By three a.m. – after another dose of Demerol – he was inconsolable, alternately pacing the living room and curling up on the floor, weeping. I called the hospital, and we were soon in the car, heading down the highway to the emergency room . . .
Halfway around the globe, Randy and Linda were on the phone, trying to get through to their son in Pennsylvania. Someone had relayed a message that Matt was sick, but Linda was sure it was a mistake. “Matt never got sick,” she recalled. “Nick was the one who was always coming down with something strange. I almost wanted it to be Nick, because I had been with him when he had pain, or when he was nervous and scared. I know how he reacts and handles things. But how would Matt deal with it? He had no experience with pain.” Little did she know what he was going through that very moment – one wave of pain after another, so brutal and searing that before long his morphine injections were abandoned in favor of a continuous intravenous drip.
On Sunday Tim visited Matt with Brian, another friend, and they decided to stay at the hospital overnight. The experience was pure hell, but Tim felt he was doing penance for his joke two days before:
I’ll tell you, those were the most agonizing hours I’ve ever spent with anyone. Matt was getting morphine shots when I arrived, but he was in such pain that they didn’t help. Every half hour he’d start writhing around in bed. He was fidgeting with his sheets, biting his lips, and drawing deep breaths. Then he’d get up, because he couldn’t sit any more, and pace wildly or crawl around on the floor. He was bellowing, “Oh God, please help me!”
Sometimes his pain was so bad that he would bend over double and claw at the walls. I’ve never seen anyone in such agony. He’d try one position after the next – crouching on the floor, sitting on the heater, lying on the bed. Every position caused excruciating pain.
At one point Matt was lying in bed, and he looked at me and said, “You know, Tim, it would really suck if this was cancer, wouldn’t it?” I said, “Yeah, it would.” Later a football game came on. Matt said, “Just so you guys know, I am not the entertainment. Watch the TV.”
But they couldn’t. Brian remembers:
For six long hours we sat next to Matt in relative silence. There’s nothing worse than sitting there helplessly, watching someone’s face contort with pain and knowing you can’t do a thing to alleviate it. We put our arms around him and rubbed his back and told him to hang in there. We wiped his face and forehead and adjusted his pillow. We gave him water to drink and tried to tidy up the room. When a nurse brought him prune juice (he had trouble going to the bathroom) he tried to laugh, but the next moment he was balling up his sheet and biting at it in pain.
During one of his worst episodes – he was lying on the floor, gasping for breath – his parents called in from Australia, and he was saying, “No, I’m all right; I’m fine.” That’s when I started crying.
On Monday, Matt’s second day in the hospital, he underwent a bone marrow aspiration. During the procedure, a hollow, eighth-inch bit is drilled into the patient’s hip bone – first on one side of the base of the spine, and then on the other. Following this, suction is applied in order to extract marrow for testing. Jonathan calls that moment the mule kick – the point at which the patient, who is normally howling in pain despite local anesthesia, will suddenly “go through the ceiling.” Jonathan remembered later:
Matt was very dubious about the whole thing, if only because it would require lying flat on his belly for a long time, a position he had not been able to attain in more than a week. As it was, the 45-minute procedure was sheer hell. Matt was kicking and screaming. I told him to squeeze my fingers, and squeeze them he did! My fingers ached for days afterward, and my knuckles were purple and bruised. Matt’s pillowcase was so saturated with tears that I could literally have wrung it out. And I cannot say how many tears I shed, to see him in this condition. If anyone thinks he can tolerate pain, he should try a bone marrow aspiration.
Jonathan drove in to see Matt multiple times over the next few days:
One time I dropped by and found Frank and another guy pacing the room with Matt. He would yell, and they would yell with him; he would cry and they would cry. He would grasp their hands, embrace them in bear hugs and squeeze them till they could hardly breathe. Then he’d collapse on the bed and fall asleep.
Another time when I came in, Frank was on the floor. His face was beet red from hours of crying and rubbing his eyes. Matt was dozing peacefully, but Frank said that every time his fever spiked, his pain would drive him up the wall, and he’d be completely out of control for the next hour or so. Frank had been through two of these episodes when I found him, and he was an emotional wreck.
In one sense, the young men who endured Matt’s first days of agony with him were only observers; in another, they were – as one of them put it later – being “laid low” along with him. Suddenly, life had been stripped to the bare essentials, to a battle for survival. “It totally threw me,” recalls Frank. “Matt had been living a normal life just days before all this! Now he was hooked up to monitors and IV lines and needed help getting in and out of a bathroom.”
Jonathan noted the same thing, but what really struck him was the change in Matt’s demeanor. Just one week ago he had been a capable, happy-go-lucky adult. Now he was more like a frightened, clinging child:
It was striking how quickly his confidence was toppled by his pain. He willingly let me – no, begged me – to pull him up in bed, smooth out his sheets, change his pajamas, bathe him, rub his legs, scratch his back, hold a glass of water to his mouth, run a damp washcloth between his toes, and dry his feet with a towel.
When I accompanied him to the OR for a lymph node excision, he was quite frightened, as he had never undergone an operation before. He asked a hundred questions over the next hour and begged me not to leave his side. I promised him I wouldn’t. I also reminded him of a conversation we had had the night before: that no matter how things turned out, we had to pray that it would be according to God’s will.
On Monday Matt asked me point blank whether I thought he had cancer. I told him that it was indeed looking more and more like it. He sat silent, aghast, and then looked me straight in the eye, tears streaming down his cheeks: “Do you think I will die before New Year’s?”
“Only God knows,” I told him.
It was at this point that I decided to tell Matt that his parents were already on their way from Sydney as we spoke. “That’s bad!” he grimaced.
“It is,” I agreed. “But you are in a bad way, and we have to face it and fight it.” He then said resignedly that if his parents were coming home all the way from Australia, it must be clear that he had cancer. All I could do was remind him that there was no firm diagnosis, and that there was nothing I knew that he didn’t.
The next days were a blur. Tuesday morning the pathology reports had come in: Matt had lymphoma, and it appeared to be an anaplastic, large-cell type. Further, the cancer seemed to have spread from the abdomen to the chest. At noon Matt was transferred by ambulance to the university hospital in nearby Morgantown, West Virginia. Later that afternoon an oncologist came by. His report confirmed everyone’s worst fears: Matt had anaplastic, large-cell lymphoma. Chemo could help him, but it would have to be started the very next day.
Meanwhile, Randy and Linda were on the way home, flying first from rural New South Wales to Sydney, then on to Los Angeles – a flight of twenty-one hours – then to New York, and finally to Morgantown. As Randy remembers the grueling trip:
We had a five-hour layover in Sydney and were already totally exhausted. We hadn’t slept for two nights. At first the airline couldn’t find our
