I started my first course of chemo on Sunday.
“Hi, I’m Allie, from Oncology,” said the nurse who came to hook me up. She was wearing scrubs with rainbows on them - double rainbows all the way across the sky of her blue scrub top. I guess you have to be optimistic when you work around cancer patients all day. “I’m going to get you started with your chemo infusion. You have a port?”
I pulled back the neck of my hospital gown to show her the piece of gauze taped over the newly-implanted portacath in my chest. It didn’t look as freaky as it had sounded; I’d seen it when the nurses changed the bandage, and it really was just a little round lump beneath my skin. It would never be noticeable through my shirt, and I couldn’t even feel it unless I poked at it. Still, it was weird to think I had a piece of metal embedded under my skin, hooked to a plastic tube that went into one of my veins.
“Great,” said Allie. She pulled on a pair of gloves and peeled off the gauze. “I’m going to use a little Betadine to sterilize the area and then put on some anesthetic cream that will numb your skin so you don’t feel me stick you,” she explained as she set to work. “Is this your first time?”
“Yeah,” I rasped; my throat had gone dry. I cleared it and added, “I’m a chemo virgin.”
She blushed and laughed lightly. “Well, you won’t be when I’m done with you. I’m going to put in a Huber needle that will hook up to the IV line,” she said, and I winced at the thickness of the needle on the end of the yellow, plastic square she held up for me to see. “I promise, you’ll hardly feel it,” she added, with a reassuring smile. And amazingly, she was right! The numbing cream had worked well; it didn’t even hurt as she slid the needle into the skin over my port.
“Wow, you’re good,” I said, impressed, looking down. The yellow thing was right up against the port now, and there was a bit of plastic tubing hanging out of it. It reminded me that chemicals were going to be flowing through that tube, straight into my chest, and I started to get nervous again.
She hooked the tube to an IV line that ran up to a bag of clear liquid that she hung on the IV pole next to my bed. “Just saline, for now,” she explained. “Your chemo will run through this infusion pump, which I have to set to drip at the right rate.” She gestured to a monitor on the IV stand. “I’m also gonna give you a dose of Zofran, which is an anti-nausea drug. If you’re lucky, it’ll keep you from getting sick later.”
My stomach turned over at the thought. I hated throwing up. “How bad are the side effects, really?” I asked.
“It varies from person to person,” she said, as she injected a shot full of the drug into my IV line. “They can be pretty bad, but not always. Some people tolerate chemo better than others. We have medications to help with some of the symptoms, like the nausea and vomiting, but not others. Even if you don’t feel sick, you’ll be tired. You may lose your appetite; sometimes people get sores in their mouth or find that things taste funny after chemo, and that can keep them from wanting to eat, too. You’ll probably lose your hair...”
I raised a hand to my head and smoothed down the front of my hair. I’d been keeping it pretty short, and maybe that was just as well - it’d make it easier to adjust to having none at all. “How long does it take for that to happen?”
“Three or four weeks. Some people lose it sooner. I’ve seen a lot of patients just buzz it off when it starts to fall out.”
I nodded. That’s what I would do. I wasn’t going to go around looking worse than AJ, with big bald spots on my head.
When Allie had finished setting up the chemo, she said, “Okay, this is set to drip over three hours. If you need to, you can get out of bed and move around, use the bathroom or whatever; just make sure you wheel your IV stand with you and watch to make sure your line doesn’t get tangled or caught on anything. If you start to feel sick or need anything, just use your call button. I’ll be back to check on you later.”
She left me with the call button connected to my bed and a small basin, in case I needed to hurl. I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. I lay back against my pillows and watched the fluid flow slowly through the clear IV tubing, into my chest, wondering how long it would take for the side effects to kick in.
I tried to keep myself occupied while the three hours passed. I watched TV. I played on my laptop. But mostly, I just thought. I had a lot to think about, a lot of decisions left to make. I’d known about my cancer for four days, and I still hadn’t told anyone. I was making excuses for myself. I’ll wait till I know what chemo’s like, so I can tell them how the treatment’s going, I thought, figuring that would be a more optimistic conversation than just telling them I had Stage IV cancer. I didn’t want to depress anyone. I’ll wait till I’m out of the hospital, so they don’t have to visit me here. That would buy me at least another week.
I knew I was being stupid, not telling anyone, dealing with everything by myself. The guys and my family would want to know I was sick, and they’d find out eventually - it wasn’t like I could keep it a secret for long, with my hair falling out and daily trips to the hospital to get chemo. But I wanted to delay that moment for as long as possible. My friends and family members were living their own lives, and they were happy. I didn’t want to mess that up for them by dragging them into the shit I was going through.
It was bad enough cancer had disrupted my life. I didn’t want it to disrupt theirs, too.
***
“Congratulations, you’re all done!” My nurse, Thea, unhooked the needle and tubing from my port and covered it with a band-aid.
“For now, at least,” I replied, sitting up straight in the recliner I’d been lying in for the past half hour. “That was really quick.”
“I told you it would be. The vincristine infusion only takes about ten minutes, unlike the cyclophosphamide you got last week.”
It had been over a week since the start of my chemo; I was now on Day 11 of my first cycle. After a week of being monitored while I got chemo as an inpatient, I’d finally been discharged from the hospital. I was only back at the oncology clinic as an outpatient to get my last dose of IV chemo of the cycle. I still had a steroid to take in pill form for three more days at home, but then I would have a week off of medications completely before starting my next cycle.
The timing couldn’t have worked out much better. I had a couple days to recover before heading up to Fresno to play a club gig on Friday, then on to Napa for another performance on Saturday and the fan event on Sunday. I was actually looking forward to the trip. I’d been feeling surprisingly good - the chemo had made me tired, like everyone said it would, but other than that, I hadn’t had many side effects. The Zofran they gave me before each round worked on my bouts of nausea, so I wasn’t throwing up all the time, and I still had all my hair. Granted, it was a little early to start going bald - Allie had said it could take three weeks, and it had only been half that.
Still, as I left the oncology clinic, I felt pretty optimistic. It helped that it was a beautiful day in LA; as I pulled my Benz out of the dark, underground parking deck, the sunlight was so bright that I immediately reached for my sunglasses. For a minute, I thought about driving over to the beach, but decided I’d better not that day. I guess I was still waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for those horrible side effects I’d read about to come and get me. It’d be just my luck that I’d start projectile vomiting on the Santa Monica Pier. So I went straight home instead.
But once I was home, I didn’t know what to do with myself. It had been that way ever since I’d come home from the hospital. At first, I had been glad just to be able to veg out in my condo and sleep in my own bed again. But then I started getting cabin fever. I was tired, but I didn’t want to just lie around, watching TV and playing video games. I’d been doing that for two weeks in the hospital. Now that I was out, I wanted to do more. I didn’t want to waste any time. Ironically, I wasted plenty of it just pacing around the condo, wondering what to do.
It wasn’t just that I was bored. I kept remembering what Dr. Submarine had said to me: “If you choose not to undergo chemo, you’ll be dead in a matter of weeks.” Even though I was doing the treatment, I couldn’t forget how serious my disease was. I had done some research on my own online, and I’d seen the statistics. My kind of lymphoma was pretty treatable in children, but not so much in adults. The survival rate was only about fifty percent. A coin flip. Heads, I’d be alive and well in five years. Tails, I’d be in the ground.
If I was going to be dead in five years, I wanted to make the most of the time I had left. I just wasn’t sure how to do that yet.
I thought about what other people did when they found out they were dying. They made bucket lists. They did all the things they’d always wanted to do, but never had the chance. They traveled around the world. They did daredevil stuff, like skydiving and mountain-climbing. They spent time with the people they loved.
What would be on my bucket list?
I didn’t really know. The thing was, I’d already done just about everything I’d ever wanted to do in my life. I had seen the world. I had tried out all kinds of crazy things. I had nice houses and fast cars and all the luxuries my money could afford. There just wasn’t much I wanted to do that I hadn’t already done.
So maybe that was it. Maybe I wanted to spend my time doing the things I’d already done. Doing what I’d always done. Living my life like normal. I loved my life the way it had been before I’d gotten cancer. If I had one last wish, like those Make a Wish kids whose dying wish had been to meet me, mine would probably be just to keep my life the same. To keep on touring, keep on making music, keep on making people happy. That was what made me happy. Why shouldn’t it be number one on my list?
***
I think that, subconsciously, I’d already decided not to tell the guys about my cancer. I knew they would never let me keep performing if they knew how sick I was, and I couldn’t exactly finish the tour without them. I needed them, and that meant I needed to keep them in the dark.
Still, I knew I should tell them, that it was the right thing to do, so I thought I’d do it in Napa. It would be better to tell them all at once, in person, I reasoned, and the wine would make it a lot easier. But as we sat around a winery down the street from the opera house, hanging out before the show, I couldn’t bring myself to say the words.
Everyone was talking, laughing, tasting the wine. It was always fun when we first got back together after a break. The time apart was good for us; everyone got to go home and be with their families and relax, and when it was time to go back on the road, we weren’t sick of each other anymore. Everything felt fresh and fun again.
The guys all had stories from the three weeks we’d had off. Brian talked about spending time at home with Leighanne and Baylee. Howie told us all the new things James had learned to do. AJ shared the wedding plans he and Rochelle had started making. When they asked, “So what have you been up to, Nick?” I had my opening. But what was I supposed to say?
“Oh, not much, just doing chemo for this cancer I found out I’ve got. There’s only a fifty-percent chance it’ll work, but if I don’t give it a shot, I won’t live to see summer, so I figured, eh, why not?”
I couldn’t say that. Instead, I said, “Not much. You know - just been hangin’ out.” It wasn’t a lie; I just left out the part where I’d been hanging out in the hospital. I’d tell them after the show, I thought. It would be better that way. If they found out beforehand, they’d be preoccupied, and the performance would suffer. It wouldn’t be fair to the fans to tell them now and ruin the night when I could just wait and do it later.
Our show that night was more like a long soundcheck than an actual concert. We performed just ten songs that the fans had helped choose, accompanied only by an acoustic guitar, and answered questions between songs. I didn’t enjoy talking as much as I did just sitting on a stool, singing. It was easy to forget what was going on inside me when I could lose myself in the music and sing my heart out, and even though I was tired, I was disappointed when it was over.
We did the obligatory meet-and-greet after the show. Once the last few fans had been escorted out, I turned to the other guys. “Wanna head to a bar or something?” I asked. I figured I needed some more booze before I could break my bad news to them, and it would be good to kick back with a beer after all the froofy wine I’d had that afternoon.
Brian bailed on me first. “I think all that wine earlier was enough, buddy,” he laughed. “Besides, we’re gonna head back to LA first thing tomorrow morning, so I should probably get Baylee to bed.”
“Yeah,” Howie agreed, “I wanna go back to the hotel and check on James. Another time, man.” I was disappointed in him; Howie never used to say no to a night out on the town, but that was before he went and got all “family man” on me.
“I think Monkee and me are just gonna head back to the hotel too,” said AJ, slinging his arm around Rochelle. They were so in love, it was sickening; I didn’t want to think about what went on behind the closed door of their hotel room. He must have seen the look on my face, because he added, “We still cool?”
“We’re cool,” I muttered back. “I just kinda wanted to tell you guys somethin’...”
“You can tell us now,” said Howie. “What’s up, Nicky?”
Usually I hated when he called me that, like I was still the twelve-year-old I’d been when he’d met me (and even then, I hadn’t gone by Nicky), but in that instant, I felt my throat close up with a different kind of emotion. Howie loved me like a little brother, the same way he’d always been a big brother to me. He had been protective of me from the beginning, but ever since Kevin had left, he had really taken on the leadership role, watching out for the rest of us and keeping me and AJ in line. I looked at him then and wanted to protect him, too. I didn’t want to tell him something that was going to devastate him.
“Spit it out, Carter,” growled AJ, when I didn’t answer right away, and Rochelle giggled. Only Brian, I noticed, said nothing. He was just staring at me, his eyes narrowed slightly, as if he could tell I wasn’t acting quite like my usual self.
I really had meant to tell them. But instead, I put on a big grin and avoided Brian’s eyes as I said, “It’s nothin’. Just wanted to tell you I had fun this weekend. I can’t wait till we’re back on tour.”
***
