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Okay, you knew this was coming, before I forget.
DISCLAIMER: This story was entirely a product of my imagination and (fortunately) it has no connection whatsoever with reality. I don't own the following characters: Brian Littrell, Nick Carter, AJ McLean, Howie Dorough and Kevin Richardson. However, I do own Joshua, Jamie, Ryan, Michael, Julia, Shane, Dr. Harrisson, Dr. Fernandez and Mrs. Gardner.
It was five hours later, at seven a.m., after another X-ray, another blood test, and an MRI, plus one false diagnosis (a pulmonary embolism), when I was finally told just what the problem was, what it was that was causing such a terrible pain (according to Joshua, it was now a 10 in the scale of 1 to 10).
"It's a lymphoma. It's some kind of mass in his chest that's bothering him." said Dr. Fernandez, with a face that didn't express much emotion. I really preferred Dr. Harrisson, who was much nicer to both of us and seemed older and ten times more experienced, if you judge by the number of diplomas on the walls.
How could he say such a thing so calmly? I may not have gotten such good grades at school but I happened to know that lymphomas were a type of cancer, and not harmless, either.
And I know that doctors face saying similar information every single day, but I bet they feel bad for the patients, too. It occurred to me that Dr. Fernandez was maybe putting a face or maybe his strong point wasn't telling the families, but I would have felt a little better if the doctor had been a little sympathetic.
"You'll have to go to the 5th floor, Oncology, where they'll do several other tests and then they'll tell you what to do next, all right?" Dr. Fernandez said, ignoring Josh as I suspected he'd been doing for a few hours and not at all sympathetic to him, who was staring at him with an open mouth, or me, who was trying to grasp the information but not really succeeding at it.
We took the elevator upstairs, with Josh crying uncontrollably and I trying to comfort him but not really succeeding, as I had entered some kind of trance and I was kind of trying to deny it, myself. I mean, how do you just accept that your son has cancer? It can't be done.
That was the way that the longest day of my life began, and it slowly unfolded that the lymphoma was not the only concern.
By the end of the day, we were told that not only did Josh have a lymphoma, but also acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL), a fairly common type of leukemia in children.
At first I was worried that Josh wasn't going to be able to go to school, nor to soccer practice, perhaps not even to piano lessons. But as the diagnosis sunk in, I started to understand that there was a lot more in stake than a simple soccer game, that Josh would have to fight harder than he ever had on the soccer field, and that a much larger team was involved, a team that included family, doctors, nurses, the school, and many, many friends...