Never giving up on you - Completed.

55.

[A/N; It's just a filler, sorry. But it's cute. Next chapter will be important :)]

Costa Rica

May 2017

Austin

My good days didn't seem to hold on for long, sadly. After that one particularly relaxed day on the beach with Caity, there had only been two or three more of those days before the pain in my back and the cramps in my legs came back up.

It annoyed me, because after some phone calls with my medical team in Stanford I was planning on reducing my oral pain medication, but since the pain was coming back, dr. Johnson adviced me not to for another while. Not that the medication really helped, though.

The plan for trying to get me complaint-free, or more taking the sharp edges off them, was a regular IV-treatment in the hospital. The doctors in the hospital here had been in contact with Stanford, and had agreed on giving me this therapy. It was an intensive course, starting with IV's every week for a month, and slowly trying to stretch the time period between them. It took a lot of time, almost an entire day, and energy from both me and my family. Caity came with me every single time, sometimes bringing Hailey with her, or other times accompanied by Jessica or my dad. It was wearing her out since she was seven months pregnant now, but she was the only one who could get an IV in my veins without fucking up, so she had made it her personal task to come with me and do so. Somehow it seemed to make her feel useful, and as long as that was the case I would be the last one to tell her to take it slow and stay at home instead of staying with me all tiring, boring day.

To kill the time I often went on social media and update my fans; the weirdest thing was that it seemed as if my popularity had only gotten more since I left the band. There were so many fan-accounts on Instagram it was insane, and they all picked up and shared whatever I posted. Whether it was an update about my health or a photo of Caity's belly, or a smiling Hailey, or whether it was on my Stories or my feed; it didn't matter. It got shared. It got me a bit more aware of what I was actually posting. Not that I posted a lot, most of the time I was just interacting with fans, liking and commenting on their photos. It was almost funny how just a like or a small message of me could make people's entire day. And if it didn't take that much effort, I didn't mind doing it.

On my better days, I was now teaching baseball to a group of children from town. I tried to get them together at least once, sometimes twice a week and play baseball on the huge field a few minutes away from our house, until the sun went down and it got to dark to see. My Spanish was improving, so was Caity's, and some nights she came along. Hailey had picked up some interest to play baseball and she was actually pretty good at it; my father said she obviously had that talent from me, since I had played baseball for years when I was younger.

In between my IV-treatment, church meetings, baseball trainings and my bad and good days, Caity and I had been planning a small, intimate beach wedding, which would take place in a week.

Her parents were coming over, and we had asked Lillian and Alan to come too, but they were both too busy to be able to make it. Caity was quiet upset over that, and I also didn't like the idea that I would spend one of the most important days in my life without my best friend.

But Alan was still part of Of Mice And Men, and the band had been pretty damn busy with recording and releasing new music, and that always came with a new tour.

I was really proud at the boys for pushing through like that, spitting out new music and moving on without me, but somewhere deep down it still hurt. It wasn't that I was jealous at them, because I now realized that the life I was living at the moment was the life that in the back of my head had always seemed the most ideal life. Jealousy wasn't an emotion for me anyway, and it wasn't that I had completely turned away from music; by far.