Two steps back
I made sure that he was at the hospital two days later for the biopsies and we were told that as soon as they knew something the doctor would call us.
On Saturday he did.
Four tumors were tested, all of them were malignant.
I'd answered the phone, Justin was on the couch and he couldn't hear, but he saw the look on my face, read my body language. He knew.
Two days before he had cried, this time he just looked like it was simply confirming what he had known all along and for all I know, it was.
The doctor went on at some length about how we would have to come in on Monday to go over what the options were. He said that the tumors were fast growing since the MRI a month ago hadn't found anything and so the treatment would have to start almost immediately and be aggressive. He also told me that he knew that this was a blow to Justin—you think?—and that there were some things that perhaps he should tell either me or his mother privately to minimize the emotional trauma. He understood, he insisted, that Justin was an intelligent young man and no longer a minor, but with something like this, perhaps we could work together to decide what he needed to know at this point.
Christ—doesn't that just make it sound like a walk in the park?
The rest of the weekend was about as bad as I thought it would be.
Before, the first time around it had been a night mare, but there was this basic feeling that if we did everything right, if he had the chemo and the radiation and lived through the mouth sores and the foot sores and the weight loss and the hair loss and the pain and the exhaustion and the knowing that he fucking had cancer, then—if we made it through all of that and he was declared clear then—shit, he should be OK.
This wasn't supposed to happen and he was supposed to be better now and getting ready for the move to New York. He should have been excited about setting up the studio the way he wanted it and about starting his classes. He should have been jumping up and down about being in cabbing distance to those astounding museums and he should be looking forward to another fifty or sixty years of every Goddamned thing he wanted to look forward to.
Instead he was this walking corpse who was starting to die inside and didn't know if he had it in him to keep fighting after he'd thrown everything he had into the last eighteen months.
Fuck.
So first thing on Monday we were at the doctor's office—he'd come in early for us so that he'd have time to talk without interruptions—and we got the low down. He wanted to start Justin on another course of chemo, which could continue at Sloan Kettering when we went in a couple of weeks. He also wanted to start up the radiation again, this time targeted on the tumors themselves. He was hesitant about the one in his left breast because that's over the heart and he didn't want to damage it, but I'd been reading about radiation and asked about the new gating radiation. That's a deal where they can somehow focus the radiation pretty much where they want it without much over spray. Doc wasn't convinced, though and Pittsburgh University Hospital didn't have the machine anyway. He suggested that we could ask when we got to Sloan.
You bet we will, Doc.
Justin sat quietly the whole time, holding my hand but not asking any questions. I think he was in shock.
After I took Justin back to Jennifer's to rest, I went to Vanguard. The move to New York was in less than two weeks and I was up to my ass in it. As soon as I got there Cynthia told me that Doctor Albans was on line seven. I picked up and he wanted to tell me the real story and either he or I or Jenn could tell him as much as we thought it would benefit him to hear.
Shit—isn't that bullshit?
I started to say that Justin should know everything, but the more I heard, the less I was convinced I was right about that.
OK, here it is in a nutshell.
The tumors in his lungs, because of their locations, were inoperable. Justin was a bad risk for a transplant because he was too weak to survive the surgery and with his medical history there was roughly a snowball's chance in Hell of him getting a new set anytime soon anyway.
The tumors in his breasts weren't good either. Christ, who knew that men get breast cancer? Well, they do. They would try to take care of them with radiation, but his recommendation was that, if it didn't work, we were looking at a double mastectomy.
He wanted to start the chemo this week and the radiation at the same time. The problem was that, although Justin looked better, he was still weak and rundown from the last go around. Because of this, they couldn't use the level of chemo and radiation that they wanted to so they would make do with a lower dosage of both, run him two weeks on and two weeks off through Christmas so that he'd be able to recover between rounds and then see where he was.
If he were stronger, if they thought he could survive the operation, they'd do the mastectomy in early January.
The hope was that the radiation would shrink the cancer in his lungs.
Christ. He was fucking nineteen years old.
I thanked Albans and stared out the window for about five minutes then got up, told Cynthia that I had to deal with something and drove over to Jenn's.
She was there, curled up on the couch I the living room. Justin was asleep upstairs. She asked me what the doctor had said and I gave her both conversations. She took it pretty calmly, all things considered, just nodding once in a while and asking an occasional question. We were speaking in low voices so that we wouldn't wake up Justin—and so that he wouldn't hear what we were saying.
We agreed that he didn't have to know about the mastectomies yet. They weren't definite and he could find out if he had to later.
He had to know about the chemo and the radiation, obviously, but he could be spared the knowledge that he wasn't a candidate for a transplant or any other major invasive surgery right now.
He didn't need to know that he was too weak to survive.
We didn't really talk all that much, Jenn and I, about this. I told her what the doctor had said and we agreed on what he should be told and that was about it. I think she was in shock, too.
Hell, so was I, when you come down to it.
Two days after that Justin was back at the hospital for his first treatments. He went about them matter of factly and with out any kind of fanfare.
He was starting to look like he was beaten before he even really started round two.
He was apathetic and accepting that he was going to die.
He was also becoming even more isolated from his friends than he had been when he was in New York for treatment and that wasn't even anyone's fault. His friends were, other than the family, a bunch of college students. They were busy with their studies and their papers and their projects. They had their romances and their breakups and all that adolescent angst that make college such a roller coaster ride—if you're not in cancer treatments.
His friends, though they cared about him—honest to shit they did—were kids and kids have even more trouble dealing with the possibility of death than adults do. It's one thing to lose a friend in high school to a car wreck or something 'normal', but to see someone go down to illness was harder. It was more drawn out, more painful somehow and they simply didn't know what to do to help. They would come over and not know what to say or where to sit.
You know how when you go to visit someone in the hospital you want to see them and feel sort or virtuous about being a good person and then you can't wait to get the Hell out of there? That was how it was and Justin saw as soon as they sat down.
Over the last year and a half, some of them organized blood drives, some of them tried to raise money to help with the expenses, some of them would call and a couple—Daphne, mostly—would come by just to hang out with him and maybe take him to a movie.
That was what he needed more than almost anything else, to be reminded that he was still—under all the shit and the pain and the crappy treatments and the puking and the rest of it—he was still Justin.
You want to know something that made me more proud of him than even facing down Hobbs and his asshole of a father?
After about a week or so of self-pity, he sort of came to a decision one day, seemed to say 'screw this' and started fighting again.
God, that was a good day. It was like walking into a dark room and turning a light on. All of a sudden you could see again.
It was a long haul and the move to Manhattan was a bitch. I went ahead to make sure that everything was in place. Instead of us doing the townhouse together, I did what I could and we agreed that he would fix up his studio when he was ready.
Because I had to put in long hours getting Vanguard/NY running, I brought in a nurse to make sure that Justin was taken care of. He hated that, but there was no choice. Even if he had stayed in Pittsburgh with his mother, she had to work to support herself and he would have had help there, too. I simply couldn't be with him as much as I had been the last time he was working with Sloan and Karen got him up and dressed and fed and to the hospital on time without fail.
His hair fell out again and he lost the weight he'd gained back.
He went to his classes at Pratt when he wasn't in the treatment room at Sloan and he would have moved mountains to get there. He found it frustrating that he couldn't do his best work when he was so fucking sick, but the professor took him aside one day and told him that the efforts he considered mediocre were better than almost everyone else in the class and he should do as much as he could. It was OK.
His platelet counts ranged from six up to a high of about twenty-five. If he got into an accident he would have bled to death like a hemophiliac.
At least once a week I would find him up in his studio—which now had the basics in it—crying because he was sick and tired and frustrated and just so fucking fed up with what was happening to him
I would hold him until it passed. Afterwards he would be embarrassed for causing me upset and the storm would pass for another week. He would then go about his business calmly until the next time.
No one other than me ever saw this. With friends or other students he never complained, never made any trouble. It was between us.
The agency was doing well quickly. We had a good rep to work with and we were the new kids on the playground so we seemed to get asked to pitch a lot of accounts that agencies that had been in town for a while were passed over for and we won more contracts than we lost. It was busy and exciting and I felt like I was being torn in two pieces.
During the day and at dinner meetings I was the complete cool, urbane professional. At night and on the weekends I was a caregiver who cleaned up vomit and rejoiced when he was well enough to sit up to watch a movie with me in bed.
And do you want to know what the absolute pisser was?
Even with the tantrums and the treatments, with the no sex and the exhaustion and the day-to-day Hell of the whole thing, I couldn't imagine him being anywhere else than with me and I just hoped to God that it would…last.
TBC