A Spine-Tingling Story - TDG Fanfic

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It felt like his blood had turned to ice.

At the same time, it felt like he'd plunged into the fiery pits of Hell.

The sheer shock of it all caused the monochrome image in front of him to blur briefly, but he couldn't miss the tangled, messy-looking blob right in the middle of it. It looked like a white paint smear done by a careless child, but he knew that the MRI scanner had been sophisticated enough so as to not produce inaccurate results.

The neurologist and oncologist started explaining what they were seeing to him, but an insistent ringing in his ears mostly drowned them out. Even if he could hear them, he didn't want to concentrate on their diagnosis, afraid of what he might hear.

"It's malignant."

Those words finally wrenched his concentration away from the MRI image.

"He appears to have a Stage 3 anaplastic astrocytoma," the oncologist, Dr Gareth, continued. "It appears to have started growing at T11, but it's since reached T9. If we don't treat it, there is a chance it could grow larger and further compress the spinal cord, or spread up or down the cord."

He felt Mike's arm wrap around his shoulders in a poor attempt to reassure him. The man, who was sitting next to him on the padded table, asked, "What can you do for it?"

"Normally for this kind of tumour, our first option is radiotherapy," Dr Gareth replied, "but it is not without risk, especially in a child. There is a low chance the radiation will affect the non-cancerous cells around the tumour, which increases the chance of the tumour growing back. In that event, we will prescribe a course of chemotherapy-"

"No," Ryan interrupted, his voice returning to him at the mention of 'chemotherapy'. "I'm not having that."

"Ryan," Mike said sternly, though with a hint of sympathetic understanding, "Let the doctor finish."

"I'm not having chemotherapy!" Ryan insisted, ignoring Mike's words. "I'm not going through feeling so rotten that I'd rather be dead anyway because of a small chance that it'll reduce the size of this lump in my back!"

"Look, there's only a small chance that you'll need it anyway," Mike reasoned with him. "It'll only be if the radiotherapy isn't fully successful."

"I'm not taking that chance," Ryan retorted, before turning his attention back to the doctors in front of him. "Is there anything else? What about surgery?"

The doctors glanced at each other briefly, before the neurologist, Dr Preston, said, "For most other spinal tumours, surgery is our first option, yes. But in your case, that could prove difficult as the tumour may refuse to detach itself from the spinal cord, in which case it would be safer to leave it in for fear of causing spinal cord injury and paralysis."

Mike saw how Ryan winced at the doctor's last point, and how his grip tightened on the cane in his left hand. He'd been given the cane as the tumour pressing down on his spinal cord was causing numbness and pain in his legs. That, along with the heavy painkillers he was on for the back pain, made standing up for long and walking more difficult than it once had been, hence the need for the cane.

Ryan swallowed hard, before raising his head and looking Dr Preston in the eyes, trying to figure him out. It would be useful to do this early on - he had a feeling he'd be seeing the man a lot over the next several weeks. "Say I did have an operation, and you remove it completely, spinal cord injury or not - would it grow back?"

"Hypothetically, if we were to go through with that, it would greatly reduce the chances of the cancer growing back," Dr Preston confirmed, "but you would likely never walk again."