Thomas Broderick (TB) and Andrea St. John (AS)
AS: I think it took a little while for him to build up the courage to ask me to do something alone. We had a lot of, you know seventh-grade-style dates, you know, where a lot of mutual friends kind of met in one place. Chaperones.
TB: So you knew he had Ewing’s. Was that scary?
AS: No, and not until he went back for the check up scans, did I really think about cancer in his life or our lives. We were back at school when we got the call from his doctors. Being new to this, I walked into the faculty room and his eyes were red, and, ah, I hit ’go’ on the copier and I’m not paying attention, and then i turned around and said ”are your eyes okay?” and then as soon as I got the words out of my mouth, I realized, ”oh no…”, he said, ”yeah I think you should get your jacket, maybe we’ll go for a walk. And he told me what his doctors had told him. That ”the cancer was back, there’s a spot in my thigh, and in my ribs and in my pelvis,” then he paused and said, ”the scans lit up like a christmas tree”. One morning I got up and got his his tea ready and his breakfast ready and stuff and said ”hey, I need your opinion on something. I want to wear this dress to your wake”, and I put it on and was standing up on the bed. And I said, ”how do I look?” And he started to cry, so I said, ”I’m so sorry, I’ll take it off, I didn’t mean to upset you at all.” And he said, ”no it’s just that you look so beautiful, I’m so glad I got to see you in that dress”, and he kept crying and I held his hand and sat down on the bed next to him and said, ”what’s going on?”, he said, ”I woke up this morning more ready”. And I asked him what that felt like, and he paused and he looked at me, he said. ”well, I guess it’s the same thing you felt when you put the dress on this morning”.