Three weeks with my brother - Nicholas Sparks [120]
“I’m sure it’s better,” Dana told him on the way in, “I feel great.”
But it wasn’t. Instead, the tumor had grown again. Now it was the size of three grapes, with tentacles spreading out from it.
Dana’s chemotherapy regimen was changed, but we all knew that the new drugs were generally not as effective as the first. Still, there was hope; in one clinical study, one patient out of twelve had been completely cured with the drugs she was now on. We still had reason to hope, the doctors assured us.
To be on the safe side, however, Micah and Dana, along with a couple of relatives, flew to MD Anderson in Houston, one of the most renowned cancer centers in the country, for a second opinion. The doctors concluded that she was receiving the highest standard of care, and that had Dana been a patient there, they would be doing nothing different.
When talking to us, Dana remained optimistic.
“I’m going to beat it,” she would say.
“I know you are,” both Micah and I would reassure her.
Afterward, Micah and I would say the same things to each other. Still, we spoke to each other less frequently that year than we had in the past; one or two calls a week, not the three or four calls that had once been normal. Cat and I continued working with Ryan; Micah was adjusting to married life and working hard; he’d also begun remodeling his home and was spending as much time with Dana as he could.
The phone calls were often painful. Talking to Micah reminded me of Dana, and vice versa. And even though I’d talk to Dana as frequently as I did with my brother, I could never escape the image of something terrible growing inside her, something irreversible.
That summer, drawing inspiration from my sister, I wrote A Walk to Remember. Jamie, the main character, embodied all the wonderful attributes of my sister, and all the worries I had for her future. It was the first time I’d ever cried while writing.
In the end, I dedicated it in memory of my parents, and to Micah and Dana.
My sister, though she knew it was about her, refused to read it.
“I don’t want to know how it ends,” she said.
By autumn, my sister’s tumor had shrunk. Not much, but progress nonetheless. She stayed on the same drug regimen, and we bided our time until winter, when she would get another CAT scan. We continued to live from one three-month cycle to the next.
In early December, Micah and Dana, along with Bob, Christine, and the kids, flew to North Carolina to visit. While there, we all dressed in khakis and long-sleeved white shirts, and sat for a family photograph taken on the beach. It still hangs in my living room today, and no matter how long you stare at it, by their appearance, you would never know that anything was wrong with Dana or Ryan at all.
A few weeks later, my sister called me on my birthday and sang to me. By then, I couldn’t help but notice that she had begun to slur words occasionally, and was beginning to have difficulty understanding some things. Still, she remained positive about her condition. But a couple of days after that, she got the results from her next CAT scan.
The second round of chemotherapy was failing. Her tumor was now the size of four grapes, and the tentacles continued to spread. She was placed on a new regimen, with new chemotherapy drugs.
“This is the last of the best,” we were informed. “After this, everything we can try is pretty much experimental.”
There was still hope, however. By then, hope was becoming the only thing we could cling to.
In February 1999, Micah and Dana, along with their spouses, flew to Los Angeles for the movie premiere of Message in a Bottle. That afternoon, before we attended the red-carpet premiere, however, we brought my sister to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. There, we’d made arrangements for my sister to see Dr. Keith Black, one of the finest neurosurgeons in the country. We wanted to make certain that surgery wasn’t an option, anywhere, by anyone, even if it entailed serious risks. While we all hoped that this latest round of chemotherapy would work, we wanted to keep every conceivable option open.