Hurry Up and Live: The Nick Sears Story

Three blocks from Garfield High School is a yellow house where everything is broken. A few rusted cars and a minivan are parked out front, and part of a lawn chair sits on the patchy grass. The old porch creaks when I step on it. The house is bright on the outside, but inside it's dark. Every window is covered with blinds, drapes, or sheets, and a dim light shines from the open oven that's heating the house.

It's the end of January, and a small Christmas tree is in a corner surrounded by a mess of clothes, paper, wrappers, and boxes. "It's my mom's house out there," says a teenager named Nick Sears. "This is my house in here," he adds, referring to his bedroom.

Nick's space is brighter than the rest of the house, and he relies on his computer to heat the room, which is covered with electrical cords. When Nick's overhead bulbs go dark for the night, there are still blinking neon lights everywhere that make it hard for him to sleep. Electronics ads line the walls, covering up holes that he's punched in them. Nick hasn't had a chance to cover up the heart-shaped hole behind me yet.

His closet has only suits and pajamas. When Nick is at home, he wears pajamas, but every time he goes out in public, he's in a suit. It's a high-end suit, no less, because everything Nick Sears owns is high-end. His favorite tie, an $80 Nordstrom number, is shimmering silver silk. When Nick wants something, he wants it now. Not next week, he says, now. And he'll do whatever it takes to get it. He's always been this way, but ever since he was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he has a reason to be.

It was June 18, 2005, when Nick started wearing suits. That was the day of the eighth-grade boat cruise at Washington Middle School when he woke up with a headache. He'd had bad headaches before and the doctors said he wasn't drinking enough water, which he probably wasn't—he thinks water tastes like an "old refrigerator." The doctors hadn't checked for a brain tumor, even though Nick's little brother, Jacob, had one five years earlier. This particular headache hurt so badly that Nick thought he was going to die. Pain, pain, pain, he says. Twelve pains in a row. He needed the pain to go away before he could even breathe.

Nick ran to the minivan his family had just bought—the first car they'd ever owned. In the hospital he got a huge dose of morphine; that was the first time he'd ever gotten high. The scan showed a tumor the size of a baseball, and Nick underwent emergency surgery. When he woke up, he had 50 staples down the side of his head, tubes everywhere, and a massive acne outbreak caused by his medications. Pus leaked from his right ear, and the pain of moving his head repressed all yawns and desire to chew.

He made the mistake of coming home only two weeks after the surgery. His head felt so hot that he wanted to sleep outside, and was so tender that he couldn't take a shower. He was rushed back to the hospital with a high fever. The month he returned home, he would get so angry that he almost broke his hand on his wall, so obnoxious that he almost caused his mom to get in a car accident, and so depressed he would lay in bed all day. Again he returned to the hospital, this time to have his mental status evaluated. The doctors told him that he was suffering from an emotional disorder. The hospital became like home.

Nick began his freshman year at Garfield High School, but spent it mostly at the hospital. He had brain scans and labs taken every two weeks. He received radiation treatment that caused short-term memory loss, making school incredibly difficult. At home, he ingested chemotherapy pills. He made up a lot of schoolwork over the summer, and finished his freshman year with a 3.833 GPA. And finally, his cancer was in remission.

Tenth grade began as Nick's favorite year ever, until October, when the cancer came back. Since then, he's been on more intense chemotherapy, for two hours every two weeks. A second brain surgery remains a last resort.

Wednesday is chemo day. Nick arrives in the morning for labs and blood tests, then has a checkup with the doctor, and then receives radiation and chemo. Entering the oncology center of Children's Hospital, we walk down a narrow hall lined with curtains. Inside each small curtained room a child with cancer receives treatment. A dad works on his Treo while his daughter waits for her treatment. I've never seen anyone so tired. I see a 2-year-old with patches of hair missing and a teenager who looks just like someone I would be friends with.

"How old are you?" is a question Nick gets a lot but hates to answer because he wants to be older. "I've been through so much, I could be 20 easily," he says. "And there are 25-year-olds that are still so irresponsible."