Dawn must have been tired after her long day of traveling, but, nevertheless, she made a late-night trip to the nearest twenty-four-hour pharmacy to pick up the supplies we needed to treat the sore on my backside.
While she was gone, I lay in bed, looking up information about pressure injuries on my phone. I compared each photo I found online to the one Dawn had taken, trying to assess the severity of my own sore. It certainly looked similar to some of the ones I saw online, but others were much, much worse. My stomach turned at the sight of a deep, festering ulcer that went all the way down to the bone.
“That’s enough internet for tonight,” I muttered to myself, setting my phone down in disgust. But, even as I lay staring at the blank wall across from my bed, the disturbing image lingered in my mind’s eye, as if it had been burned into my memory. It left me feeling anxious and deeply unsettled. How could somebody let it get that bad? I wondered.
I was determined to do whatever it took to prevent my own wound from progressing to that point. Despite my reservations, I knew Dawn was right: I needed to be seen by a doctor, a medical professional who could help me heal it as fast as possible. I didn’t want to wait until morning, but what other option was there? Nowhere was open this time of night, except for the emergency room – but, now that my autonomic dysreflexia had been managed, this could no longer be considered an emergency. I only felt like I was running out of time because I was supposed to fly to China in three days. From what I’d read online, an open pressure sore could take anywhere from three days to three weeks to heal when properly treated, so the clock was definitely ticking.
If only I had a doctor friend in L.A…
No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than it occurred to me that I did, in fact, have a doctor friend in L.A. Scrolling through my contacts, I found the name I was looking for: Sam Torres. Dr. Sam Torres these days. I hadn’t seen my former caregiver in over a year, but I had heard from her just a few weeks earlier, when she had texted me congratulations along with a photo of herself posing in front of our star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It seemed almost shameful to send her back a photo of my blistered bare butt – but I did just that, along with a text to explain why:
Hey, Sam! Sorry, I know it’s late, but does this look like a pressure sore to you?
Since it was almost eleven p.m. by that point, I didn’t really expect to receive a reply until morning, so it surprised me when my phone rang just a few minutes later. I fumbled to answer it. “Hey… I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Not at all,” Sam assured me. “I’m just now leaving work.”
“Long day?” I asked sympathetically, hearing the weariness in her voice.
“You could say that,” she replied with a humorless chuckle. “I was supposed to get off like six hours ago, but a little boy was brought in with a brain bleed an hour before the end of my shift. I just got out of the OR.”
“Damn… I’m sorry.” Imagining a small child having to undergo emergency brain surgery immediately put my own problems into perspective. What if that had been my own little boy? My mind conjured a disturbing picture of an unconscious Mason lying on a cold operating table. “Is he gonna be all right?” I wondered.
“I hope so. It was touch-and-go there for a while, but we were able to stop the bleeding and get him off the table. Only time will tell if there’s any permanent neurological damage.” Sam let out a heavy sigh. “Anyway… enough about me. Let’s talk about you. I saw the picture you sent. I hate to say it, Kevin, but that does look like it could be a pressure sore. Where’s it located?”
“My left butt cheek,” I admitted sheepishly, feeling a flicker of gratitude toward Dawn for taking the photo close-up, so that not even a trained doctor could tell exactly what part of my body she was looking at.
“So, right over your sit bones,” said Sam. “Yeah… definitely sounds like a pressure sore to me. Do you have any idea how deep it is?”
“I dunno. Dawn said it’s about the size of a nickel, but I obviously haven’t been able to see for myself.”
“With pressure injuries, it’s not the size that matters so much as the amount of tissue damage, which is how doctors determine what stage it’s in,” Sam explained.
“So I guess this does warrant a doctor visit,” I said with a sigh. “You don’t make house calls, do you?”
I was only joking about that last part, but Sam seemed to take my question seriously. “Depends. You’re not still in L.A., are you?”
“Yeah, I am, actually. We had our last rehearsal today, so I’m in town till Tuesday,” I told her.
“Well, in that case, sure. I can come over and take a look at it.”
“Tonight? Oh, no, Sam, I was just kidding. You don’t have to do that,” I said, even though, selfishly, I wished she would. “You must be beyond exhausted.”
“Yeah, but right now, I’m still riding an adrenaline high. I won’t be able to sleep till I come back down, which will probably take at least a couple hours,” she replied. “I don’t mind swinging by on my way home. Where are you living these days, anyway?”
“Granada Hills,” I heard myself answer automatically. “In the Valley.”
“Cool. Shouldn’t take me too long to get there at this time of night. Text me your address, and I’ll head that way now.”
She sounded so adamant that I knew it would be pointless to protest. “Okay,” I replied instead. “Thanks, Sam.”
When we got off the phone, I texted her my address, as requested, and tried to relax as I waited for her to arrive. I was tired myself, but, much like Sam, I knew I would not be able to sleep anytime soon.
Dawn beat Sam back to the house, bustling into my bedroom with a Walgreens bag full of wound care supplies, from bottles of saline wound wash and antiseptic cleanser to boxes of sterile gauze pads and silicone foam bandages.
“Don’t do anything to it yet,” I told Dawn, watching as she assembled the supplies on my bedside table. “I texted the picture you took to my old caregiver, Sam, and she’s coming over to take a look at it in person.”
“Right now?” Dawn asked, raising her eyebrows.
I nodded. “She just got off work. She’s a doctor now, so she works late sometimes.”
“I remember. The brain surgeon, right? We met once, when we came out here for AJ and Rochelle’s wedding.”
“That’s right…”
I remembered meeting Sam for a quick coffee break during her shift at Cedars-Sinai. “Hit me up again next time you’re in town,” she had said as she’d hugged me goodbye. “Hopefully it won’t be another three years before I see you again.”
But I hadn’t bothered to call her any of the times I’d been in L.A. since then. We had both been busy, I told myself; I’d had recording sessions and rehearsals, and Sam was wrapped up in her residency. But the truth was that I had barely even thought about her. She represented a time in my life I would rather forget. It was only now that I needed help that I’d reached out to her, just as I had five years ago, when the caregiver I had originally hired instead of her had left me stranded in bed. While it was nice to know I could still count on Sam to come to my aid, I worried she would think I was taking advantage of her – and maybe I was. The realization made my insides squirm with guilt.
The doorbell rang ten minutes later. Dawn left the room to answer it and returned with Sam, who had already swapped her surgical scrubs for a faded UCLA t-shirt and yoga pants. Although I was used to seeing her in scrubs, her casual attire put me at ease, making the whole thing feel less like a house call and more like an impromptu visit from an old friend – which, in a way, it was.
“Thanks for coming over,” I said, flashing her a sheepish smile from my recumbent position on the bed.
“No problem,” replied Sam, smiling back. Although her smile brightened her dark eyes behind the lenses of her red glasses, it did nothing to diminish the crescent-shaped shadows beneath them.
“You look tired,” I said sympathetically, feeling another stab of guilt for keeping her from her bed when she was clearly exhausted. Not wanting to seem rude, I quickly added, “I like what you’ve done with your hair, though.”
Sam chuckled. “Thanks,” she said, tucking her dark brown hair behind her ears. It had grown out to her shoulders, and the bottom was dyed a vivid shade of violet, as if she had dipped the ends into a bucket of bright purple paint. “I’m on the pediatric service this rotation, so I’ve been able to bring back some color. The kids actually appreciate my purple hair. If it wasn’t such a pain to grow out, I’d add some teal at the top and go full-on mermaid.”
“I bet the little girls would love that,” I replied. “How do you like working with kids?”
“It’s rewarding, but it can be really hard, too,” she admitted. “No one wants to see their patients scared or in pain, but it’s even worse when they’re young. And we can’t save them all. That’s the worst part.”
“I can’t imagine,” I murmured, my breath catching in my throat as I thought of Mason again. For a moment, I wished I had done what Howie was doing and headed home to see my son. But, in hindsight, it was a good thing I hadn’t. Spending the night in an airplane seat with a pressure sore right over one of my sitting bones sounded like a recipe for a dysreflexia disaster that would have sent my blood pressure through the roof. I could have stroked out and died midflight. For the first time, I fully appreciated the gravity of the situation I had gotten myself into. Letting my breath out with a shaky sigh, I cleared my throat. “Well, this won’t take long. I just need to know what exactly we’re dealing with here. Dawn, if you would pull down the covers for me…”
Dawn folded back my top sheet and comforter, exposing my naked body for Sam to examine. I remembered how awkward and vulnerable I had felt the first time she had come over to do my morning routine. I hadn’t wanted a female caregiver in the first place, but Sam had proven herself to be the best candidate for the position. She had such a warm, reassuring personality that it hadn’t taken long for me to relax around her. And although it had been more than four years since she’d last worked for me, I still felt comfortable in her presence, even without my clothes.
“It’s right here, at the base of his left buttock,” said Dawn, pointing out the pressure sore. Her voice took on a crisp, professional tone as she addressed Sam. It was as if the knowledge that she was speaking to a doctor – even one who was dressed down and technically off-duty – had snapped her right back into her previous role as a certified nursing assistant.
Sam moved around to the opposite side of the bed, so she could get a better look. “Can you grab me some gloves, please?” I heard her ask Dawn. “The last thing you want is for this to get infected…”
“Of course.” The box of latex gloves we usually kept in my bin of bowel and bladder care supplies was still sitting out on the bedside table from when Dawn had applied the nitroglycerin paste earlier. She handed it to Sam, who pulled on a pair of gloves with a familiar snapping sound.
Then silence fell as Sam, presumably, started poking and prodding the area around my wound. I couldn’t feel her fingers touching that part of my body, but I could tell by the chills running down the back of my neck that it was painful. Beads of cold sweat erupted on my forehead as my head began to pound again.
“Sorry, Kevin,” Sam apologized, seeming to sense my discomfort. Thankfully, the symptoms subsided as soon as she stopped probing the sore and came back around the bed to face me. “Mind if I sit?” she asked, motioning to my wheelchair, which was still parked next to my bed. “I’ve been on my feet all day.”
“No, go right ahead,” I replied, watching with amusement as she carefully lowered herself into my chair and propped her feet up on the footplates. “So, what’s your diagnosis, Dr. Torres?”
This time, Sam’s smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Well, unfortunately, you do have a pressure ulcer that has broken the skin, which means it’s at least Stage 2,” she said with an apologetic sigh. “The good news is that it appears to be pretty shallow; it doesn’t look like it’s gone down to the subcutaneous tissue, the layer of fat underneath your skin.” As she spoke, her fingers fumbled with the brakes in front of my big wheels. “The bad news,” she continued, rolling herself a few feet forward and then backward again, “is that you need to keep the pressure off it for at least a week or two in order to let it heal. That means staying out of this wheelchair – or any chair – as much as possible.”
“For a week or two?” I stared at her, my panic-stricken brain struggling to process what she was telling me.
“At least,” Sam repeated, still rolling back and forth. “It might take more like three weeks. But if you don’t give it time to heal, it’s only going to get worse – and you don’t want that to happen. Trust me.”
I sighed. “I do trust you. But are you sure? Because the internet said it might heal in as little as three days.”
“We’re supposed to fly to China in three days,” Dawn inserted, giving Sam a significant glance. “The Backstreet Boys tour is scheduled to start next Saturday.”
Sam frowned. “I see.” She turned my chair around to face the bed, parking herself right in front of me. Leaning forward, she said, “Listen, Kevin. I may be a doctor, but I’m not your doctor. I’m also not a dermatologist or a wound care specialist. If you want a second opinion from an expert in that field, you should get one. I can even refer you to someone at Cedars-Sinai, if you’d like. But, since you asked me for advice first, here’s my professional opinion: It would not be wise for you to fly to China this week. You’d be better off postponing the start of the tour, staying at home in bed, and waiting for this to heal…”
My heart lodged in my throat, squeezing painfully. Somehow, I had already suspected she was going to tell me to stay home, but actually hearing her say it aloud hurt worse than just suspecting. I opened my mouth, wanting to argue with her, but the words wouldn’t come.
“…because if you don’t keep pressure off it,” she continued, “it will get bigger and deeper, and then it won’t just be a Stage 2 ulcer you’re dealing with. It’ll turn into a Stage 3 or even 4, which is the worst stage. That’s when the wound goes all the way down to the muscle, maybe even bone.”
I swallowed hard, picturing the gruesome photos I had seen online.
“It will probably get infected,” she went on in the same matter-of-fact tone. “Tissue will die. You’ll need to have surgery to remove the dead tissue and replace it with healthy tissue to help it heal. It’s called flap surgery – they cut a flap of skin, fat, and muscle from the back of your thigh and use that to cover the wound, kinda like a skin graft. If everything goes well, you’ll be on total bed rest for two to three months after surgery. But if there are complications, it can take up to two years for the wound to fully heal. Some wounds never do. My brother Ray had a friend from rehab, a fellow quad, who was laid up for, like, three years before he finally died of sepsis from an infected pressure sore. I drove Ray to his funeral, not knowing we’d be burying my brother less than a year later.” She looked me directly in the eye, her expression deadly serious. “Sepsis is nothing to mess around with. I don’t wanna see something like that happen to you.”
I finally cleared my throat. “All right, you’ve made your point,” I replied hoarsely. “You can stop trying to scare me now.”
“I’m not trying to scare you,” Sam insisted, “but I’m not gonna sugarcoat it for you either. I want you to understand how bad this can get if you don’t take it seriously and do everything you can to treat it.”
I nodded, knowing she was speaking the truth, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to hear. “I’ll talk to the fellas and management first thing tomorrow morning,” I muttered, although there was still a naive part of me that hoped my wound would magically heal itself overnight.
“Good,” said Sam, nodding back at me. “In the meantime, you’ll want to keep the wound clean, moist, and covered to prevent infection and promote healthy tissue growth.” She glanced over at the medical supplies strewn across my bedside table. “It looks like Dawn knows what she’s doing when it comes to cleaning and dressing it, but if you don’t see any improvement in the next three days, you should follow-up with a doctor, ideally a wound care specialist. Like I said, I can give you a referral if you need one.”
“Thanks, Sam. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem,” she replied, rolling back from the bed.
“You might as well park that thing in the corner,” said Dawn, pointing. “Since he won’t be needing it for the next few days.”
I sighed, a sense of despair already setting in. “What am I supposed to do in bed all day?”
“I dunno… sleep?” said Sam with a shrug.
“Watch TV?” added Dawn.
“You could also read…”
“Or talk on the phone.”
“Or play games on your phone!”
“Or listen to music.”
“Or sing!”
“Or write music.”
“Or write a book!”
“Or learn a new language?”
They went back and forth like that for almost a full minute before I finally interjected. “All right, all right, I get it! Bed rest doesn’t have to be boring. But that’s easy for the two of you to say. Neither of you know what it’s like to be confined to a bed.”
“Excuse me?” Dawn blinked. “Did you forget the five days I spent in the hospital back in February?”
“That was different,” I argued. “At least you could sit up – and get out of bed to go to the friggin’ bathroom.”
“Actually, no,” Dawn replied coolly. “If you recall, they gave me a catheter.”
Her response triggered the realization that it would be difficult, if not downright impossible, for me to insert my own catheters while I was lying in bed. “And now you’re gonna have to help me with mine,” I told Dawn. “I don’t think I can cath myself lying down. I won’t be able to see what I’m doing – which is kinda important, considering I can’t exactly feel what I’m doing either.”
“That’s okay. I don’t mind,” she said in a warmer, softer tone.
“Well, I do,” I grumbled under my breath. Figuring out how to empty my own bladder had been a big step for me on the road toward independence, right up there with learning how to drive again. It felt like taking two steps backward to have to depend on Dawn to do it for me again. “I’m not looking forward to doing my bowel program in bed either.”
“Better that than ending up with an oozing, infected bedsore that’s rotted your flesh down to the bone because you were too stubborn and impatient to follow a doctor’s orders and wait for the damn thing to heal,” Dawn fired back, seeming to take a modicum of pleasure in making me wince. “Look, Kevin, I know this is a pain in the ass – literally – but you don’t have to be a pain in the ass, too.”
That last part made Sam snort with laughter. Despite how discouraged I felt, I couldn’t help but crack a smile, too.
“If you won’t listen to me, at least listen to her,” Dawn added, tipping her head toward Sam, who nodded in solidarity.
“No, you’re right. I’m sorry,” I said sheepishly. “I’m just frustrated with this whole situation. I didn’t mean to take it out on you. If anything, it’s my own damn fault. How could I have let this happen a week before the tour?”
“It’s not your fault,” Sam assured me as she got up from my wheelchair and walked back over to my bedside. “You can’t help the fact that your body doesn’t feel pressure or pain the way most people do. Unfortunately for you, pressure injuries are par for the course when you’re paralyzed. You can’t always prevent them. Frankly, I’m impressed you made it more than five years without getting one.”
“I did get one on my hip once that first year, right before you started working for me,” I told her. “But it wasn’t as bad. It didn’t break the skin. And I didn’t have to stay out of my chair.”
Sam offered me a sympathetic smile. “This, too, shall pass,” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Think of it as another bump in the road. Before you know it, it’ll be behind you, too, and you’ll be back on tour. You’d better be, anyway, because I already bought my tickets for L.A. in September.”
“You did?” I said, surprised. “Thanks!” As I smiled back, I saw her stifle a yawn with her hand. “You’d better head home now, Sam,” I told her. “I don’t want you falling asleep behind the wheel.”
“Oh, so it’s your turn to give advice now, huh?” she replied, smirking. But, as a testament to how tired she must have been, she took my advice and left shortly after she and Dawn had finished cleaning and dressing my wound.
After walking Sam to the front door, Dawn returned to my room to do the rest of my night routine. “Well, it’s a good thing Natalie never met her,” she remarked with a raise of her eyebrows. “Then she’d really have a reason to think you had a thing for your female caregiver.”
I couldn’t tell if she was teasing me or not, but her suggestive tone immediately put me back on the defensive. “Why do you say that?” I asked, frowning at her. “She wasn’t flirting with me, if that’s what you think. Sam and I are just friends, same as you and me.”
“Oh, I know. But if Natalie was jealous of you being friends with a fat, frumpy, forty-seven-year-old woman, what would she have said about you hiring that twenty-something-year-old hot tamale to take care of you?” Dawn replied, closing the bedroom door behind her. “She may have looked tired tonight, but I bet Dr. Torres cleans up nice.”
I nodded, remembering how the sight of Sam in a red string bikini she had borrowed from Kristin’s closet had turned Nick and AJ into a pair of drooling dogs. As I recalled, Nick had even asked her out on a date that day on a dare from AJ, who knew full well that Sam would turn him down. “She does… but even if I was looking, Sam wouldn’t be interested in somebody like me. She likes girls,” I said, smirking.
“Oh! I see. Well, maybe you should have told Natalie I like girls, too, and saved us both some trouble,” said Dawn, grinning back at me. “Wouldn’t be the first time someone mistook me for a lesbian. When you’re a six-foot tall softball player, people tend to make that assumption anyway.”
“They also assume you’re gay when you’re a guy who sings and dances with four other guys in matching outfits,” I replied dryly. As Dawn laughed, my stomach dropped, sending a sudden wave of anxiety crashing over my head. “God… how am I gonna tell the guys? And the rest of our team? Everybody’s bent over backwards to make this tour work for me, and I’m about to ruin it for them.”
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic,” Dawn chided as she ducked into my pink bathroom, raising her voice so she could continue the conversation. “You’re not ruining anything! If you do what Sam said, this will only affect the first six shows. And they can be rescheduled, right?”
I shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe not. It’s a lot of work to schedule all these shows in the first place, especially when they’re in foreign countries. Management might decide it’s not worth it to reschedule. I don’t wanna let our Chinese fans down.”
“I’m sure your fans will understand,” said Dawn as she came back out of the bathroom, carrying my bin of bladder care supplies. “They wouldn’t want you risking your life just to keep them happy.”
“Risking my life?” I repeated, raising my eyebrows. “Now who’s being dramatic?”
Setting the bin down on the foot of my bed, Dawn blinked back at me in disbelief. “Didn’t you hear Sam’s story about her brother’s friend who died of sepsis from an infected pressure sore? Do you think she just made that up to scare you?”
“No,” I admitted. “But that’s not gonna happen to me.”
Dawn pumped the bottle of hand sanitizer harder than necessary, squirting an excessive amount of clear gel into her palm. “It happened to Christopher Reeve,” she replied bluntly, rubbing her hands together. “You know that’s what killed him, right? Cardiac arrest, caused by sepsis, caused by an infected pressure sore.”
I was starting to resent being compared to Christopher Reeve, the previous celebrity poster child for cervical spinal cord injuries. Rolling my eyes, I opened my mouth to remind her that Christopher Reeve was a lot older than me and had a higher level of injury than mine. But not that much higher, said a nagging voice inside my head. And he wasn’t that much older than you when he died, either. I closed my mouth again and swallowed the retort on the tip of my tongue.
“If anyone tries to give you grief about this, you just tell them that,” Dawn added in a gentler tone as she put on a fresh pair of gloves. “Sam’s right. You need to take this seriously, so it doesn’t turn into something more serious down the road – and so you’ll be fully recovered by the time the U.S. tour rolls around.”
I nodded silently. In my head, I knew they were both right. But, in my heart, I still felt guilty. Once again, my disability was going to affect the rest of the group, no matter what decisions we made the next day.
While Dawn finished my night routine, I lay in my nest of pillows and stared miserably at the blank wall across from my bed again, dreading what awaited me in the morning.
***
After lying awake for hours, worrying about what I would say to the boys, I finally managed to fall asleep, still clinging to the desperate hope that my wound would magically heal itself overnight. But it looked no better when Dawn changed my dressing the next morning.
At nine a.m., I sent a message to my group chat with the guys:
Hey fellas, can we do a FaceTime call today? I need to talk to y’all.
They must have sensed the seriousness of my request because their replies started popping up right away. AJ was the first to respond, followed a few minutes later by Nick, and then Brian, who was getting ready for church and wanted to know what was wrong. One of them must have called Howie, who texted back twenty minutes later:
Sorry, I was sleeping! 🙈 I’m awake now and available to talk anytime.
I felt another rush of guilt, remembering that he had taken a red-eye flight back to Florida the night before. No wonder he was napping at noon.
I FaceTimed the four of them from my bed, wanting to break the bad news to my bandmates first, before I talked to the rest of our team. One by one, their faces filled the frames on my phone screen, their expressions ranging from curious to concerned. Howie wasn’t the only one who looked tired. AJ had dark circles under his eyes and dried baby spit-up on his shoulder. Judging by his wrinkled t-shirt, unshaven face, and disheveled hair, Nick had just rolled out of bed. Brian, wearing a button-down dress shirt and tie, was the only one who looked wide awake and well groomed.
“Sorry to bother y’all on a Sunday,” I began once they’d all joined the call, “but I’ve got some bad news to share.”
I watched their eyes widen and then narrow, the corners of their lips sagging downward as deep creases appeared in their foreheads. The effect made even Brian look weary. “What’s goin’ on, cuz?” he asked, his voice cracking.
I took a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “So… I have a pressure sore. It must have happened at rehearsal yesterday. I had an episode of AD on the way home last night, and when Dawn undressed me, she found a blister on my butt.”
“Wait… this is about a blister? On your butt?” Brian’s face split into a wide grin. “Jeez, Kev, you had us worried there for a minute! I thought something might have happened to your mom or Mason – or Dawn.”
Although he didn’t yet seem to realize the ramifications of what I was trying to tell them, Brian’s relieved response put my problems into perspective. This was just a temporary setback, not a permanent roadblock. No one was dead or in the hospital this time, myself included. My bad news could have been so much worse.
“No, everybody else is fine, thankfully,” I said. “Sorry – I probably should have led with that part.”
“Is that why you were so sweaty last night?” Howie asked abruptly. “At the airport?”
I nodded. “Yeah. That’s when I started to realize something was wrong. By the time I got home, my blood pressure was crazy high, but it came back down once I got out of my wheelchair and put on some nitro paste.”
“So you’re okay now?” Nick said. Unlike Brian, he wasn’t smiling. He seemed more guarded, as if he was waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I shrugged. “Yeah, more or less. I mean, I will be. But-”
It was AJ who interrupted me to ask the million dollar question: “How long will it take to heal?”
I took another deep breath before answering. “So, that’s the thing. I’ve been told it could take up to three weeks for it to fully heal – and that’s if I stay out of my chair and keep all pressure off of it. If I don’t, it could get worse and take even longer.”
“Three weeks?” AJ repeated, his voice rising. “But we’re supposed to fly to Beijing in two days.”
“I know,” I said with a heavy sigh. “That’s why I’m calling. As much as I hate to do this, I’m gonna have to bow out of this first leg of the tour. I just can’t risk taking a fourteen-hour flight on Tuesday, knowing it could cause me so many more problems down the road.”
“Are you serious?” said Howie, blinking in confusion, as if he couldn’t believe I would actually back out of six shows over a blister. “You can’t just sit on a hemorrhoid cushion or something like that?” He didn’t seem to be joking; it sounded like a genuine question. Clearly, Howie had no idea just how bad this could get.
“I already sit on a custom seat cushion that’s made of memory foam and filled with gel. If that wasn’t enough to prevent a pressure sore from forming, I highly doubt a hemorrhoid cushion would help much in healing one,” I replied, trying to be patient with him. “Unfortunately for me, the only thing I can do is stay off it completely until it heals.”
“How are you gonna do that?” asked AJ. “Lie ass up in bed for the next three weeks?
“Pretty much,” I said with a grimace.
“That’s gonna suck,” said Nick, wrinkling his nose. “Sorry, bro.”
“Yeah, thanks. I know.”
A few seconds of awkward silence followed. No one seemed to want to be the first to speak again. But, finally, Howie asked the question that must have been on all of their minds: “Okay, so… what are we gonna do about the Chinese tour, then?”
“I’m not asking you to postpone,” I said quickly. “If you guys wanna go ahead and perform without me, you have my blessing.”
“We’re not performing without you,” Nick replied right away, his voice dull yet adamant.
“Yeah, what would be the point in that?” Brian chimed in. “We’ve been promoting this as our twentieth anniversary tour, featuring all five Backstreet Boys. This was supposed to be your big comeback, Kev. We can’t do it without you.”
“It’s all or nothing,” AJ agreed, nodding. “If you can’t go to China, then I guess none of us are going.”
I’d had a feeling that was what they would say, but I still felt guilty. “Are you sure? I don’t wanna be the one to hold the group back or let our fans down.”
“Our fans would be more disappointed if they didn’t get to see you,” said Nick. “They’ve waited this long for you to return. They can wait a little longer. We can reschedule.”
I knew the fans cared more about seeing Nick than me, but I appreciated his sentiment all the same.
“Nicky’s right,” Howie added. “And look on the bright side: This’ll give us more time to rehearse. More time for Brian to rest his voice. More time for all of us to relax at home with our families.”
Brian and AJ both nodded. Like Howie, they would never complain about having extra days off to spend with their wives and kids. Not even Nick seemed to mind staying home, now that he had Lauren in his life.
I was the only one who wouldn’t be able to enjoy having extra time off. I couldn’t go home to Kentucky, where I’d left Mason in my mother’s care. He still had one more week of kindergarten, so I couldn’t have her fly him out to California either. For me, there was no bright side, no silver lining around the black stormcloud hovering over my head. The days ahead loomed in front of me like a long, dark tunnel. I tried to look for the light at its end, but as I lay in bed, all I could see was a blank, white wall.
***