By Your Side Read online

  In mid-January I started my new job. My traineeship wasn’t directly connected with my uni course, which I would do part-time; however, when they saw how committed I was, my managers at work told me I could take three hours in the middle of the day to attend lectures once uni started.

  The pain continued to worsen. Dad took me to a different physio, where I said again I thought I’d pulled something at the gym. The physio agreed and recommended swimming and more back-strengthening exercises. I followed the advice but nothing helped. Dad took me to our family doctor, who said the pain should go away ‘in a few days’ – even though by now it had been dragging on for weeks and weeks – and in the meantime I should use painkillers to control it.

  In late January Kirsty, who I’d met when we all used to go to the basketball games, turned 18. While I’d lost touch with others from those days, Kirsty and I had become close friends. She’d stood by me during the Bell’s palsy and had offered a shoulder for me to cry on when Mitchel died. She was having a birthday party at her house and I was in so much pain I didn’t feel like fronting up. But she’d been there for me and I felt I really had to make the effort, so I dosed myself up on painkillers and went along.

  Kirsty’s parents were happy to have people over … as long as they stayed outside in the backyard and didn’t take the party into the house itself. Guests could only go in to use the toilet, then come straight out again. I made the rounds of the backyard saying hello to everyone, then settled in for a drink and catch-up with some of the people I was closest to. A bit later, on my way to the back verandah door en route to the bathroom, I passed a glassed-in sunroom at the rear of the house. There was a girl sitting inside, all on her own.

  It looked like Cass Nascimento, although I had to look twice to make sure. I hadn’t seen her in person for three years. She’d always had a slight build, but she looked much skinnier than I recalled. She was still so beautiful, though, that for a moment I flashed back to being that awkward, shy Year 8 kid who could barely stutter out a word when I met her. Near me, I saw a girl who used to come along to the basketball with Cass and tapped her shoulder to ask if it really was Cass and why wasn’t she out here with everyone else. She said yes, it was, and she was inside because she couldn’t risk getting bitten by a mosquito for fear the bite might become infected. (I found out later she had known the party was outdoors and had put on insect repellent, but there were just so many mozzies she felt like she couldn’t stay out any longer and had gone inside to wait for her mother to pick her up.)

  The room Cass was sitting in had a sliding glass door, and at that moment Kirsty’s mother opened it from the outside. Cass turned to look, and as she did I caught her eye and waved. She waved back, although the slightly confused expression on her face suggested she hadn’t quite placed me yet. I started to go in to say hello but the lady of the house said, ‘No-one allowed inside, Jason.’

  ‘I just wanted to see my kebab bud,’ I pleaded.

  Cass, who heard this, started laughing and said, ‘You remembered.’

  ‘How could I ever forget?’ I answered, then said to Kirsty’s mother, ‘I’ll only stay in there for five minutes …’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘But be quick or everyone else will want to go in.’

  I sat down and Cass and I started the conversation by recalling our 14-year-old online chats and some of the lame things we used to say to one another. Then, with a big grin, she asked, ‘Remember the first time we met and you didn’t even say anything, just stood there like a stunned mullet?’

  ‘I may or may not recall that,’ I said, ducking my head.

  Cass clearly remembered it very well. ‘Every time I used to talk to you, you would take ages to reply.’

  There was nothing for it but the truth: ‘That’s because I was thinking for hours to try to impress you with my answer!’ I was the first to make reference to her brain tumours, saying, ‘I just want to tell you that I’ve been through a similar experience to you, with Bell’s palsy, and I know how it feels to be at your lowest.’

  Instead of getting insulted or upset at this massive ignorance on my part about the horrible time she’d had over the past 16 months, Cass said, ‘Oh no, that’s terrible. What’s Bell’s palsy?’ She listened while I explained and then expressed sympathy for me, but when it came to her own illness she said, ‘These things happen and I guess we just have to go with the flow of life.’

  Her phone rang. She checked the display, saw it was her mum and sent it to voicemail so we could keep talking a little longer. But her mother called back, so Cass excused herself to take it. ‘I’m sorry, I need to pick this up or else my mum will worry. I’ll make sure I’ll add you on Facebook.’

  Now that we’d stopped talking, I became aware that the painkillers I’d taken were wearing off; my back was hurting again. I went to the toilet and when I returned Cass had gone. I left soon after, in too much pain to enjoy the party. Later that night Cass and I connected on Facebook, but that was about as far as it went. We didn’t continue our conversation or have meaningful interaction in the months that followed. I was preoccupied.

  Pre-season soccer training had started up and I should have been doing two weeknight sessions a week, but even taking painkillers I was hurting too much to get through them. We went back to the family doctor, who now gave me prescription medication and recommended anti-inflammatories but still thought it was just a muscle strain exacerbated by poor posture. I stopped going to the gym and took a break from soccer. Even so, I found at work I had to stop and lie down on the floor at the back of the open-plan office and stretch for a couple of minutes to try to find some relief. My co-workers began teasing me about being ‘the new kid who thinks he can take a nap whenever he wants!’ I began getting massage and acupuncture treatments, but nothing helped.

  During January and February things had been manageable, just, but in March uni began and so did the TAFE course that was part of the traineeship. I had seriously underestimated how hard it would have been to cope with full-time work, uni two nights a week and TAFE one afternoon a week, even if I had been able to concentrate fully. The pain was so bad that I could barely think, and I was flat-out trying to keep up with everything. I knew how much of a stress relief soccer had been when I was doing my HSC and thought it might be good to pick it up again now, so I attempted to start training but just couldn’t do it, the pain was too great. I saw a chiropractor and gave my usual explanation: ‘I think I did some damage at the gym.’ I was in so much pain I could barely lie down on his table. He said, ‘A strain does not cause this much pain. It has to be something else.’

  On the third visit to the GP, he rather reluctantly gave me a referral to an orthopaedic surgeon who specialised in back pain. It took about a month to get in to see him (and cost a bomb), and by the time the appointment finally came around in late March I was in such agony that the only way I could get to sleep at night was by applying a hot water bottle to my lower back, despite the warm weather. But the surgeon just diagnosed a micro-tear in the muscle, saying, ‘This happens all the time to footballers’. He added, ‘I’ve spoken to the leading doctor in back studies and we still don’t know what causes back pain. All we know is if you rest it and train it, gradually it will get better.’

  He said this even though I’d told him it clearly wasn’t improving, and the pain was actually at its worst when I was resting. By this stage, movement, like walking around, was often the only thing that brought a little relief. He finished up by saying that I should continue football training and taking anti-inflammatories before a session, and to come back and see him in a month.

  In the weeks that followed, I kept up the swimming and the back exercises I’d been given, but the pain got worse and worse and worse. In fact, one night I begged Dad to take me to hospital because of it. They examined me but couldn’t find anything wrong. They gave me very strong pain medication, and when it worked sent me home to get some sleep. At the follow-up appointment with the specialist,
I explained what had happened but he repeated his view that it was a micro-tear.

  In late March, the GP sent me for an X-ray and a CT scan of my abdomen and kidneys – there was a history of kidney stones in my family and he thought perhaps that was causing the problem – but the results showed nothing amiss.

  Over the next three weeks I got ‘sack-whacked’ three times. If you’re not young and male, you mightn’t have come across this particular term. It means being hit with a light to moderate force in the groin for the amusement of your mates. Hey, what can I say, it’s the kind of thing we young guys find funny. Somehow it had never actually happened to me before, but in that short space of time I got three whacks from three different mates. ‘What’s the capital of Thailand?’ was the set-up for the first one. To the response, ‘What?’ my mate said gleefully, ‘Bangkok’ and landed a well-aimed blow. The other two skipped the preamble and went straight for the whack.

  When I realised a little while later that my right testicle was swollen I figured it was just a bit of bruising from these whacks. I applied an ice-pack in the privacy of my own room, but I didn’t connect it with the back pain. I never mentioned it to the doctors and other medical people we were seeing, I would have been way too embarrassed. I didn’t know anything about testicular cancer, and even if I had I would have assumed that the fact the average age of diagnosis in Australia was 35 would have ruled it out completely as a possibility for me, a healthy 18-year-old.

  Only when the swelling had been there for a week and my testicle was the size of a tennis ball did I mention it to Dad. He and Mum rushed me back to the doctor, who took one look at it and said, ‘That’s going to need to come out.’ He didn’t say the word ‘cancer’ or explain what he thought the problem might be, he just started writing me a referral for a CT scan that needed to be done later that week, after which he said we had to come back and see him. But with this sort of answer, Dad, Mum and I could sense it was something critical.

  Dad, trying to be positive as always, said, ‘Well, we don’t know for sure yet, do we?’ The doctor replied, ‘The scan will show for certain, but it will have to come out,’ and that was it.

  I walked out of the doctor’s room back into the waiting area, where Mum was. My knees gave way and I curled up on the ground, crying and shaking in panic at what I’d just heard. It was a large, open reception area at a medical centre, and at that moment an old school friend walked past and waved, then looked puzzled as he realised what I was doing. I was in too much distress to try to explain. Mum and Dad reassured me as they got me to the car to take me home.

  That evening I called my best friends, Tomic and Adrian. They were my go-to guys when things went wrong and they somehow always knew how to make me feel better. This was no exception. I rang Tomic first and was crying as I explained what had happened. He comforted me, saying, ‘Jason, you don’t even know if you need surgery. Don’t fret about things that haven’t happened yet.’

  But later that night, April 3, I started vomiting uncontrollably. Dad rushed me back to the nearby Shellharbour Hospital, where I was admitted through the emergency department and given a repeat of the CT scan I’d had three weeks earlier. I waited on a bed in a cubicle for the results. A nurse came in and told me, ‘Jason, the scans are showing you have a large tumour in your belly. The doctor will be along soon to talk about it with you.’

  Still, somehow not understanding what a tumour was, I gave a laugh of relief and said to Dad, ‘Well, that explains my back pain – we finally found the source!’

  Then a doctor came in to see me. She began to console me, telling me everything would be okay. But I gradually got what was going on and my mind was scrambling, trying to make sense of it all. Nothing had shown up in the first scan because the cancer hadn’t advanced beyond the testicle at that point. Now there was a six-centimetre tumour in my abdomen, in addition to the cancer in the testicle.

  Dad called Mum and had the horrible job of breaking the news to her and Mel. Crying, they got in the car to race down to the hospital. Meanwhile I called Adrian. I just wanted to talk to him. Maybe he could help me understand. As soon as he heard how upset I was and found out what was going on, he said he would be there right away, and he too jumped in the car and came straight over.

  The hospital doctor wanted as much information as he could get about the symptoms I’d been having and the attempts that had been made to find out what was wrong. Our family doctor happened to be one of our neighbours, so we had his mobile number. Dad called him in tears and explained what was happening. In anguish, Dad said, ‘How on earth did we not find this earlier?’ and he replied, ‘This is just one of those things.’

  Dad then called his oldest brother, Manuel, and asked him to tell the rest of the family. They both knew it would be a hard thing for Luis and Kylie to hear, coming less than two years after their son Mitchel’s death.

  I was put in an ambulance for the 25-minute trip to Wollongong Hospital. Dad came with me while Mum and Mel followed in the car. Mel also cried the whole way, although Dad tried to reassure her that ‘Everything will be all right. Now that they know what’s going on, they can fix it.’ As he was saying those words, he was also trying to convince himself they were true.

  When we arrived it was 2 am but the emergency department was surprisingly busy. They found a bed for me very quickly, though. My Uncle Manuel and Aunty Irene had arrived and a nurse came to tell Dad, who had stepped out of the room. He’d tried to stay strong in front of me but confessed to me later that he just fell into his big brother’s arms and cried uncontrollably. Over the next half-hour, Dad’s sister Aurora and brothers Emilio, John and Luis all came, bringing various family members with them. Luis wept as he approached – not only could he see the anguish on my father’s face, but the room in which I’d been placed was right next to the one where Mitchel had been pronounced dead.

  There really was a crush in the room now, and when the registrar arrived to talk to me he asked everyone except immediate family to move to the waiting room. He confirmed that the scans showed I had testicular cancer. It was an aggressive kind, travelling fast, and was responsible for the tumour in my abdomen. ‘I’m very sorry to tell you this, Jason, but we need to remove both your testicles tonight to stop the tumour growing.’

  It would be incredibly hard for even the most mature adult to deal with this bombshell but I was only 18. I’d never felt so vulnerable and powerless. I almost couldn’t breathe. He was going on to say that after surgery I would need to have chemotherapy, but all I could focus on was the idea that I would lose both my testicles.

  I turned to Dad, frantic for some reassurance. ‘Dad, what did he say? What did he say?’

  Dad remained calm, radiating strength as he turned to the doctor. ‘Is there anything else we can do?’

  ‘I want to save his life,’ the doctor said.

  ‘But couldn’t you take one testicle, not two? Only one is inflamed,’ said Dad as I cried out, ‘All I want to do is have kids. Why is this happening?’

  The doctor said again, ‘All I want is to save your life, Jason. But it might be possible to bank some sperm before surgery. As soon as we’re finished here, I’ll see what we can do about that.’

  ‘Wait, am I going to make it?’ I asked.

  Gently, he replied, ‘We don’t know, Jason, but we’re going to do our best to make sure you do.’

  He left and I must have been so overwhelmed I passed out for a short while. When I came to, Dad was still with me in the room but Mum and Mel weren’t. I heard them outside the door, crying. Dad maintained eye contact with me, giving me the same reassuring look he’d use when things were going against us in a soccer match. Without even speaking, he was telling me we would get through this together.

  I tried to focus on his eyes, but I kept getting distracted by the thoughts racing around and around in my brain: This is obviously a mistake. I’m just a teenager. Cancer is for old people. I’m a uni student, not a cancer patient; someone somewh
ere has made a big mistake. I get it now – all those things I used to be angry and annoyed about, like not getting the grades I wanted or running late to training, they’re nothing; I won’t let any of that upset me now. OK, I understand, I’ve learned my lesson. Can I go home now?

  Chapter Three

  Since the house is on fire, let us warm ourselves.

  – Italian proverb

  It was too much, I couldn’t take it in. I was so shell-shocked and in agony from the pain in my back that I couldn’t get the words out, but I managed to make Dad understand as I stammered how there was no way they were going to cut off both my testicles. Dad could see how frightened I was. ‘We don’t know yet whether that’s the case,’ he said, ‘but even if it is, that doesn’t necessarily mean not having children – there’s the sperm bank option. The good news is they’ve caught it in time to treat it. If you have to get cancer, this is the best one to get. I promise you, son, we are going to get through this together. I love you so much.’

  I didn’t say anything, just looked into his eyes and nodded. He’d always been my rock; now I felt that if I could just cling on to the deep meaning in his words I’d have a lifeline that could get me safely back to the way things used to be, with me on the soccer field and Dad yelling encouragement from the sidelines, urging me on when I thought I was done. In those moments I only needed to look across at him, and I knew I had more to give, I could dig even deeper. If I could do it there, I could do it here. Impossible is nothing – I needed to hold onto that thought.