CR Hayes Productions
CR Hayes is proud to introduce the latest branch of the business, CR Hayes Productions. We are partnering with Aaron Davis Graphic Design Studio and will be bringing you the documentary, "No Sidelines: The Troy Druppal Story" in 2019! The feature-film,"Six Months to Live", following the journey of a terminal cancer patient and one-armed basketball player to NBA champion, will follow.
"Six Months to Live" Foreword
I was having another dream. But it was not so dream as much as it was a nightmare.
But it was more than that. It was neither dream nor nightmare.
This, whatever it was, was clearer, crystalized in a sheath of fact and fantasy. Each sound in this surreal scene was a sword which impaled my mind. Each feeling was a faint echo of some hidden meaning.
I was, at the same time, in the moment and out of it, observing a montage of memories as an outsider and insider, someone who knew the story but did not know how it ended. I knew, though, that what I was seeing were more than mere memories.
Everything was thunderously loud, as if I was on the runway of an airport. Everything was dark. Everything was cold.
I was trapped within four cold steel walls. Lights flashed around me. Beneath my feet, the unmistakable heartbeat of an engine pulsed, rattling my bones.
I looked around, studying my strange surroundings. There were three other figures in the room with me.
But it was not a room.
We were in an airplane. We were in the sky.
One of the figures, a little boy, lay on a gurney in the middle of the plane. His body was limp and his lips were sallow, the sick shade of purple. A group of shadowed people, their hands holding devices I recognized from my time spent in the hospital, moved frantically around the boy’s body.
Mortal whispers, grave mutterings in the gloom over the chirping echoes of the devices strapped to the boy’s body, the machines responsible for keeping the little boy alive, permeated the air on the plane like poison rain.
Doctors – they were doctors.
The white coats, the hushed voices, the sharp instruments… I should know. I knew many.
Next to me, in the opposite corner of the plane’s hold, their hands interlocked together, sat a middle-aged man and woman. The man was African-American and of a strapping, powerful build. Even though he was sitting down, I could tell he was tall.
The woman was white, blonde, and blue-eyed. I could tell she had a lovely smile, but, in the magnificent sadness of the moment, all of its magic had been sapped.
White and black… Just like my parents.
I knew, simply by watching the man and woman for a few seconds, that they were husband and wife. The way their hands fit together, holding on tight to the bay railing with one and greedily grasping the other’s with their other, the way their heads leaned against one another’s to steady the other, the way their heavy, horrified hearts beat to the same steady rhythm…
I knew, watching them as they watched the young boy lying in the middle of the plane, that they were his parents.
Suddenly, the voices of the doctors became faster, almost frenetic. The doctors I knew back at the hospital were never worried. These were profoundly perturbed.
The boy’s mother began to sob louder. The harrowing sadness in the father’s eyes transformed into terror. The EKG machine began to blare a sharp inimitable sound.
I could pick that sound out anywhere. I would never forget that sound.
It was the same sound I had heard in the middle of the night a year ago when they had taken him from me. It was the same sound I heard in my dreams.
It was a sound so shrill that it could kill. It was the sound which, in fact, did kill.
With that deadly beeping blaring in the cold, atmospheric air of the airplane, suddenly, in a searing bolt of self-awareness, I realized where I was.
Suddenly, my soul snapping like a string pulled too far and too tight, I realized who the little boy was.
I woke up in the same hospital bed I had just fallen asleep in, sweating and shivering. Casting the cold, thin sheets off my body, I rolled on my side and slide into my slippers on the chill floor, rubbing my eyes and groggily making my way over to the window on the other side of the small room.
I stared up at the stars, half of my body hanging out the hospital room window, wondering what I would do for my Wish. Searching the night sky, I finally found his star, the star I had given the little saint during the long, lonely nights we spent together in the hospital last year when we would gaze up at the glowing heavens, wishing we were anywhere but here.
I wondered what Nicholas had done with his Wish, wondering if he had already had his, wondering if he would ever get one. I figured, if he had already had his, if he had ever had his, he would have given it selflessly to another.
That was just the kind of beautiful little boy he was. He never needed anything, but he gave everything. I figured, if there was one person on this planet who deserved a Wish, it was him.
Staring up at the night sky of a billion stars and a billion more bittersweet dreams, I listened to the distant sounds of the City, imagining the wide, wonderful world out there, the world I would never know.
Closing my eyes, I listened to the sad, serene heartbeat of the universe around me in the darkness, searching for some secret peace within me, wondering…
Wondering if anyone ever got the chance to make more than one “wish” in this world.
Wondering if this was it.
Wondering, for the first time since my diagnosis, if I was truly going to die.
Wondering if Nicholas and my fates could be sealed so definitely by three simple words.
Wondering if a PET scan could really be a death-sentence.
Wondering if the game only got good right before it came to an end.
Wondering if you could really only have one shot.
Wondering if six years could really be all Nicholas got.
“Six Months to Live” Introduction
I sit at a crowded table filled with the next generation of NBA all-stars, bright lights flashing all around me, each flash a brilliant reminder that I was really here and that this was not a dream. I draw a deep breath and fold my hands in my lap, praying for my name to be called.
The names keep coming. The first round of the Draft is already nearly over, and my name has not been called yet.
The NBA Commissioner, Adam Silver, who I met last night as the Rehearsal Dinner, takes a picture with each draft pick onstage at the far end of the room, donning each man’s head with a hat from the team drafting them before they depart the stage and enter into the throng of reporters.
He smiles. They smile. Everyone is smiling. Everyone looks like they belong here.
Everyone but me.
I looked out of place. Having one-arm, of course, drew a lot of attention, most of it the unwanted kind. But my looks were not the only thing which made me uneasy. I felt, somehow, like I was living a lie, as if I didn’t deserve to be here, as if this was all a dream.
As the Commissioner called my name and every camera in the New York sky rise suddenly fell upon my face, every dream I had ever dreamt came true.
Everything – the dirty bed in that dark hospital room, all those long nights spent on the streets, the chemo coursing through my veins, the shadow of death which had haunted me ever since I was fourteen – it all became a dream.
This was real. This was fate. This was my future.
Standing, I pushed my chair under the table and did my best not to trip over myself as I made my way to the stage. I blinked with each flash of the blinding lights. The memories, like a waterfall of time trapped behind a great dam, drowned me in a deluge of gravity and guilt.
The face of a little boy with big, brown, beautiful eyes I had once known– the sad, comforting smile of my mother – the cold, calm voice of the doctors – the bittersweet breath of my girlfriend as she told me goodbye when it seemed I would leave the world – the breathless words she mouthed to me as she said goodbye – my left arm sitting next to me on a hospital gurney, disembodied from my body – the proud, pained eyes of my father, the man I met as I found standing at death’s door.
I turned, opening my eyes and doing my best to stay on my feet, searching for his eyes in the sea of smiles and swirling cameras.
Finally, I found them.
He smiled, his head nodding ever so slightly, the trembling act filled with every tear ever shed, every word never said, every smile never shared between us.
Time stood still. Sound was eclipsed.
Inside me, my heart broke, crashing down like a chandelier from a broken ceiling.
The world around me went on applauding and cheering. It was business as usual as I bleed inside. No one heard the earth-shattering sound of my soul breaking within.
I turned, making my way to the stage and the welcoming figure of the Commissioner. Beside him, I found, stood someone else, someone I used to know, someone I had not seen in years, someone I only saw when everything seemed to be falling apart.
He looked the same. He always looked the same.
This could not be real. But, I knew, this was real. It was, after all, too real to be one of my dreams.
I had always dreamed, even when it seemed I had no right to dream. I had always believed, even when they told me I was already dead. Never once did I believe them, though. Never once did I stop dreaming.
I scaled the stairs of the stage and took the outstretched hand of Commissioner Silver. With my other hand, the hand I had not known in more than ten years, I took the hand of the man next to the Commissioner who had always been there with me, yet, at the same time, never had at all.
With my right hand locked with the Commissioner’s and the hand I used to know embraced with the hand which had held mine tight in all of my darkest nights back, held it when I had needed it most, I faced the crowd and smiled.
“With the twenty-first pick in the 2021 NBA Draft, the Golden State Warriors select…”
The voice on the speaker system called my name and Adam Silver leaned in closer to me, placing a blue and gold hat on my head.
He asked me a question, but I could hardly hear him over the roaring crowd and the ringing memories in my head. I think he asked me “what it had taken me to get here.”
Hardly able to speak, my throat hoarse and my heart heavy, I told him “Everything.”