Chapter
20
“I’m sorry,” Nick mumbled, wiping his eyes in humiliation.
“Don’t apologize,” said Dr. Kingsbury. “It’s okay to cry. You men seem to think you have to be all
‘macho’ and put up some tough front… but you don’t. Not in front of me anyway. Go ahead and cry; let it all out.”
Nick smiled wanly. “You
sound like a psychiatrist.”
“Well, I did originally intend to go into psychiatry,” Dr.
Kingsbury said with a laugh.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Eh… once I did my psych rotation in med school, I decided it was
too dull,” Dr. Kingsbury replied with a shrug.
“You don’t get to operate or do any really hands-on kind of stuff when
you’re a psychiatrist.”
Nick nodded. “I can see
that.”
Dr. Kingsbury smiled.
“Well, enough about me,” she said.
“Let’s get back to you.”
“I’d rather not,” said Nick, without expression.
“Have you told anyone about your illness yet, Nick? Family… friends?”
Slowly, Nick shook his head.
He hadn’t called anyone, not even his parents… no one knew. He didn’t want them to know… not yet
anyway. Your illness… Those words repulsed Nick. He didn’t consider himself sick; with the
exception of his aching shin, he felt perfectly fine. Those kids he had visited in the hospital,
the ones who were so pale and gaunt and bald, they were sick. Not him.
But he knew as soon as he told anyone he had cancer (God, how he despised
that word… cancer), they would automatically think of him the way he
thought of those children. Sick. Ill.
Diseased. And they would feel
sorry for him, the way he had always sympathized those poor kids. And sympathy was something he did not want. He wanted to be treated normally, to be
teased by the guys, wrestled with by Aaron, even scolded by his mother, for
that was what was normal for him. He had
a feeling none of that would happen anymore once people knew what was wrong
with him.
“Nick,” Dr. Kingsbury said, disrupting his thoughts. “How long do you plan on waiting? You need to tell someone.” Her voice was calm, yet firm. “You can’t keep something like this to
yourself. You need support from the
people you love. Trust me, that will make
it easier.”
Somehow, Nick didn’t think so.
But he had always been like this, keeping things to himself, hiding his
emotions, bottling up his feelings.
Being the youngest member of the Backstreet Boys, he had often been
picked on by the older guys. And
sometimes, though he would never admit it to them, even today, they had hurt
his feelings. But, in trying to prove
his maturity, he had hidden this from the others, laughed it off, pretended he
didn’t mind. During tours, he, like them
all, occasionally came down with something… a cold, the flu, once even
pneumonia… but there was no calling off shows, not for a little thing like
sickness… and so he had learned to adapt, to make due, to perform anyway,
despite feeling under the weather.
Though he was a singer, he had also become an actor… and a pretty damn
good one, he thought. And this, his…
cancer, would soon become his toughest role.
He wanted to keep it from them – his parents, his siblings, his friends
– for as long as he could, for the longer he kept it from them, the longer he
could feel normal.
“Nick? Did you hear me?”
Nick glanced up, realizing he had been spacing out. “Yeah,” he said quickly. “Yeah, I heard.”
“So you’ll call someone tonight?
Your parents… or a friend, maybe?”
“Yes,” Nick lied. “I will.”
“Good,” Dr. Kingsbury said with a smile, and Nick couldn’t help
but feel a bit guilty for lying to her.
But, then again, that was just part of the charade. In the next few weeks, he was going to have
to do a lot more than lie to a doctor.
He was going to have to lie to the people he loved.
***
In the end, Nick settled on the catheter/portable chemo pump
option, and Dr. Kingsbury scheduled him for minor surgery to put in the
catheter at the end of the week. After
that, she said, he would probably be able to go home. In the meantime, he would be starting chemo
in the hospital so that he get used to it, and Dr. Kingsbury could figure out
the proper dose to give him.
The first chemo treatment started the day after these decisions
were made, and Nick was terrified. He
was not completely naďve; he had heard plenty of horror stories about chemo and
its side effects, and he was afraid of what it would do to him.
That morning, right after breakfast (which Nick barely touched,
despite less-than-comforting advice from a nurse who came to take his vital
signs – “You better eat up while you can because you might not be able to keep
anything down later today”), Nick was taken to the “chemo room,” as it was
designated. Just by that term, Nick was
expecting something of a dungeon or horror movie morgue, with metal beds and
chains, dingy gray walls, cold cement floors… but he was surprised to find
himself in a happy-looking pale yellow room with a row of light gray, padded
chairs that looked like dentist chairs in the middle. All of these were empty, except for one,
which a girl lay back in, an IV line feeding into her arm.
“Your doctor tried to arrange it so you could be in here alone for
your treatments because of your celebrity status,” said the nurse who had
brought Nick up to the room, “but there was a bit of a conflict today. Don’t worry though, Claire won’t spill the
beans about you.” She motioned to the
girl in the chair, who looked curiously over at Nick and offered him a slight
smile. Too nervous to manage a smile in
return, he simply nodded in her direction.
The nurse pushed Nick’s wheelchair up to one of the chairs, two
down from the girl, and helped him into it.
“Okay, Nick, my name’s Flora, and I’m going to get you started on your
chemo. Sit tight, and I’ll be right
back.” She walked away, and Nick rested
his head against the back of the chair and closed his eyes, feeling slightly
sick already.
Flora returned a few minutes later with supplies to start an
IV. Nick held his breath and looked away
as she slid the needle into his inner elbow, and it hurt, but only for a few
seconds. One the line was in, the pain
faded, and he swallowed back relief. Flora
taped down the clamp attached to the needle and then hung a bag of liquid on
the IV pole next to the chair and attached the tubing from it to the
clamp. Moments later, liquid started
dripping from the bag, through the thin tubing, and into Nick’s vein.
“How long is this supposed to take?” he asked, watching it drip.
“A little over an hour,” Flora replied, and Nick groaned, not
wanting to spend an entire hour like this.
Then again, the only other alternative was lying around his hospital
room, and that really wasn’t much better.
Flora went off to another part of the room, telling Nick to call her if
he started to feel sick or needed anything.
Nodding, he closed his eyes and lay back, wishing he would fall asleep,
wake up, and discover this was all just one big nightmare.
“So is this your first time?”
The voice extinguished his hopes of sleeping through this whole chemo
business, and Nick opened his eyes and looked peevishly over at its source, the
girl in the other chair.
“Yeah,” he muttered unsociably, looking away and closing his eyes
again.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to bother you,” she said, speaking loudly so
that her voice carried across the empty chair that separated.
“No problem,” Nick grunted, keeping his eyes shut.
“I’m Claire Ryan, by the way.”
With a sigh, Nick’s eyes flew open, and he looked over at her
again. She was the epitome of the
typical cancer patient, thin-faced and pale, with a flowered scarf on her
head. She was dressed in a t-shirt and
baggy sweatpants, with furry leopard-print slippers on her feet. And that’s when Nick realized he had seen her
before – in the elevator on the way back from one of his tests. He had been completely ignorant then, pitying
her, not knowing he would come to resemble her in a matter of weeks.
“I’m Nick Carter,” he replied, feeling obligated to introduce
himself now that she had.
She smiled. “I know.”
He didn’t know what to say to that, so he just nodded.
“So, um… I hope you don’t mind me asking this, but what kind of
cancer do you have?”
“Ewing’s sarcoma,” Nick answered, and it pained him to do so, for
that meant admitting he did have cancer.
“It’s a kind of bone cancer.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.
Sorry,” Claire said with empathy.
“That’s what you thought?
Why, did you hear something about me somewhere?” Nick asked, his heart
beginning to race. How could she have
known what kind of cancer he had? Had
something leaked out of the hospital?
Had the media gotten a hold of it?
“What? No,” Claire said,
laughing. “Your leg brace – that’s what
made me think maybe it was bone cancer.”
“Oh… ohh… okay…”
Nick flushed red in embarrassment, feeling like an idiot. “I just thought maybe the media had found
out.”
Claire smiled. “I
understand,” she said.
Nick managed to return the smile this time. “So,” he said, feeling he should ask her the
same question, “what kind of cancer do you have?”
“Leukemia,” Claire replied.
“Oh… so how long have you had it?”
“Almost three years… I just came out remission though.”
“Oh. I’m sorry,” said Nick.
Claire smiled sadly. “Yeah,
it sucks, huh? But…”
Nick waited for her to continue, and when she didn’t, he asked,
“But what?” It was then that he noticed
Claire had closed her eyes, and her already-pale face had gone
paper-white. “Claire? Are you okay?” he asked in concern, wondering
if she had passed out.
“Uh… just a minute…” Claire’s
eyes flew open, and she sat forward quickly, whipping something silver out of
the crevasse between the arm of the chair and her body. Then she turned her head away from Nick,
leaned over, and threw up.
Nick quickly looked away in disgust, but the retching sounds alone
were enough to make his stomach churn.
Vaguely, he heard Flora hurry over to Claire. “Oh, Claire, honey,” he heard her say, her
voice sounding distant and garbled, like a voice in slow motion. As the gagging and heaving continued from
Claire’s side of the room, he began to feel hot and clammy all over. He leaned back against his chair, closed his
eyes, and tried to take deep breaths, afraid he was going to pass out.
From faraway, the vomiting sounds finally stopped, and then Nick
heard Flora’s voice ask, “Nick? You
feeling okay?”
“No,” he mumbled, and even his own voice sounded strangely
distorted. He was just barely aware of
Flora bustling over, and then suddenly, there was a faint humming sound, and
the head of his chair was being lowered all the way down, so that he was lying
flat. Then, more whirring, and the part
with his feet was raised slightly up, so that his legs were on an incline.
“Lie still, Nick,” Flora said gently. “I’ll be right back.”
Nick opened his eyes, but his vision was dim and fuzzy and
bordered by blackness. He squeezed his
eyes shut and opened them again, but his sight did not return. Flora came back then, lifted his head up a
little, and placed something cold under the back of his neck.
“Does that feel better?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Nick whispered, the ice pack soothing his sweaty
skin. Slowly, he began to feel better,
and when he opened his eyes, he could see clearly again. He glanced weakly over at Claire, who was
sitting up again and looking better.
“You doing okay, Nick?” she asked, glancing over at him.
“Yeah,” he murmured. “You?”
She shrugged. “I’m
fine. I just always get sick from the
chemo. Hate to say it, but you probably
will too.”
Nick groaned, knowing she was probably right. In fact, the first hint of nausea was already
coming over him. He could tell already –
chemo was going to suck.
***