Friday rolls around and I wait to hear from Drew. The call doesn’t come until almost noon.

“Sorry, babe. I was poked, prodded, questioned, my results were reviewed, and quite frankly I’m not sure I want to talk about it.” He sounds fatigued.

“Want to wait until I get home?”

“Yeah. Do you mind?”

“No. As long as you snuggle with me.”

“Always.”

On the way home I pick up Drew’s favorite pizza and a six-pack of his favorite IPA beer. When I get home, he’s lying on the couch, asleep in the den, the TV on. I almost break down in tears looking at him, because right now, he looks so robust and healthy. I can’t imagine he has cancer in his lungs.

Sitting on the couch next to him, I put my head on his chest and wrap my hand around his neck. I know it’ll wake him, but I don’t care. I don’t want either of us to ever sleep again and waste precious moments we could spend together.

“Hmmm. I’ve always loved waking up to you.”

“I’ve always loved sleeping with you. By that I mean making love, and not actually sleeping.”

“Funny.”

“I brought dinner home.”

“That’s nice.” He yawns. “I’m not particularly hungry, though.”

I lean back and inspect him. “Did an alien beam down from space and invade Drew McKnight’s body. Not hungry?”

He half smiles. My attempt at amusing him is an epic failure. “I’m sorry. We don’t have to eat. We don’t have to do anything. We can just lie here all night and not even talk, if that’s what you want.”

“Cate, that’s not fair to you. You need to know the plan.”

I toe off my shoes and stretch out on top of him. “Shoot.”

“Tuesday morning I go in for round one of chemo. Different drugs. Same side effects.”

I grab his face and say, “You good with this?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. Then what?”

“We do three rounds, then surgery. But this time we’ll do bang, bang, bang.”

“Meaning?” I ask.

“No time off in between.”

Ouch. That’s rough. That means he’ll debilitate. With zero time off, it won’t give him much time to regroup and gain his appetite back.

“That’s rough, Drew.”

“I know. They know it. But they think I’m hearty enough and it gives me the very best fighting chance and I have to take it.”

“Okay, I’m with you. Are the drugs as harsh?”

“Yeah, but the doses will be different and they’ll add more protective measures to make sure I don’t get neutropenic and such.”

“Okay.”

“Then PET scans and if they like the progression of the shrinkage, then surgery.”

He’s tempering his Greek because I understand these terms, when usually I don’t. This tells me he really doesn’t want to talk much more about it, and I’m good with that.

Three weeks later, Drew is down twenty-five pounds and feels like hell. I bring him milk shakes, ice cream from his favorite ice cream shop, sundaes, cake, brownies, chocolate chip cookies, you name it, to try to get some pounds back on him. But eating is a huge problem. He’s nauseated all the time. The drugs they give him to prevent it don’t seem to be that effective. Ben, bless him, scores some weed and that helps the most. Plus, it has the added benefit of stimulating his appetite. At first I worry it will hurt his lungs, but Drew, in his dry humorous way, looks at me and says, “What, Cate? Worried I might get cancer?”

And what can I say to that?

He finally seems to be turning in the right direction. The doctors won’t even consider surgery until they can get his strength up. So Ben comes over every night and they smoke and get high. And by high, I mean completely stoned. Drew eats, and Ben and I laugh, because Drew is freaking hilarious. He comes up with the craziest shit, like telling us we’re going to plant asparagus in the back yard, instead of grass. Then we’ll just mow it down once a week and have dinner afterwards. Ben and I try to convince him it won’t work, but he has it all planned out in his head that it will.

One night we’re all sitting around, and my mom decides to pay us a surprise visit. Drew, who is stoned as hell, pulls out his pipe, and offers my mother a hit off it. Ben almost falls out of his chair, and I have to drag my mother in the kitchen and explain things to her.

“Cate, I am aware of the medical uses of marijuana. I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday, you know. I did smoke the stuff when I was in college.”

“I didn’t know that, Mom. But, uh, thanks for sharing.” Jeez, talk about a shocker. I can’t conjure up an image of my mom taking a hit off a bong for the life of me.

“By the way, Cate, where did Drew get his pot from?”

“Oh my god, Mom, I can’t believe you just asked me that.”

She shrugs. “Well you never know if you’ll ever need it.”

When I tell Ben what she said, he dies laughing again.

“Oh god, the picture of your mom hitting the pipe is just too good. Cate, we need to get her high with us.”

“Ben Rhoades! That is a big negative.”

Drew chuckles. “Oh, Cate, I think she’d get so into it.”

“Most likely. You two are terrible.” I shake my head at them and leave the two of them alone. Ben is good for Drew. He gets his mind off things and relaxes when Ben is around. And Ben is coming around a whole lot these days.

The following week, Drew’s doctors deem him strong enough and ready for the surgery. The limbo I’ve been surviving in ends much too abruptly for my liking. But Drew is ready to get the dog and pony show on the road, as he says.

“Are you scared?” I ask him the night before.

“Not of the procedure itself. I’ve been through it once, so I know what to expect. I’m afraid they’ll either find more inside than the scans showed, or they won’t be able to grab it all.”

“I’ll be brave for the both of us,” I tell him, which is a big fat lie. I’m so afraid I can’t eat or sleep.

In the morning, we arrive at the hospital and things run as expected. My support team is there: Ben, Jenna, my parents, and Drew’s parents. Jenna holds my hand the whole time during the five-hour surgery, and Ben never sits down. As close as Jenna and I are, Ben and I have really bonded over the last month or so. He is every bit as worried and scared as I am. I glance at Letty and Ray and my heart plunges into my guts. I can’t imagine being in their shoes, having your only child go through cancer treatment like this. A sudden urge hits me and I run to Letty and throw myself at her, burying my face in her lap, my arms wrapped around her. She must think I’m a lunatic, but I can’t help myself.

Her arms wrap around me and we try to comfort each other. I’m not even sure how long we stay like this, but eventually Drew’s surgical team makes an appearance. Dr. Rosenberg also shows up, which is weird. This can’t be good.

The head surgeon, Dr. Sherman, leads the talk. “Surgery went well. Drew’s in recovery and he’ll be fine. We had to take the entire lung. It was peppered with mets. When we got into the lobe we thought was affected, we decided to check further and it soon became clear that we were dealing with a more aggressive situation here. We also had to resect more bone than we initially thought. So now it’s a wait and see.”

“So he can live with one lung, right?” I may sound stupid, but I don’t know these things.

“Oh, yeah. He’ll adapt. Most people only use a percentage of their lung capacity as it is.”

“Oh, okay. And what about more chemo?”

Dr. Rosenberg says, “We’re going to have to switch that again, since we didn’t get the results we sought. But we’ll discuss that after Drew recovers. Our goal now is to get him healed up after the surgery and out of the hospital.”

All of us, Ben, Letty, my parents, Jenna, and myself look like deer in the headlights. Everyone except Ray. Being a doctor, he knows what’s going on. He gets it. But I don’t want to ask. Because I want to bury my head in the sand and pretend none of this happened.