The first day of my trip through stem cell transplant hell was the last day I felt good.
When I checked into the hospital that morning, I’d been off chemo for seven weeks, and the cancer I’d been diagnosed with was undetectable. I was finally feeling like my old self again, but I should have known it wouldn’t last. By the time I checked out, twenty-four hours and one chemo drip later, I’d gone back to feeling like… well, a cancer patient. I spent the rest of the day within running distance of the john – let’s just say I had it coming out both ends. It helped to be home, instead of on a tour bus, but needless to say, Cary and I didn’t have sex that night.
The rest of the week wasn’t much better. “How in the hell did I get through the tour like this?” I griped on Saturday morning, when I woke up still feeling like shit. My “digestive issues” had cleared up, but all week I’d felt run down, like I had the flu. It was a familiar feeling, but I couldn’t imagine singing and dancing that way. I didn’t even feel like getting out of bed. How had I managed to drag my ass onstage all those nights?
“I always wondered the same thing,” Cary replied, offering me a sympathetic smile. She’d been as sweet as ever to me all week, taking care of me and putting up with my complaining. I think I complained a lot more than I had during the tour, and maybe that was the difference. I had nothing to hide and no reason to pull the tough guy routine anymore, so I laid it all out there and acted like a big baby. “I couldn’t have done it, if it were me,” she added. She didn’t seem to mind me being a baby; in fact, I think she liked it better that way. At least I was being honest with her. Truth be told, I liked it better that way, too. It was easier than having to lie.
That was the morning I was supposed to start the shots of some drug called Neupogen, which was the same thing I’d gotten from the doctor in Boston when I was sick on tour. The way I understood it, its job was to kick my bone marrow into high gear and get it to make more blood cells – in this case, stem cells that they’d take out of me in a few days and put back later. Cary had given me the shots before, so I wasn’t worried about them. They were just a pain in the ass – or wherever she decided to stick me.
“I’m gonna go get the stuff from the fridge,” she said. “Be back in a few.”
But she was gone longer than just a few minutes, and when she finally came back, I saw why. “Oh. My. God,” I groaned appreciatively, as my eyes panned up and down her body. “Are you trying to kill me?”
Cary tried to pull a sexy smirk, but she was blushing too much for it to have the right effect. It didn’t matter, though. The rest of her was just right. She had squeezed herself into a short, skin-tight, white dress that hugged her curves as it buttoned down her body, stopping at mid-thigh. Below that, she wore white thigh-highs and red high heels. Perched on her head was a little white hat with a red cross, and she’d put on a fresh coat of red lipstick to match. My naughty nurse had arrived.
“Not kill you,” she purred, slinking closer. “I’m gonna make you feel much better.” She came around to my side of the bed, managing to look sexy and embarrassed about trying to look sexy at the same time. “Don’t you worry,” she said, expertly flicking off the cover the syringe in her hand. “This won’t hurt a bit. Now drop your shorts, big boy.” But on the last two words, she lost it, dissolving into a fit of giggles, her cheeks burning redder than ever. “I can’t do this,” she gasped, shaking her head, her hand covering her face.
“But you were doing so well.” I grinned up at her, totally amused. I could tell she had never role-played before, but I appreciated the effort. “I knew you’d make a hot naughty nurse.”
“Well, I’m glad you’re enjoying this, at least… watching me degrade myself,” grumbled Cary, rolling her eyes. Her face was still bright red.
“Aww, don’t say that. You’re not degrading yourself; you’re… highlighting your assets,” I assured her, nodding.
“Right… my assets.” She turned around, sticking out her butt. The dress cupped it perfectly, stopping just below. If she bent over a little further… But she straightened up and spun around again before I could even finish the thought. “Okay, you’ve had your show. Now seriously, let’s get this over with.” She flashed the syringe again.
I groaned. If only that was just part of the game, too. “Alright…” I sighed, throwing back the covers and pushing up my boxers so she could get at my thigh. I shivered as she swiped it with an alcohol wipe, but felt warm again, too warm, when she leaned over and put her hand on my bare skin. She’d left the top few buttons of her dress unbuttoned, and I stared into her cleavage, refusing to watch while she gave me the shot. I was fantasizing about motorboating those babies when I felt the pinch and the sharp sting of the stuff being injected. Then it over, and she was straightening up again, handing me a little gauze pad to hold against the tiny hole in my leg.
“All done.”
“For today…” I had at least three more days of taking these shots to look forward to, before there might be enough stem cells in my system to “harvest,” as they kept putting it – like I was a farmer, growing a crop of them. “You gonna wear that outfit for the rest of them?”
She made a face, probably wishing she’d never put it on in the first place. Now that she had, I’d never let her live it down. “We’ll see.”
“I hope so. That dress… it does a body good.”
“My body or yours?”
“Yours… but you can do good things to my body, if you want. C’mere…” Smirking, I pulled her on top of me, grabbing a handful of ass as I helped her get situated. Her dress hitched higher as she straddled my legs, hooking hers around my back. Her heels grazed my bare skin, but I didn’t care. It was a good kind of pain; it took away from the throbbing in my thigh. Cary made a great distraction, I decided again, kissing her.
“I guess you are feeling better,” she said, smiling.
I smiled back. “You’re good medicine. Especially in that dress. I’d feel even better if I could take it off you, though.” I waggled my eyebrows at her, already working on the first button.
She blushed again. “I’d feel better, too.”
***
The day of the first “harvest,” it was cloudy and unusually cool in California. Of course, that just meant it was, like, seventy, but seventy degrees in September in LA feels pretty cold. I wore long sleeves and jeans into the hospital. Cary tried to compensate for the gloomy weather with a bright yellow top and a plaid scarf that whipped around in the wind as we walked in. She held my hand and matched her pace to mine, even though I was moving pretty slow.
My whole body ached, right down to my bones. According to Cary, the bone pain was a normal side effect of the shots; she said it was a good sign, that my bone marrow must be working overtime, churning out millions of stem cells. I took her word for it, but I still felt like an old, arthritic man, shuffling along beside his much younger, hotter girlfriend. I had to remind myself that I was only a year older than Cary and still looked thirty, even if I didn’t feel like it. When I wondered what the hell she was doing with me, I remembered, Oh yeah… I’m Nick Carter. I’m a hot pop star, and she wants me.
It was easy enough to tell myself that, but a lot harder to understand why. Cary was beautiful and could sing like a bird; she’d been on American Idol and on tour with the Backstreet Boys. The doors were wide open for her; she could do anything she wanted, but instead, she was here with me. I had promised to help her, and instead, I was holding her back.
I felt guilty, knowing I had conned her into helping me, into falling for me, into being with me now. I knew if I said anything, she would swear she wanted to be with me, but I wondered, How could she? I hadn’t been very good company the last week or so; I was sick and tired and not up for doing much. She’d already seen me through worse, but I had a feeling that the worst was yet to come, and I felt bad for putting her through it. It couldn’t have been easy for her, after losing her mother to cancer, yet she never cried or complained or let on to how hard it was. She was more than I deserved, but I was too selfish to give her up. Cary was good for me, even if I was bad for her.
These were the thoughts messing with my head as I lay on a hospital bed, watching her look around the room. It seemed like she had run out of things to say, and I wasn’t up for starting a conversation. We were quiet as we waited for someone to come and set me up for the procedure. I didn’t know what to expect; I’d been told several times that a stem cell transplant really wasn’t much different from a blood transfusion, so I figured they’d just come in, suck some stem cells out through my port, and I’d be on my way.
As usual, I was wrong.
First, my nurse came in and announced, “The doctor’s ordered a catheter placed for the harvest procedure, so I’m going to take you down to radiology for that to be put in.”
“Oh, I already have one of those,” I said quickly, pulling down the hospital gown to show her my port.
She took one quick glance at it and shook her head. “That’s a portacath. It’s not designed to handle the amount of blood going in and out of your body during this procedure. You need a Vas-Cath, a special kind of catheter that goes in your neck. It’s just temporary,” she added quickly, when she saw the look on my face.
“My neck?” I repeated, staring at her.
“Usually the neck. It can also go in through the groin, if you’d prefer that.” She gave me a wry smile, already knowing what my answer to that would be.
“Um, sorry, but hell no. I don’t want another tube coming out of my neck or my…” I left it there, shaking my head. “Just, no. I thought this was supposed to work like a blood transfusion.”
“It is similar. Your blood will go out one tube and into a pheresis machine, which will take out the stem cells and send the rest of your blood back into your body through another tube,” she explained patiently, even though I was being a pain in the ass. “If you don’t want the catheter, we’ll have to put an IV in each of your arms, which means you won’t be able to move much during the harvest, which takes about four hours. Also, you’ll have to get new IVs put in each time you come in. If you choose to get the Vas-Cath, your hands will be free, and once it’s in, it can stay in for the next few days, until they collect enough stem cells. Then it can be taken out.”
“Okay, fine,” I sighed, caving in. I knew I was way too fidgety to handle lying in bed for four hours without being able to move my arms. A tube in my neck couldn’t be as bad as that – and it was definitely going in my neck, not the other place. The portacath had turned out to be okay, not nearly as bad as it had sounded, so I figured this Vas-Cath thing would be the same way.
Wrong again.
When I got back from radiology, I had a giant tube hanging out of my jugular, which split into two different ends, like the Y adaptors I used to hook up my electronics. They hooked me up pretty much the same way, plugging two IVs into the ends of the catheter – line in, line out. Both lines ran dark red with my blood, as it was pumped out of my body, through this giant, noisy machine next to my bed, and back into my veins through the other line. My arms were free, but the catheter was taped to my neck so it wouldn’t get pulled out. It was threaded through my vein, all the way down to my heart, and every time I turned my head, I could feel it pulling on the inside. It freaked me out, and it hurt like a bitch.
While I lay there getting tortured and feeling sorry for myself, Cary tried to look on the bright side. At one point, after she’d been sitting at my bedside for a couple of hours, keeping me company, she stood up to stretch. “Look at this,” she said, poking one of the IV bags hanging above the pheresis machine. It was a small bag, about a quarter full of red liquid. “Those are your stem cells.” It just looked like blood to me, but Cary seemed impressed. “There are probably millions of cells just in that little sample.”
Even so, they told me I’d probably have to come back two more times just to get enough. I was discharged with instructions for how to take care of the new catheter, a prescription for painkillers, and an appointment for more harvesting the next day. When it was time to go, I looked at Cary and said, “How am I supposed to just waltz out of here with this thing hanging out of my neck?” I flicked the ends of the catheter in disgust, making them swing. I felt like a freak. “What if somebody recognizes me?”
My interview with Ellen wasn’t scheduled to air until the following week, so the public was still in the dark about my illness. I didn’t want them to find out the wrong way, through paparazzi photos snapped of me looking like this. It’s not like I expected a whole herd of paparazzi to be hanging out at the hospital, unless they’d followed someone like Lindsay Lohan or Britney Spears there, but still, we were in LA. They could be lurking anywhere, waiting for a sighting.
“Here,” Cary said, taking off the scarf she’d been wearing. I hadn’t paid much attention to it before, but when she handed it to me, I recognized it and snickered.
“Is this one of Leighanne’s Wylee things?” I asked, holding it up.
She blushed and nodded. “It’s the Brian tour scarf,” she mumbled, and on closer inspection, I saw Brian’s signature going down one end of the scarf in big, iridescent lettering. The other end was bedazzled with the Wylee logo in little, silver rhinestones.
“You bought one of these?” I asked, laughing again. AJ and I had ripped on Brian behind Leighanne’s back about being such a tool when it came to his wife’s line. He was always modeling scarves and hats and bags for her. We would never let him live down carrying around the little man-purse she’d made for him on the Unbreakable tour, but still, he had worn it onstage for the encore every single show. The guy was completely pussy-whipped then and still is. But I guess he knows, just like the rest of us, that only BSB fans buy Leighanne’s stuff, and only because she’s the wife of a Backstreet Boy, so he keeps on promoting it.
“I like it!” Cary insisted, fingering the rhinestoned end.
“You like it ‘cause it’s got Brian’s name on it,” I teased, grinning at her.
“So what if I do? Here, let me help you put it on.” She took the scarf back and started to sling it around my neck, but I twisted away.
“You think I’m gonna-? Fuck,” I hissed, feeling the catheter pull again. I touched the dressing tenderly, making sure it was still in place.
“You okay?”
I grimaced. “Yeah. But you think I’m gonna walk out wearing this fruity thing around my neck instead?”
Cary shrugged. “Take it or leave it. If you end up on TMZ tonight, do you want them questioning your sexuality, or wondering what you have implanted in your neck?”
They didn’t need a pastel, plaid scarf to question my sexuality; that kind of speculation was nothing new. I shrugged. “Point taken. Go ahead. Just, please, don’t tie it in a bow or anything.”
She laughed. “Guys do wear scarves, you know.”
“Not straight guys. And not purple plaid scarves with sparkly shit on them.”
“Okay, okay, fine… I’ll put it on backwards, so the sparkly stuff doesn’t show. It’s really not purple, by the way; it’s more of a lilac.” She grinned at the look of pure disgust I gave her, as she fashioned the scarf around my neck. By the time she was done, I’m sure I looked like a total queen, but better that than a sideshow freak.
As we left the hospital – quickly – I wondered what I would do the next day. Wear a turtleneck? Pop my collar? There really aren’t many good ways for guys to cover their necks without looking like pretentious douchebags. I decided the 8 Mile look – a hoodie, with the hood up – would be my best option. I’d remember that for tomorrow.
I hadn’t completely realized it yet then, but slowly, the last shreds of normalcy I had clung to were being stripped away. At some point soon, I would no longer care about what I looked like or what people thought. And I would never feel “normal” again.
***
