Fireflies Read Free

arm or a leg. In this case, the uncommon cancer had chosen an uncommon spot, the underside of Matt’s right sixth rib. Even so, Ewing’s had been known to respond to chemotherapy. His chances of surviving were judged to be eighty percent.
    “In January, he rapidly learned to familiarize himself with the names of arcane-sounding drugs. Vincristine. Methotrexate. Adriamycin.
    “Cytoxan. The last part of that chemical’s name—not its spelling but the way it’s pronounced—says everything. Toxin. These substances were poisons intended to kill the tumor, but unavoidably they hurt healthy tissue as well.
    “By early February, Matt’s long curly hair, grown in imitation of his rock music heroes, had begun to fall out in huge disturbing clumps that littered his bed and clogged the drain when he took his morning shower. It’s a measure of Matt’s spirit that he decided to cut this ugly process short by having a party in which his friends ceremonially shaved him bald. Some of them still have his locks. His eyebrows and eyelashes were less easy to deal with. He let them fall out on their own. He never tried to disguise his hairless condition. No wig for him. He displayed his baldness boldly for all the world to see and sometimes stare at and on occasion ridicule.
    “It’s a further measure of Matt’s spirit that the weakness, disorientation, and vomiting produced by his medications never slackened his determination to persist at school. A straight A student soon was making grades that a few months before would have embarrassed him.
    “But he hung in there.
    “Chemotherapy was infused through an intravenous line, a tube surgically implanted beneath the skin of his left chest. You couldn’t see it. But you could feel it. And for sure, every day, Matt was terribly aware the tube was present. The chemicals didn’t take long to be administered, an hour for each, but their damaging side effects to the bladder required a prolonged irrigation of saline solution to flush the chemicals from his system. Thus the beginning stages of Matt’s treatment forced him to stay in the hospital for three days every three weeks and to recuperate at home for another three days. A small price to pay.
    “Except that after several applications, it became frighteningly manifest that the treatment wasn’t working. The tumor had continued to grow. More aggressive chemotherapy was called for. His survival chances were now fifty percent. But as the weakness, disorientation, and vomiting worsened, he still didn’t lose his spirit. He began to think of the tumor as an alien within him, a monster whose strength, intelligence, and will were pitted against his own.
    “‘But I’ll beat it,’ he would say. ‘I’ll win. I want to be a rock star when I get older.’
    “Life is suffering.
    “The more aggressive chemotherapy didn’t work either. His physicians moved from chemicals that under ideal circumstances gave cause for hope to agents that are called ‘investigational,’ that is they’d been used so seldom that permission from the hospital’s ethics committee was required before Matt could receive them. Nonetheless, of the twenty-two cancer patients who’d received them, eighteen had experienced dramatic results. Sounds good. But you don’t receive investigational therapy unless you’re in the twenty percent of patients predicted to die.
    “Again Matt familiarized himself with arcane names. Ifosfamide. Mesna. VP-16. Now, in April, the length of his stay in the hospital while receiving chemotherapy was five days every three weeks. And the hangover from these drugs took another five days. Between treatments, he had only eleven good days, if ‘good’ is a word that applies here.
    “For once, the treatment worked. The tumor shrank fifty percent. Imagine his elation.
    “Imagine his equal and opposite distress when the next time he received these chemicals, the tumor—the alien—adjusted to them and began to grow again.
    “Surgery