
Speaker 2: Three hundred and sixty days after Jane's collapse, she dies.
Speaker 1: When she did die, it wasn't a matter of all
Speaker 1: of the feelings suddenly rushing back. It was a slow,
Speaker 1: slow progression of stuff that sort of put me back
Speaker 1: in touch with my feelings. And they were triggered by
Speaker 1: things like going through her closets and getting all of
Speaker 1: her old clothes ready for goodwill. You know, among her
Speaker 1: many other attributes, she was an incredible pack rat. I
Speaker 1: hadn't been in her closets for decades, and I found
Speaker 1: shoes and outfits I remembered from thirty years earlier that
Speaker 1: he just hadn't thrown out. I mean, I ended up
Speaker 1: piling big piles of boxes full clothes for good will
Speaker 1: that were taller than I was in our front hall.
Speaker 1: I would come across things that she had left behind,
Speaker 1: And you know, a big part of getting in touch
Speaker 1: with how I was really feeling about things was that finally,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe two weeks after Jane died, I asked
Speaker 1: somebody for a referral to a therapist who I've now
Speaker 1: been seeing for almost eleven years. So what a relief
Speaker 1: to finally do that as well.
Speaker 2: So it's so interesting you had such fidelity to her
Speaker 2: secrets and not betraying them at any point, even to
Speaker 2: the point where keeping that information as much as you
Speaker 2: possibly could private and within the hospital system where you
Speaker 2: both worked. And now you've written a book about it
Speaker 2: and we're talking about it, and many people will listen
Speaker 2: to the story. And once she was no longer living,
Speaker 2: you were able to seek the conversation and the help
Speaker 2: and the the dialogue that you needed to be able
Speaker 2: to have where you no longer had to keep her
Speaker 2: secrets because she was gone. Was there any hesitation about
Speaker 2: that once she was gone or did it really feel
Speaker 2: like no. Now I've been living with this for so long,
Speaker 2: it's my right to tell this story and to lighten
Speaker 2: my burden in some way.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, Dan, there was so much reluctance so
Speaker 1: much took me almost ten years after James's death before
Speaker 1: this book was published. Initially, I would tell myself, I
Speaker 1: should really write this down. But then I thought, why
Speaker 1: would you do this? Because no one's ever going to
Speaker 1: read this, because you can't possibly publish this or can't
Speaker 1: even show it to anybody. What I thought about was
Speaker 1: that if I were to write this, all of these
Speaker 1: people who worshiped Jane, the people that she mentored, the
Speaker 1: people whose lives she touched, they would be furious at me.
Speaker 1: She wanted her secrets cap she was a private person.
Speaker 1: This would be a betrayal of betrayals, and so that
Speaker 1: was part of what sort of stayed my hand. Eventually, though,
Speaker 1: there were two things I realized. One was that by
Speaker 1: writing this down it would allow me to gain a
Speaker 1: little bit of control over a thirty year period of
Speaker 1: my life which I had very little control. That this
Speaker 1: was a way of sort of helping me understand what
Speaker 1: I had done, helping me understand the secrets and why
Speaker 1: I had kept secrets. You know, what the motivation was
Speaker 1: for being complicit in those secrets I didn't tell anybody
Speaker 1: else was my secret too, and that was part of it.
Speaker 1: But I think also I came to this realization maybe
Speaker 1: seven or eight years after she died, that well, you know,
Speaker 1: it's my story too. It's not just Jane's story, and
Speaker 1: I get to tell my story if I want to
Speaker 1: tell my story, and I can tell it in a
Speaker 1: way that I hope will make it clear that I
Speaker 1: loved Jane and that she loved me, and that this
Speaker 1: isn't at core a betrayal of secrets. It's a description
Speaker 1: I tell people. The under line story here is somebody
Speaker 1: keeping a big, huge, neglected breast mass a secret for
Speaker 1: years and years until you know it was too late
Speaker 1: to do anything about it. And she's oncologist by the way,
Speaker 1: you know, and brilliant by the way. You know. It's
Speaker 1: very lurid. But the core story is a story of
Speaker 1: a marriage, and it's a story about the deals that
Speaker 1: we make with each other in couples, the deals that
Speaker 1: couples make with each other, and the sort of arrangements
Speaker 1: that they make, most of which are not explicit, in
Speaker 1: order to stay together for thirty years. And if you
Speaker 1: strip out the lurid aspects, that's what it's about. And
Speaker 1: it really has to do with you know, what secrets
Speaker 1: are acceptable, which ones aren't, which ones can you talk
Speaker 1: about with you know, the person that you're in a
Speaker 1: folly ado with, and which ones can't you talk about?
Speaker 1: And pretty personally, that's where I think I justify saying
Speaker 1: these things. And you know, before I published it, I
Speaker 1: showed typeescripts to some of the people that Jane had trained,
Speaker 1: and I was, really, you can't imagine how nervous I
Speaker 1: was about this and writing about things that have been secrets. Everybody,
Speaker 1: I think feels the same way. But the shocker was
Speaker 1: that almost all of them said, oh, you needed to
Speaker 1: do this, and they would start telling me things about
Speaker 1: Jane that they know, things that they didn't understand and
Speaker 1: couldn't explain, and said, you need to talk about this.
Speaker 1: I do have one person who kind of trolls my
Speaker 1: social media accounts and says that I'm being a terrible person,
Speaker 1: but everybody else is sort of on board.
Speaker 2: Well there's always one. And I'm so glad you just
Speaker 2: said that about marriage, because that's how I see this
Speaker 2: story as well. Barrett's story is not only about his
Speaker 2: marriage to Jane, however, it's a story of another marriage too,
Speaker 2: Believe it or not. It's a happy story.
Speaker 1: I described Jane as being a medical student who came
Speaker 1: on to the hospital where I was. There were actually
Speaker 1: two medical students that arrived the same day. There were classmates,
Speaker 1: and as I said, I oversaw two teams, one that
Speaker 1: I ran myself and then one that was run by
Speaker 1: a junior residence who kind of technically reported to me,
Speaker 1: but not really. Jane was on the other team, the
Speaker 1: junior residence team. The student came onto my team. His
Speaker 1: name was Lynn. Was like the best medical student I'd
Speaker 1: ever had. She was really smart, incredibly hard worker, really
Speaker 1: fun to work with. It turned out that, you know,
Speaker 1: the students need to be on call every third night
Speaker 1: as well, and her schedule was such that she was
Speaker 1: on call the same nights I was. So we would
Speaker 1: work together and I would teach her stuff, and I'd
Speaker 1: help her with the patients that she was being assigned,
Speaker 1: and you know, stay at all hours and taking care
Speaker 1: of things. And she was great. She was funny, and
Speaker 1: she was very confident. And those rotations last a couple
Speaker 1: of months, and on the last night we were on
Speaker 1: call together, we'd had a particularly busy night, a lot
Speaker 1: of patients, a lot of sick patients being admitted. It
Speaker 1: was about four o'clock in the morning and we were
Speaker 1: sitting in the nursing station on one of our awards,
Speaker 1: writing up our admission notes and she stuck turned to
Speaker 1: me and Lynn said, listen, I need to talk to
Speaker 1: you about something. And I said, fine, what do you
Speaker 1: want to talk about She said, no, I can't talk
Speaker 1: to you about it here. Well, what do you want
Speaker 1: to do? It said, follow me. So that ward was
Speaker 1: a long, long halway with a window at the end.
Speaker 1: So we walked down to the window and it's completely black.
Speaker 1: You know, it's four o'clock in the morning, so patients
Speaker 1: were sleeping the lights off. So we sat in the
Speaker 1: window sill and Lynn turns to me and says, listen,
Speaker 1: I have to tell you something. Said fine. And she
Speaker 1: told me something that no woman had ever told me before,
Speaker 1: and no one has ever told me since. She said,
Speaker 1: I'm really attracted to you, and I wonder if we
Speaker 1: should do something about that. I was unbelievably flattered, and
Speaker 1: I said to her, oh, Limb, you know, I think
Speaker 1: you're amazing, But didn't you tell me that you're engaged
Speaker 1: to be married and your wedding has taken place in
Speaker 1: like two months, and she said yeah. I said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not going to get into the middle
Speaker 1: of that. You really to think about this, Plus, I've
Speaker 1: already asked out your classmate Jane. And to Lind's credit,
Speaker 1: she just kind of rolled with it and said, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I suppose you're right, and things didn't get awkward. We
Speaker 1: spent the next three or four days as she finished
Speaker 1: up her rotation, it was absolutely fine. And then she
Speaker 1: went off and she got married, and I, you know,
Speaker 1: took out Jane. But that was an unusual event, and
Speaker 1: I would think about it over the next several decades.
Speaker 1: I have a friend who has sort of the quantitative
Speaker 1: turn of mind that I told this story too. Why
Speaker 1: He said, oh, so how often did you take about it?
Speaker 1: Was it once a year? Was it four times a year?
Speaker 1: Was it ten times a year? And I told him,
Speaker 1: you know what he could do with his questions. But
Speaker 1: I did think about this every so often. So after
Speaker 1: Jane died, I was not interested in seeing anybody. I figured,
Speaker 1: you know, before I examined things really closely, I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I'd had a long, wonderful marriage. Many people
Speaker 1: don't even get that. I don't want to try this again.
Speaker 1: The castro Ole ladies would come by, and I just
Speaker 1: was not interested. But then, almost a year after Jane died,
Speaker 1: I get this email and it's from Lynn, and my
Speaker 1: pulse races a little bit, and she says something like
Speaker 1: I must be living under a rock us heard that
Speaker 1: Jane died. I wanted to let you know sorry I am,
Speaker 1: and that I have lovely memories of thirty years ago
Speaker 1: when I was a medical student. And so I wrote
Speaker 1: back and said, this is a lovely thing that you've said.
Speaker 1: I also have lovely memories of that time, and thank
Speaker 1: you so much for writing. And Lynn wrote back once
Speaker 1: more and said, listen, I'm working in New Jersey, right
Speaker 1: across the George Washington Bridge forever in New York. You know,
Speaker 1: just let me know we can have coffee or a
Speaker 1: meal sometime. And I wrote back and said, yeah, I
Speaker 1: would love to do that. I can tell you about
Speaker 1: the most amazing woman who ever lived.
Speaker 2: Barrett doesn't really have any intention of meeting Lynn for
Speaker 2: coffee or a meal. First of all, he's not interested
Speaker 2: in rekindling some long ago spark. Second, he's pretty sure
Speaker 2: she's still married. But then a close friend from their
Speaker 2: early days in medicine. Visits Dana Farber to give a talk,
Speaker 2: and it turns out that she's Lynn's best friend. She
Speaker 2: proceeds to tell Barrett that Lynn's marriage is on the rocks.
Speaker 2: Barrett responds that he doesn't care. He's not going to
Speaker 2: get into the middle of this. But then when he
Speaker 2: gets home that night, he writes to Lynn. He tells
Speaker 2: her he's going to be visiting New York the following week.
Speaker 2: Maybe they could have lunch. He picks a restaurant on
Speaker 2: the Upper West Side and in walks Lynn, looking just
Speaker 2: as he remembered her, in his words, gorgeous.
Speaker 1: So we go inside and we talk. She tells me
Speaker 1: about her husband soon to be ex husband, as it
Speaker 1: turns out, and I tell her stuff about Jane that
Speaker 1: I hadn't told anybody else. I really hadn't talked to
Speaker 1: anybody about Jane's secrets and what it was like to
Speaker 1: take care of her. But I told Lynn, and things
Speaker 1: just moved very quickly, and within a year she had
Speaker 1: moved up to Boston to live with me. A couple
Speaker 1: months after that or about a year after that, we
Speaker 1: got married. And so now I am happily married to Lynn.
Speaker 1: She has three sons who I love dearly. She has
Speaker 1: two dogs who are part of the menagerie, and my
Speaker 1: daughter adores her and my grandkids adore her. So I
Speaker 1: think you know. The way I've described this sometimes is
Speaker 1: I've learned a lot about secrets. I've learned a lot
Speaker 1: about misery. I've learned a lot about marriage and secrets
Speaker 1: and marriage. But as it turns out, I've also learned
Speaker 1: about redemption. My life has sort of been redeemed by
Speaker 1: this relationship with Lynn. We've now been married for almost
Speaker 1: ten years. It's really something.
Speaker 2: Here's Barrett reading a final passage from his wrenching, searingly
Speaker 2: self searching memoir.
Speaker 1: It was no better feeling in the world than being
Speaker 1: in James's good graces. Her formidable intelligence and finally, hone
Speaker 1: taste combined to make her approval something special. A nod
Speaker 1: made you feel like a million bucks, and for exactly
Speaker 1: the same reasons where disfavor was crushing. This was true
Speaker 1: for anyone who interacted with Jing, but of course I
Speaker 1: felt it much more intensely because love was added to
Speaker 1: the mix. I crossed Jing west Or twice in our marriage,
Speaker 1: and her response had been to withdraw not just her affection,
Speaker 1: but everything. Being frozen out felt like the worst punishment imaginable.
Speaker 1: I would respond with a desperate scramble to find anything
Speaker 1: that might restore me to her favor, including in this case,
Speaker 1: I promise not to do anything about her breast cancer. Now,
Speaker 1: I felt deeply ashamed of my inaction. Fear of Jane's
Speaker 1: displeasure was an absurd excuse. I asked myself, what kind
Speaker 1: of husband could stand by idly for four years while
Speaker 1: his wife's breast cancer grew. I'm still asking that question.
Speaker 2: Family Secret is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Acur is
Speaker 2: the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer.
Speaker 2: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 2: please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear
Speaker 2: on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight
Speaker 2: eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also
Speaker 2: find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd
Speaker 2: like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast,
Speaker 2: check out my memoir Inheritance.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.