Character Driven Read Free Page A

visible in the pupils of children with retinoblastoma, is known as leukocoria or the cat’s-eye reflex. Just as a cat’s pupil appears white in certain lighting, so will that of a child who has retinoblastoma or other eye conditions including Coats’ disease. That white reflection in photographs does not always indicate those serious conditions, but it is definitely worth checking out with a doctor. We learned all of this only after Tatum’s diagnosis, and our doctors told us that it is a good idea to take a monthly flash photo of an infant and child to check for that telltale marker of a potential problem.
    After the examination, when the doctor told us that he’d detected some abnormalities and what he suspected was a tumor, I felt as if all the air in the room had been sucked out. I remember grasping Candace’s shaking hand, and my mind rushing. The sensation was like what happens when you are driving a standard-transmission car and you think you’re in gear but you’re in neutral. You hit the gas and you can hear and feel the vibration of the rapidly racing engine, but you don’t increase your actual speed. Thoughts were bouncing all around my head, but I wasn’t making any kind of positive steps toward coherence.
    Looking back on it, I now realize, how could it have been otherwise? I’m not a real worrier by nature, and despite the difficulty Candace and I had experienced in having lost a child previously, I didn’t fixate on the list of possible bad things that could happen to the twins before or after they were born. I had lost some people close to me, usually after a long and protracted illness, as with my grandmother. I’d lost a few older relatives, but they had lived what seemed to me then to be long lives. Nothing could prepare me for someone telling me that my daughter had cancer. It was a life-altering moment, like a kind of sign being driven into the ground indicating that was then , and next was now . Facing the prospect that she might lose not just her eye, but that we could lose her, was unimaginably difficult to process.
    In a way, hearing that news was also as if I’d instantly done some mental spring cleaning and thrown away anything that wasn’t needed and put everything else neatly into order. As clichéd as it sounds, I knew in that moment that very little besides my daughter’s health and my family’s safety mattered. All the little gripes and complaints I might have had about how the season was going, even though things were going well—any nagging pain from overuse or injury, any thoughts about upcoming games, whom I’d be matched up against—just neatly took their place in line behind—a long ways behind—one overriding concern: what were we going to do to help our daughter?
    The next day, Tatum was given an MRI exam that confirmed the diagnosis. We had a play-off game that night against Houston and I would suit up. At that point, no one except Jazz owner Larry Miller, General Manager Kevin O’Connor, and trainer Gary Briggs knew the specifics of the situation. They told me that I was under no pressure to play that night or any other during the play-offs. They agreed that Tatum’s condition and our privacy was what mattered the most.
    I had been making such a mad rush from practice to doctors’ appointments to the hospital for tests that the reality of what was going on with our child hadn’t really sunk in. We’d won the game, and only when I sat in front of my locker after the game did the truth hit me, and it hit me hard. I sat staring blankly ahead of me, a towel draped over my shoulders. A few minutes later, reporters were allowed in, and they were just doing their job, but the last thing I wanted to do was to talk about the game, the series, or anything to do with basketball. All I could think of was what my daughter potentially faced. I didn’t want anyone to see the anguish I was experiencing, so I went into Briggs’s office and broke down. In some ways the game