The Times Magazine 6140.’ He just says, ‘Your odds are 40 per cent.’ ”
I do wonder about the odds. Patients hang
on this kind of thing. Were my friend’s odds
really 20 per cent? How do they do it? Ephron
hasn’t asked van Besien since. “I’m sure it was
probably Dr Roboz telling him he had to tell
me that I had higher a percentage,” she says.
During her initial round of chemotherapy,
an oncologist she calls “Dr C” told her it
might not work, and wrote a note in her file
warning that she was “at risk for adverse
outcome”. Ephron felt her hopes collapsing.
“This is a doctor that shouldn’t be allowed
near patients,” she says now. “I think they
should probably just give doctors personality
tests and root [those ones] out. Because it’s
very hard to teach empathy to someone who
isn’t an empathetic person.”
Later, an intern who had been hanging
around observing her treatment told her,
“I bet you make it. You have good support.
It makes a difference.” He was only an intern,
but she found herself clinging to his words and
the hope they offered.
The initial chemo worked and Ephron
advanced to the bone marrow transplant
unit, passing a sign warning that “NO LIVE
FLOWERS OR PLANTS ARE PERMITTED”
and beginning a course of extremely
aggressive chemotherapy that climaxed with
an IV drip of melphalan, which can apparently
destroy the inside of your mouth and throat.
You have to chew ice for an hour beforehand,
throughout the infusion, and for an hour
afterwards. She lost her taste for food and any
desire to eat it or ability to keep it down, she
says. After this, and as she received the two
infusions of blood – from a young woman in
Florida and then from the umbilical cord of
a baby boy – there were a lot of pills: around
30 a day, which she struggled to swallow and
came to dread. “This is rough,” she said to the
tall male doctor who came to check on her
each day to see if she had managed to eat
anything. “This is war,” he replied.
To write of this time, Ephron tried to read
her in-house hospital records, which ran to
6,000 pages. “I got to page 4,000,” she says.
“Some of them were just jumbled; I didn’t
understand anything on them. And then other
places it was, say, ‘Patient doesn’t recognise
her own palm,’ or something riveting like that.”
A friend of hers, a journalist and editor
named Meredith, told her she had been in
the intensive care unit for six days after her
heart rhythms became very irregular. Ephron
can’t remember this. They tried to give her
an MRI scan but “you didn’t want to be in
the machine”, Meredith told her. “You told
them, ‘F you.’ ” She said this to everyone,
apparently. “Stop this right now!” she shouted.
“F you all!” One of the technicians came
out and said, “Miss Ephron seems upset,”
Meredith recalled. Ephron began tearing her
clothes off. Then Peter came in, grabbed
a blanket, covered her up and said “calmly
but very forcefully, ‘There is no need to
continue this. Let’s just take her back to
the room,’ ” she writes.
Ephron wanted the whole story. “I was just
riveted,” she says. “I was swearing at everybody
and tearing my clothes off... And then she
told how Peter came in and covered me and
protected me. I mean, it was a beautiful story.”
She sounds almost proud about the
swearing. “If you’re in the hospital, you don’t
have a lot of choices,” she says. “The meals
come at a certain hour, they take your vitals,
they give you a thousand pills a day. You’re
the centre of the world but you are absolutely
powerless. And so when I heard that I acted
up, because it’s not my nature at all, I was very
excited to hear that... Meredith said, ‘It was
your interior voice.’ But Peter said it was just
the steroids. I was overdosed on steroids and
that’s what made me do that.”
The notes in her files got rather bleak
after that. “Patient says she wants this to
end multiple times,” said one. Roboz tried to
reassure her that, “You will bounce back strong
and fit and fabulous and then write the best
screenplay ever and Julia Roberts will play me.”
Her records show the bone marrow
transplant was taking, and working, even as
she lost the will to live. She begged friends,
doctors and Gail the psychotherapist from her
building to help her die. She told them she did
not love Peter.
“I wasn’t lying. I didn’t feel anything,” she
says. “I describe it as being feral, but I wasn’t
myself in any way... I asked Peter, ‘Please, put
me on something and let me go.’ ” She texted
the same plea to Roboz: “Please let me go.”
By this time she had a lung infection too.
Her lungs were filling with fluid and she was
on oxygen.
Roboz came breezing into her room.
“ ‘What’s going on?’ she says, as if she can’t
imagine what’s gotten into me,” Ephron writes.
Then she said,“Give me 48 hours, and if I get
somewhere, give me another 48.”
Ephron grins. “I mean, that woman, she
knows how to talk to you,” she says. “I asked
her about it later and she said to me this
thing, she said, ‘Small bites.’ In other words,
when a patient is that distressed, you don’t say
in six months you’re going to be... You give
them small bites. Forty-eight hours. And if
they get somewhere, give me another 48.”Peter sat up that night monitoring the
oxygen saturation in her blood, adjusting
the oxygen she was getting. “I don’t have
any memory of that time, but I do remember
waking up and realising, ‘Oh!’ I mean, I wasn’t
on oxygen and the room looked bright. Peter
looked handsome. I was back. So it was those
48 hours. But it’s such a brilliant thing to say
because [Roboz] gave me hope and she gave
me an endgame. In one sentence she gave me
both things.”
And how did Peter manage? Was it his
long career as a psychiatrist? How did he
not go completely insane?
Ephron says I should ask him. She goes to
fetch him and he sits in the chair opposite me.
He’s wearing a blue shirt, dark blue trousers
and trainers and he has a square jaw and
rugged features. He has a deep voice and he
speaks slowly. He really is rather dishy. I can
picture the canoe.
“An analogy occurs to me,” he says. When
he was going down into the Grand Canyon,
mourning the death of his wife, when he was
“6,000ft down and you have to climb up to
the rim, you don’t look up... You just put your
head down and you take a step that you can
in that moment.”
And all his time dealing with other people’s
traumas prepared him for this one, when
Ephron wanted you to let her die?
“My heart was breaking, and yet I could
have an objective sense that this is a medical
effect, so to speak, of a successful treatment,”
he tells me.
I would worry that I was torturing her by
keeping her alive. But you really had hope?
“Yes. Because there was great hope if this
hurdle could be overcome.”
And now, just as I predicted back in 2017,
he is in a book. You must have expected this,
I say. Marrying an Ephron and all that.
“No, actually. I was living with Delia’s
illness and the possibility that she would never
write again. And that’s what she proclaimed
for a long time,” he says.
“I did,” Ephron says.
“She said, ‘I’ll never write again.’ So I didn’t
expect it. But it was a miraculous rebirth, a
renaissance, when she just started to write,
when the writing came to her.”
Will there be a screenplay?
“I’m talking to people,” Ephron says. She
thinks it might be something for the stage.
How do you make people see what you’re
going through?
“I mean, I have some ideas,” she says. “But
I’m not ready to share them.”
So that’s all for now, folks. Let’s do this
again in five years. nLeft on Tenth: A Second Chance at Life by
Delia Ephron is published by Doubleday
on April 14 (£16.99)A bone marrow
transplant was followed
by chemo. ‘This is war,’
her doctor told her