The Fault in Our Shooting Stars

Chapter 1: Support Group

Gallavich AU: The Fault in Our Stars

Chapter One: Support Group

If there’s one thing worse than being that kid with cancer, it’s being the kid that everyone knows has cancer.

I mean it’s kind of hard to hide when you’re at school. Popping a dozen pills a day doesn’t go unnoticed, and the other kids sort of form a giant circle around you – a five-foot radius because if they get to close they might fucking catch it. It doesn’t really help the fact that I got that before the cancer because I’m a ginger, and everyone knows that you can catch the ginger if you get to close to it.

So now I’m that ginger kid with cancer and home-schooling is where it’s at.

Sure you get all the cancer perks, free shit, priority entry to movies and theme parks and hell, sometimes even celebrities come down to the fucking South Side to visit you, but the perks don’t really outweigh the rest of it.

So here it is: Ian’s Big Fat Cancer Story.

I was diagnosed when I was twelve, Leukaemia. That’s a pretty common one for a kid my age. Only thing was, being on the South Side we had no idea how we were going to afford treatment. I mean, obviously we figured something out, I’m still here. Basically I just got too weak to play baseball, I passed out on the field twice and then Fiona took me to the clinic to check me out.

She wasn’t even an adult yet, seventeen and a baby on her hip – not hers, my mom had just bailed out on us for the fiftieth fucking time – taking her twelve year old brother to the doctors because our dad was too wasted to do it.

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia.

5-year survival rate is good, not bad anyway. I was slightly older than most of the kids who had this kind of cancer, but that didn't mean crap. It was cancer, I have fucking cancer.

I needed a whole bunch of crap done, I was in hospital a lot and a lot of the time I was alone. Fiona couldn’t be with me all the time, she had a home to look after. My other siblings were too young to be hanging around a hospital all day. Lip came to see me the most, he was thirteen when they first started my treatments.

Anyway, it spread to my lungs. I had a rough couple of months where they didn't think I would make it. I remember Fiona just sitting by my hospital bed and resting her head on my arm, crying and pleading with me to get better and that she would do better for everyone. I started wishing that I didn't have cancer not because I wanted to be better, but so she wouldn’t feel like she had failed us.

So there was a while there where no one thought I would pull through, I even asked if I could write down my last words. I was thirteen at that point and you have no idea how fast time can skim by when you’re sick. I think I made it through nearly two months not knowing that it had been more than a week. But I pulled through.

Sure, then I became that previously ginger, currently bald, oxygenated cancer kid, but I never liked any of the other kids in school anyway. So now some money-throwing foundation funds my education at home by sending a tutor in a couple times a week. I’m not complaining, hell, without that fucking foundation I would cease to exist, except in the memories of my family.