“Seriously, Lil, the dude is gaga over you. He’s one of those rare good ones. You know I wouldn’t let him near you if he wasn’t.”
“I know. I get that vibe from him as well. And honestly, I guess I’m kinda diggin’ him, too.”
“Really?” he asks, confused.
I shrug my shoulders. “Yeah, it’s a recent development.”
“Sweet. Well, this evening just got a whole lot more interesting.”
He grabs two of the drinks that were just set on the bar while I grab the other two. We start weaving our way through the crowd toward the table where Charlie and Rob are now sitting.
“So, what about Charlie?” he asks.
“J, unless you are one hundred and ten percent over your whorish ways, you’d better stay far away from her.”
I hear his laugh above the loud music.
“Noted,” he responds.
Jax
“I’m not doing it, Jax! And I’m done talking about it!” Stella yells.
She storms past me, holding a towel around her body. Grasping her towel in one hand, she uses the other to sort through her dresser drawer. She faces away from me as water droplets fall from her damp hair, rolling down her back until the towel absorbs them.
“Stella, please,” I plead. “Just try it. It might make a difference. Don’t give up.”
To put it mildly, things have been stressful lately. According to the scans, the cancer is growing. The protein therapies that Stella has been on don’t seem to be slowing its growth any longer. Stella has also been experiencing more side effects from both the cancer and now the new medicines that she’s been taking to combat those side effects.
Stella’s health has changed a lot in the six weeks since we’ve been married. The scariest new development, for me, is the seizures. Until Stella, I never witnessed one before, and it is unnerving. It is especially frightening to watch someone I love have one, knowing that a deathly cancer in her brain is causing it. Stella doesn’t remember the seizure after the fact, and I’m grateful for that small blessing. The doctors want to try a round of aggressive chemotherapy, but she won’t have anything to do with it.
She turns to me. “I’m not giving up, Jax. But you heard what Dr. Thompson said. The patients with the chemo treatments in the trial only lived an average of a month longer. What is the point of that?”
“It’s a month, Stell. A month longer at life. And who knows? You could get more than that.”
Stella’s voice drops, an air of exhaustion coating it. “What good is living another month if that time is going to be spent being sick? Of course I want to live longer, Jax. But I want to enjoy the time that I have left. I don’t want to spend it miserable.”
“But maybe—”
Stella cuts me off, “Jax, do you know what chemo does to your body? Do you know how sick I would be? Have you Googled it?”
I shake my head. I haven’t looked up anything lately. Every time I do, I’m left feeling more hopeless than when I started.
I looked up glioblastoma right after Stella had told me about her diagnosis, and I was so traumatized by what I read that it literally made me sick. When I looked at the statistics and numbers related to the cancer, I felt devastated.
But that’s not how I see Stella. She isn’t a statistic. She’s a miracle, and I’m hoping she gets one. But how can she get one if she doesn’t try?
I know this is her battle to fight, and she should be able to do it the way that she wants. But it is so hard to sit back and watch her body deteriorate before my eyes.
I want to try everything—every therapy, every treatment, anything that could help her. Gluten-free, dairy-free, organic, no soy, no GMO foods; essential oils; swishing with coconut oil; protein therapies; and medicines—we’ve tried it all to see if anything would make a difference. I know that she’s done it all for me. She’s agreed to everything I’ve suggested because it makes me happy to live under the illusion that we’re combating the cancer. If an article in a magazine that I read while waiting for her at the doctor’s office says that eating a spoonful of bee pollen daily helps, then we’ll go out right after the appointment and buy bee pollen.
But lately, she hasn’t been as invested in any of the experimental dietary changes, and she’s especially