By Your Side Read online

  About the Book

  ‘I’ll be waiting for you, and when we beat this thing we are going to celebrate.’

  At 15 Cass Nascimento was so beautiful she left boys tongue-tied. But her beauty was more than skin-deep: she was a sunny, generous, kind force of nature.

  When Jason Carrasco was diagnosed with fast-spreading cancer at age 18 he feared the worst. Despite a loving family and supportive friends, he couldn’t seem to find the strength needed to survive. Then came Cass. As terrible as Jason’s ordeal was, Cass had already endured far worse, after being diagnosed with a malignant brain tumour at just 16 years old. The way she dealt with her diagnosis and gruelling treatment stunned everyone who came into contact with her the more terrible things got, the brighter Cass’s light shone.

  Now in remission, Cass knew firsthand how isolating it is to be a teenager whose future has been ripped away, so when she learned about Jason she was determined he would never feel alone again – she would be by his side no matter what.

  Cass was true to her word, and with her inspiration Jason made it through and was declared cancer-free. But fate had a terrible twist in store. Just as Jason walked into the sunlight Cass’s cancer returned. Now it was his turn to be there for her, hoping against hope that their deepest of bonds and her remarkable optimistic spirit and love for life would be enough to save this special girl.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  About You Can

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Picture Section

  Copyright Notice

  Medical Disclaimer

  For Cass – may the memories we shared last forever.

  Sony Foundation is the charity arm of the Sony Group of Companies operating in Australia.

  Sony Foundation’s ‘You Can’ is a national youth cancer program focused on improving the lives of young Australians with cancer. For too long, young cancer patients have been a ‘forgotten generation’, falling through the gaps of our healthcare system. Too old for children’s hospitals yet too young for adult wards, these young people aged between 16 and 25 have significantly poorer survival rates due to a lack of access to age appropriate care.

  The long term goal of ‘You Can’ is to build You Can youth cancer centres across Australia. These will help to address the lack of improvement in cancer survival rates by providing a focus for medical collaboration amongst medical professionals, encouraging specialist training and allowing for the delivery of a psychosocial support services equipped to deal with the issues specific to this age group. Most importantly, You Can centres provide age appropriate spaces within the hospital creating a community of young cancer patients ensuring young people no longer feel alone on their cancer journey.

  Sony Foundation has built their first You Can centre in Perth, recently opened their second You Can centre in Melbourne and will soon open two more You Can centres in Sydney and Brisbane. To date over $5 million has been committed by Sony Foundation to building You Can centres around Australia.

  For more information on Sony Foundation and You Can head to www.sonyfoundation.org

  Chapter One

  Impossible is nothing.

  As everyone knows, you don’t get to choose the family you’re born into. All I can say is I got very lucky. The happiness and stability of my childhood was a bedrock that helped me get through the soul-testing times that lay in wait. I’m not sure I could have survived the lowest points if I hadn’t known such love and support in those early years.

  I grew up in Blackbutt, a suburb of Shellharbour, south of Wollongong, New South Wales, which has a rich multicultural mix. My home was a melting pot of ethnic backgrounds filtered through the easygoing outdoor Aussie lifestyle. My father’s proper name is Jose Maria but he’s always known as Joe. As you might have guessed from his name, his parents were Spanish. Most of his siblings were born in Spain, but he came along after the family had migrated to Australia in search of better opportunities. My mother, Pina, was born to Italian parents who were living in Uruguay, where she spent the first 10 years of her life before her family also migrated here.

  Like many other migrants, both my grandfathers went to work at the nearby Port Kembla steelworks as labourers. Dad’s father, my abuelo Juan, had come from a very large family and he and my abuela Maria set about creating one of their own, with eight children, seven of them boys (the lone girl, my aunty Aurora, learned to hold her own from an early age!). Maria stayed at home to look after the family, so all eight of them got by on one wage, which meant living in hand-me-downs and sharing everything. (Dad says he can’t shake the habit of eating fast, because as a child if he was too slow he went hungry.) It made the siblings, especially the brothers, incredibly close.

  Because she had less interaction with the outside world, Maria never learned much English. I have only minimal Spanish, so my relationship with her has never been really tight, though she tells me te quiero – ‘I love you’ – every time I see her. I was much closer to my abuelo, a real character who loved to be around his grandchildren and keep them entertained. He was always playful, making hats for us out of newspapers or doing coin tricks where if we could guess the location of the coin we got to keep it. He died when I was just 10, but I treasure his memory.

  Mum’s parents, my nonno Giuseppe and nonna Maria, did it even tougher, arriving in Australia with their two children, Pina and her older sister, Tina, with only $50 to their name. Giuseppe’s early years were very hard and he was a taciturn man, often difficult to be around. He died when I was seven. Nonna Maria, 17 years younger than her husband, is a completely different character and my relationship with her runs very deep. She often took care of Melissa and me when our parents were working and is the classic Italian grandmother for whom nothing is too much trouble. She loved to make food for us and spoil us in any other way that she could. One day, as all teenagers do, I complained I was bored. The next time she went shopping she bought me a $700 PlayStation 2. I learned to be more careful with what I said around her after that!

  To this day I love sitting with Nonna and asking her to tell me stories about what it was like for her growing up, working in the fields at age nine and leaving home at 16 to try to find a job. Even now, at 73, after a lifetime of hard work, she scrubs her house from top to bottom. Nothing is more important to her than family, and her courage and inner strength are a real inspiration to me.

  My parents met through a mutual friend when they were teenagers and, before long, they were an item. They were soon smitten. Dad says he would get starry-eyed just thinking about Pina back then, and he’s still completely devoted to her 30 years later. They’d originally thought about having lots of kids but when their first child, Melissa, was aged four I came along and they decided the family was complete. My parents tell me there was no big-sister resentment about the new arrival, in fact, just the opposite – Mel doted on me. She appointed herself my second mother, popping my dummy back in when I cried and sitting with me for hours.

  Dad left school in Year 10 and two weeks later started at the steelworks, sometimes sharing a ride to work with his father in the early years. He started out as a fitter and machinist, and is still there 35 years later, now in environmental engineering and monitoring.
He’s always been a hard worker, and as well as his full-time job he worked part-time in a local pizza shop before buying it in partnership with two of his brothers. It was a big component of our family life: we went there for a meal every Saturday for the seven years they owned it.

  On top of this he also found time to build three houses over the years, but no matter how busy or tired he was he always made time for his kids. We would listen out when he was due home, and when we heard him approach we would run off and hide. He would seek us night after night – although I was under strict instructions not to repeat the fright I’d given my parents when, as a pre-schooler, I took the game a bit too seriously and didn’t respond to their increasingly frantic calls for me. Seriously worried, they phoned the police, and the neighbourhood mobilised in a massive search mission. It went on for hours until someone who had volunteered to stay at our place in case I wandered back heard giggling from my mother’s wardrobe where I’d been the whole time.

  I absolutely idolised Dad, who seemed to be able to do anything and always had the best advice when I needed it. We spent countless hours playing badminton, hitting a tennis ball against the back wall of the house (driving poor Mum mad) or down at the local park kicking a ball around. With my parents’ backgrounds, there was no question what code I would play: it was ‘the world game’ all the way. My father is so crazy about the sport, I think it would have broken his heart if I hadn’t been interested – even in his busiest years he continued to play with his mates in a weekend competition. Leaving nothing to chance, he and Mum put a soccer ball in my cot to make sure I got the bug nice and early. It worked. They tell me my first word wasn’t ‘mama’ or ‘dada’, it was ‘ball’.

  I joined a team at age six, along with new friends I’d made in school, including Adrian, who became like a part of the family and who’s still a really close mate today. Dad volunteered to take on the role of coach and he was great at being supportive of everyone in the team. Mum has always been just as proud and encouraging. She’s very physically demonstrative and showered Mel and me with hugs and kisses every day when we were children. She works as a clerical officer, and like Dad has been with the same company her entire career.

  As the years passed on Mel and I squabbled from time to time like any sister and brother, but we were always close. Even when our parents couldn’t take the bickering anymore and Dad started doling out punishments, she constantly offered to take the grounding or the smack for both of us, just to spare me. When I was old enough I joined her and my cousins at a nearby Catholic primary school. All but one of my dad’s siblings lived within a 20-kilometre radius and their kids went to the same school – for years there was a Carrasco in almost every grade. We knew there was always someone we could rely on if we needed help.

  Mel went into protective mode once I started school, holding my hand at the bus stop every day to make sure I didn’t get distracted and run off, and even giving up the chance to sit next to her friends on the bus in order to keep me company. At school she kept a watchful eye, getting me to check in with her every lunchtime to ensure I was eating. She even got physical when she thought it was the only way to protect me. When I was in Year 1 a kid on the bus slapped me. To his astonishment, Mel charged up to him and slapped him back even harder. He never dared to look sideways at me again.

  Our parents expected us to support one another in every way. Mel would come along to watch my football games and I would go to watch her dance – she won lots of prizes at it and was just as devoted to it as I was to soccer, which I played right through my school years. I remember one of the other boy’s mums warning a kid who kicked the ball fiercely at a fence one day. She said we should never do that because she knew a bloke who had booted a ball in anger only to have it rebound off the fence and come back hard, hitting him in the testicles with such force that one had to be amputated. My friends and I laughed in horror at the story, and I commented to them what a terrible thing that would be and how I didn’t know what I’d do if I lost a nut.

  During school breaks Dad would arrange rostered days-off or take holidays so he could spend time with us. Even during the term Dad and I spent hours together; we really enjoyed each other’s company. If we weren’t playing soccer we were watching it on TV or going to the fish markets to get the ingredients for a big cook-up of a traditional Spanish paella, a Friday night favourite in our house. Dinner was family catch-up time when we would trade stories about all the things we’d been up to that day and make each other laugh.

  I loved to relax with family, but in pretty much every other arena I was fiercely competitive. When I was younger, if the opposition scored when we were playing football I would start getting emotional at the fact that my team might fall behind. Even in the backyard with Dad I refused to go inside if I didn’t win whatever game we were playing. It was persistence that tipped over into obsession because I craved the feeling of accomplishment that came with winning. Teachers would call my parents in to discuss it, asking them why I felt like I had to come first, whether it was a maths test or a sporting activity, and why I was getting angry at myself if I thought I’d ‘failed’.

  My parents tried to support my enthusiasm and high standards for myself while aiming to shape my drive into something a bit more sportsmanlike. Every week that Dad was coaching my team he would wear a T-shirt on game day that bore the slogan ‘Impossible is nothing’, and every week he would urge me to live by that message, saying, ‘Jason, nothing is impossible – nothing, I tell you! You can do anything you set your mind to, but you have to really want it. You need to be hungry. You need to be focused. But, most of all, you need to believe.’ He would finish this pep talk by telling me how much faith he had in me, not just when it came to football, but in anything I did. That support and encouragement were instrumental in shaping me into the person I am today.

  The other fundamental message that ran through our lives was the importance of family above all else. When I was growing up, we visited each grandmother on alternating weekends, and milestones such as birthdays and communions were celebrated with the whole, extended clan. I was really close to all my cousins and loved spending time with them. There was a very European feel to these gatherings, with lots of banter. We had enough people to make two large teams for soccer or volleyball. If we were at Dad’s parents’ place, a table-tennis table would be set up in the lounge room for the kids to crowd around. Once we were fed, the adults would eat. When everyone was done, the flamenco dancing would start. They were very happy times.

  As we kids grew older and got wrapped up in our own activities the get-togethers became less frequent, but we all reunited for Christmas, and still do – it’s a magical time that makes me realise just how lucky I am.

  Gratitude was one of the core values our parents instilled in Mel and me, alongside integrity and respect. Integrity meant staying true to your values even when no-one was watching, and respect covered everything from simple good manners and thoughtfulness, such as taking your shoes off at the door when you go to someone’s house, to greeting male family and friends with a handshake and women with a kiss on the cheek. They encouraged us to build our own strong work ethics in the approach we brought to homework and to our extracurricular interests.

  Dad was the rock of the family, but at the same time he was open with his feelings, telling us often how much he loved us. He said to me, ‘Don’t ever be afraid to love the people around you.’ In the way that I looked up to him, he idolised his own father and he took his death very hard. I suddenly understood how fragile life can be and how important it is to make the most of every moment with our loved ones.

  Outside of family there wasn’t much that could take my mind off football, but in the middle years of primary school I discovered girls, specifically a girl in my class called Grace. She was pretty and funny. In fact, she was so perfect that all the other boys also had crushes on her. Plenty of them were bold enough to tell her, too. Not me. I was so shy I wouldn’t have known where to b
egin. Even asking her to pass the glue-stick was beyond me. There was only one thing for it: divine intervention. Grace became the star of my earnest pre-sleep prayers: Dear God, all I want in my life is to marry a girl like Grace. I promise I’ll be extra nice to all the younger kids if you give me this. Promise.

  Being at a Catholic school, we had a daily ‘prayer time’. In Year 4 this took the form of 10 minutes after lunch where the teacher would put on ‘blissful’ music and we were to commune with God either by lying quietly on the floor, sitting in a circle and praying together, or writing in a ‘prayer journal’ at our desks. I chose the journal option so I could pour out my feelings in the form of poems about Grace, which would show God my nightly pleadings weren’t just whims. There were lots along the lines of ‘every time I see her I get instantly lost in her eyes’. Looking back now it was A-grade cheese, but I was too young to realise that at the time so that’s not what made me hide the book deep inside my desk as soon as prayer time was over. It was the unbearable thought of how embarrassing it would be if anyone found out my true feelings.

  Can you guess where this is going?

  Yes, my furtive attempts to hide the journal made it a prime target for one of my classmates, who grabbed it when the teacher was out of the room and read it to the entire class. They laughed. I cried and never wrote in the journal again.

  I did develop confidence in other areas, though, and by Year 6 had decided I wanted to run as a student representative on the school council. This was a pretty ambitious aim and my parents tried to talk me out of it. They thought that those positions were reserved for kids whose parents played a role in the school activities and they pointed out that I had no real leadership experience, which they thought would count against me. But I liked the idea of developing those skills and becoming involved in decisions on behalf of our school. I was sure that if I put my case forward, the kids would see what I had to offer and vote for me. I put my foot down and told my parents that they were the ones who had instilled in me the belief that anything was possible if you worked at it, and I was going to do just that.