Treatment Continues

Note: A few months ago I started a story mostly for myself—this is a thinly veiled account of the cancer a close friend's daughter is fighting. What happens to Justin is what is happening to Lisa. The story is real and I admit that it's self-indulgent. That's OK; we all deal with things in our own way.

This is the next chapter; the ending is still out there.

Simon

 _

So at first they told us at Sloan that he would have to go through the entire chemo thing again, but then the doctors said that Justin wasn't really strong enough to have the level of chemo that he needed so they would give him a lower dosage and basically cross their fingers. After that had run its course for a couple of months, they would use radiation to try to follow up on what the chemo had hopefully started.

With a little luck he would be able to actually go to a couple of classes and then with a whole lot of luck he would be able to actually matriculate as a full time student after the fall semester was over. I had stressed to the doctors that it was important that he be able to get out and be a normal kid for at least part of the time. He had to. He had to do normal things and talk about stuff that didn't have anything to do with blood counts or any of that crap. He needed to walk down a street with some asshole college kids whose biggest problem was whether or not they would be getting laid that weekend and whether or to order the pepperoni or the sausage.

He needed to worry about assignments and papers and being late for class instead of whether or not the anal fissures would come back.

God, he needed that so fucking badly.

The problem, as the doctor explained to me when Justin was asleep, was that he wasn't strong enough to take the full dose of chemo and the radiation probably wouldn't be strong enough to eliminate the tumors. The tumors in his breasts could be dealt with in a double mastectomy—didn't that just sound like a party—but the real problems were the tumors in his lungs.

The lung tumors, yeah, the lung tumors—the ones that are inoperable.

Anyway, the lung tumors are inoperable and even with gating—that's some hotshit way they have to control the radiation so that there isn't much over spray—even with the gating they won't use it on his left side because they're afraid of causing damage to his heart. Shit and fuck me.

He's not a candidate for a lung transplant. I asked. He wouldn't survive the surgery even if they could find a donor.

So, anyway, that's what happened. Justin would go to chemo early in the morning, like seven and then after about four or five hours of the chemo drip he'd force himself up and get a cab or a bus or a subway over to Parsons for a class maybe three times a week. He didn't have the energy to do more than two classes and the professors knew that he was sick, but he wouldn't let them make any allowances for him.

That was just so fucking like him—insisting that he'd do it on his own Goddamned terms. He insisted that his essays and sketches had to be the best in the damn class or he wouldn't turn them in.

No one else gave two craps about that, not really. Well, except Justin, of course.

Shit—I was just so fucking happy that he was out and dealing with other kids and normal day-to-day shit that I wouldn't have cared if he flunked everything. Honest to shit, I wouldn't have cared. God—just to see the look on his face when he would sit on the couch reading some assigned book or when he was busting his butt over some design project that was due, just like any normal nineteen year old—God that made my day every time.

And, Jesus, there were times when it was all he could do to drag himself out of the bed, out of the apartment and out of the hospital, but he did it almost every time.

I don't know if I could have done it. I honest to God don't know if I could have.

So finally6, finally the chemo rounds were over and he started on the radiation, which was a good thing because it didn't make him sick like the chemo did. His hair could start to grow back again and he looked healthy. Damn, he just looked so healthy and he had more energy and he could do things and go places—at least places that were fairly close by. His appetite started to return and it was looking good then. He did—his color was good and he just began looking and acting like Justin again, not like Cancer Boy. God, it was just so good to see that.

Jenn and Molly came to visit over Thanksgiving and we all went to see a couple of shows. He took them to the Met to see the exhibits and they started Christmas shopping and it was just so damn good. I went to work, but I saw them over the weekend and at dinner and we had fun together. We really did.

So Justin was in the radiation therapy after his family left and the doctor took me aside while he was still in the treatment room. We had been joking around with Manku, he was the regular tech and a good guy, and just having a good time—or as good a time you can have during treatment in a hospital.

So the doctor sort of took me into a corner and told me the deal. Here we were doing the radiation, thinking that it was helping and thanking our lucky stars because it didn't make him sick and his hair had grown back and he was happy and feeling pretty good—did I tell you?

The doctor, the one who was handling Justin's case looked at whatever machine or monitor of film you look at to see how that's coming. Do you want to know what she told me? I know, the shoe is about to drop here.

That fucking old dropped shoe.

She said that she'd never seen anything like it—she'd never seen new tumors appear while a patient was actually undergoing radiation therapy. It was a first. The new one, the new main one, anyway was another muscular tumor down near his ribcage. It had grown while he was undergoing radiation.

Jesus. It was a first for them, they'd never seen that happen before.

Then the oncologist told me that the surgery that they had hoped to perform sometime after Christmas, the one that would hopefully remove the primary tumors and hopefully either stop or slow the spread of the cancer—you remember that surgery? The possible double mastectomy because of the breast tumors? You remember?

Well, it's not going to happen because they can't pinpoint which site is the primary tumor and now the fucking cancer cells are fucking everywhere—in his blood, in his muscles, his lungs, his breast—fucking everywhere.

 They need to find the primary tumor before they'll operate and they seem to be having this debate about which one it is—shit, OK, I'm not a doctor, but does it even matter at this point? I mean—fuck.

Oh, God.

And so now the plan is to give him another year—another Goddamned year!—of chemo and then see where they are. One week on then two or three off so that he can recover from that Goddamned poison that they hoped would save his life and now looks like it's doing dick.