And the entire time we’d plotted course and travelled through time, I’d been a dead man walking.
I might have run from Mclary’s. I might still live and breathe and exist, but I’d died there.
I was a ghost.
Della had fallen in love with someone who was already dead….He just didn’t know it yet.
God, the pain.
The torment.
The undying yearn to somehow reverse the clock and forbid such tragedy from happening.
I thought I was prepared to die. I believed I would accept when my time came because I would’ve had an entire lifetime with Della by my side.
I wanted kids with her.
I wanted the privilege of growing old with her.
I wanted to marry her.
Now…that lifetime was no longer an option.
No one knew how long I had.
Statistics had been thrown around until I had to stop listening. I refused to let depression latch onto one answer while hope clung to another.
How fucking twisted that I got my wish?
I would die before her.
It was a guarantee now, not merely a possibility.
And I would die so much earlier than I wanted.
That was the worst part.
Lying in bed, warm and cocooned in the dark—that was when the aching, quaking grief found me. Tears would leak from my eyes as I squeezed them shut against the agony of what existed in our future.
I’d clutch a sleeping girl close, stifling my urge to cough, hating the curse in my lungs.
The tests had come back positive.
Stage one mesothelioma.
John had been there when I’d heard the news. When the phone fell from my hand and the doctor on the other end asked us to come see him for further information. When I’d heard words such as latency period, chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery, I’d shut down.
I couldn’t help it.
I turned blank inside to prevent pure, undiluted rage from consuming me.
Rage at life.
Rage at injustice.
Rage at unfairness.
Rage at love itself.
Life, it seemed, had decided I’d loved too deeply and for long enough. I’d had Della for longer than most couples, and we were still so young.
But I was greedy.
I didn’t want to die.
I wanted more and more and more.
I wanted everything I would never have and it fucking tore me up inside that I couldn’t.
So, when doctors hemmed and hawed about my prognosis, I said nothing.
John cried.
I didn’t.
When treatment plans were discussed, John demanded all of it, any of it, immediately.
And I’d stared into silence and wondered.
How?
How would I ever tell Della?
How would I ever break her heart the way my own heart was breaking?
How could I protect her from all of this while ensuring she would be safe once I’d gone?
Being given that diagnosis was the start of a war between John and me.
He wanted to pay for surgery straight away.
I wouldn’t accept charity.
He wanted to hook me up to drips and lock me in the hospital.
I needed to be outside.
Both of us wanted a solution, but I refused to accept the money he had from Patricia’s life insurance, and I had no intention of letting Della see me frail and weak post-surgery.
John was willing to condemn me to a life of sickness if it meant extending that life by a few years.
But I had no intention of being bedridden.
I was incurable.
We both heard that truth.
And now, it was the hardest decision of my life to gamble on what option would give me most of what I wanted.
Rushing into it wasn’t going to happen.
I needed to think.
To plan.
To strategize.
For a month, we argued while I researched, and he rang every hospital in the country. Not having any money or insurance, my choices were slim.
But then, John’s doctor referred me to an oncologist who dealt with mesothelioma and agreed to see me for free, considering I was one of the younger patients to show symptoms, and I wasn’t on death’s door just yet.
I had time.
I had the potential to be studied.
I lied to Della once again, claiming I was inspecting a guy’s farm for new fence lines, and headed to the appointment on my own.
I didn’t want John there. I needed to do this alone. I wanted the luxury of showing my fear to a doctor rather than acting brave around a friend.
And that was how I found out two things that didn’t save my life but definitely gave me hope.
There were off-label trials for men like me. Two drugs that had shown success in later stages but had yet to have conclusive evidence in stage one.
Keytruda—an immunotherapy that was administered by intravenous injection for thirty minutes every three weeks, and a listeria-based vaccine called CRS-207 that had shown promise.
One was a passive immunotherapy and one was an active, meaning my already pre-loaded immune system that had adapted and grown with me would have help in fighting the cells that were slowly killing me and be taught to recognise those cells.
I liked the sound of that.