Nick
The
symptoms started overseas.
At first, it
was just minor shit – coughs, fevers, fatigue.
I thought I had a cold I couldn’t shake or some European strain of the
flu that my flu shot hadn’t covered. We
were all paranoid about the flu, ever since Brian got the H1N1, and we’d been
acting like total germaphobes, dousing our hands in
hand sanitizer after soundcheck parties, but we knew there was no surefire way
to keep ourselves from catching some bug.
It’s just an inevitable part of touring.
When you’re on the road, always on the go, traveling different places
and shaking hands with hundreds of people a day, you’re bound to come down with
something. I don’t think a tour’s gone
by where I haven’t gotten sick at least once.
I usually just grin and bear it and soldier on through until it runs its
course.
This one
never did, though, and I went home for Christmas still feeling crappy. I thought I was just run down from two months
of touring and was sure that a few weeks at home were all I needed to get my
energy back. I did feel less tired when
I wasn’t constantly traveling and performing almost every night, but the other
symptoms didn’t go away. Looking back, I
guess I was stupid not to go to the doctor then, but you know how busy the
holidays are. I had so much other stuff
going on between Christmas, New Year’s, and my thirtieth birthday, I didn’t
make it a priority, and then I just ran out of time. Before I knew it, I was on a plane to Tokyo
for the Asian leg of our This Is Us
tour.
It was in
Asia that I realized something was seriously wrong with me. I would run fevers even at night and wake up
drenched in sweat, my chest heaving, like I’d had a nightmare, except I
couldn’t ever remember having one. My
cough had never really gone away, and lying down, I could hear myself wheezing,
gunk rattling around in my lungs. When I
was onstage, I would get short of breath way more easily than I ever had
before, even when I was sixty pounds heavier.
But the scariest symptom was the chest pain.
I knew it
had to be my heart. Besides the obvious
symptoms, I had two personal experiences to back up my self-diagnosis. First, I remembered Brian saying how tired
he’d felt before his heart surgery, when his heart was enlarged. Second, I remembered the way I’d felt,
myself, at the end of the European leg of the Unbreakable tour, when I’d made the doctor’s appointment that led
to my diagnosis of cardiomyopathy. My
cardiologist had said it was a condition that could worsen, but could also
improve if I cleaned up my act and started living healthy. I’d done that! It really sucked to think that, despite
everything I had done to take care of myself the past two years, this problem
had gotten worse.
I placed a
long-distance call from China to schedule an appointment with my cardiologist
in Fort Lauderdale for the day after I got back to the States, and when the
guys wondered why I was flying to Florida, instead of home to California or
Tennessee, I told them it was just a routine check-up and a chance to catch up
with some of my family. It was Brian who
asked if I’d been feeling alright, Brian I had to lie to when I answered
yes. I know I should have opened up to
them about what was really going on – I could have used the support – but I
wanted to find out what I was dealing with and how bad it was before I told anyone
else. Maybe it’s nothing, I told myself myself. No
point making them worry if it’s nothing.
But I wasn’t just being a hypochondriac.
I was in denial.
Still
jet-lagged from the long trip back from Beijing, I dragged myself to the
private practice of my cardiologist, Dr. Richard Polakoff. I was his last appointment of the day. A nurse made me get on a scale on the way
back to the exam room, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that I’d lost a
few pounds since the last time I had weighed myself, despite having been too
tired to work out much. I just figured
all the dancing I did on stage was keeping me in shape, and besides, I was
still following my diet.
After the
nurse had taken my temperature and blood pressure and all that preliminary
stuff, Dr. Polakoff came in. I had a lot of respect for him. He was in his mid-fifties and treated me like
I was his son. I would never forget the
way he had lectured me the day he’d called me in to his office to discuss the
test results that showed I had cardiomyopathy.
“You need to change your lifestyle,” he had said sternly, scaring me
with stories of other celebrities who had died young from the same heart
disease. Then he’d added, “I don’t want
you to end up like that.” It had stung
to hear that, but I knew he was just looking out for my best interest. It was tough love.
I thought
it was obvious that I had taken his advice, but after listening to me describe
my symptoms, he still asked me lots of questions about my diet, alcohol intake,
drug use, and exercise regimen. I’d fessed up to slipping a few times before, but this time, I
swore up and down that I was living clean and trying my hardest to stay
healthy.
“Well, let
me take a listen, and we’ll find out what’s going on inside there,” said Dr. Polakoff finally, slipping his stethoscope into his
ears. “Take off your shirt, please.”
I pulled my
t-shirt over my head and wadded it into a ball in my lap. I winced when he pressed the end of the
stethoscope to the center of my chest.
Why do those things always have to be so fucking cold?
“Take a
deep breath in,” Dr. Polakoff ordered. “And out.”
I could feel the dull ache deep in my chest as it expanded, but when I
mentioned it to the doctor, all he did was nod.
“Another deep breath, please.” He
moved the stethoscope over my chest and around to my back, listening to my
heart and lungs. Then he lowered the
head of the padded table I was sitting on and asked me to lie down. He listened to my chest again while I was
lying flat on my back, then tapped along my rib cage with two fingers. The whole time, he had a frown on his
face. I hoped it was just because he was
concentrating, but deep down, I already knew it was because he was hearing
something he didn’t want to hear.
After a few
minutes, he removed the stethoscope from his ears and slung it around his
neck. Then he used his hands to examine
me, his fingers poking along my jawline, down my neck, under my arms, and
across my chest. I wondered what he was
feeling for, but he didn’t say. Finally,
he told me to sit up and put my shirt back on.
When I did, he sat down on his stool in front of me, looked up at me,
and said, “I hear fluid in your lungs.
That’s why you’ve been short of breath.”
“What does
that mean?” I asked. When I heard “fluid
in your lungs,” I thought of someone drowning, like the time my brother fell in
the pool when he was little. I couldn’t
imagine how mine had gotten that way.
“It might
just be an infection, like pneumonia.
Your glands are swollen, and your history of fevers suggest your body’s
been trying to fight off something. But
I do want to warn you, given your diagnosis of cardiomyopathy, it could be
indicative of something much more serious.”
My heart
responded to his grave tone of voice, skipping a beat and then racing to catch
up. “Like?”
“Pleural
effusion – a build-up of fluid in the lungs – is a major symptom of congestive
heart failure.”
It took me
a minute to comprehend what he was saying.
Congestive heart failure? I’d
only heard the term used for old people.
I was only thirty years old! How
could I be in heart failure? I looked at
him, feeling betrayed. “How could I have
that?” I demanded. “I did everything you
told me to! I stopped drinking, stopped
doing drugs, started exercising and eating right. You told me my heart would go back to normal
if I did all that!”
“I told you
I hoped it wouldn’t deteriorate any further if you changed your lifestyle. And it might not have. Like I said, it’s only a possibility I wanted
you to be aware of, a worst-case scenario.
Chances are, you just have an infection.
I want to run some bloodwork and get a chest x-ray. We’ll know more after that.”
He called
ahead to University Hospital and ordered the tests, then told me to drive
straight over. I had déjà vu the whole
way to the hospital, remembering the two days of testing he’d put me through
before diagnosing me the first time. The
blood draw and chest x-ray were pretty painless, but it wasn’t the tests
themselves I was worried about. It was
the results.
***
The next
day, I was back in Dr. Polakoff’s office, staring at
an x-ray film of my chest. It was all
pretty much a black and white blur to me.
I could make out the bones of my shoulders, spine, and ribs, along with
a big white blob in the middle that had to be my heart. But I couldn’t tell if it was normal-looking
or not.
“Well Nick,
I have good news and bad news for you,” said Dr. Polakoff,
referring to the x-ray. “The good news
is that your heart looks fine.”
I blinked
in surprise. “Really? So it’s not…”
I didn’t want to say the words that had raced through my thoughts all
night, keeping me awake.
“Not in
failure, no. In fact, it looks in better
shape than it did when you were first here two years ago. So that’s the good news.”
“Okay…” I said,
trying to prepare myself. “So what’s the
bad?” Something told me it was still
more serious than pneumonia.
Dr. Polakoff took a deep breath and used his finger to trace
around a foggy section of the big white blob as he spoke. “The x-ray shows a mass in your chest.”
“A mass?” I
repeated, my voice going higher. “You
mean like a tumor?”
He
nodded. “That’s what it appears to
be. An x-ray doesn’t tell us everything,
though, so you’ll need to undergo more tests to get a better picture of it. There’s no way to know, for instance, if it’s
benign or malignant. All I can tell is
that there’s something there, compressing your lungs, which explains your chest
pain and shortness of breath, as well as the fluid build-up.”
“I thought
that was my heart,” I admitted, staring at the x-ray.
“The mass
is near your heart,” he said. “Your
heart is down here.” He lowered his
finger to the bottom of the blob, which was brighter white, more opaque than
the supposed tumor. Still, the two
looked so close, it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began.
My
short-lived relief over hearing that it wasn’t my heart went away, and I was
scared again. “Is it cancer?” I asked in
a whisper.
Dr. Polakoff offered a reassuring smile. “Like I said, it’s impossible to know for
sure without further testing. Since it
doesn’t appear to be cardiac-related, I’d like to refer you to a
specialist. You’ll need a biopsy for an
official diagnosis.”
Biopsy… I didn’t know exactly what
that entailed, but I’d heard the word before, and it never sounded good. I stared at the x-ray, long after Dr. Polakoff left to place a call to a doctor he knew in Los
Angeles, the specialist who would be able to diagnose me for sure. I couldn’t stop looking at the shadowy blob
between the two black spaces that were my lungs.
Alone in
the room, I pressed my hand to the left side of my chest and moved it around
until I could feel my own heart, pulsing beneath my palm. Then I moved it up and to the right, to the
spot where the tumor appeared to be on the x-ray. My hand was right in the center of my
chest. I pictured a tumor that looked
like Slimer from Ghostbusters,
buried deep beneath my skin, slowly engulfing my heart and lungs. The mental image alone made me feel
light-headed and sick.
I left Dr. Polakoff’s office that day with a manila envelope
containing copies of my x-rays and bloodwork to take with me to my appointment
with the specialist in Los Angeles. He
had written down her name on an index card, along with the day, time, and
location of my appointment with her.
Though he wished me luck and told me again that the diagnosis might not
be cancer, I couldn’t help but notice the name of the clinic he was sending me
to: UCLA
Santa Monica Hematology and Oncology.
I didn’t have
a clue what was in store for me at that point, but I knew one thing: oncology was the branch of medicine that
dealt with cancer.
***