One morning early this year, Archie McNealy stood in front of a baggage carousel at the Tampa airport.
''Showtime, showtime, showtime,'' he muttered under his breath.
Archie was about to check into a cancer center for an aggressive regimen of chemotherapy, to be followed by an infusion of stem cells taken from his blood a few weeks before.
The treatment is so potent that it kills one in 20 patients. Archie hoped it would knock out the cancer flowing through his body, and that by year's end he'd be taking classes at Miami-Dade College, returning to a path he left five years before.
Things didn't turn out that way.
Archie, 26, first appeared in The Miami Herald in 1999 as a kid who grew up in public housing in Overtown and won a scholarship to Ransom Everglades, an elite private school in Coconut Grove. A second article appeared in January of this year, chronicling Archie's story since high school -- dropping out of Florida A M, moving back to South Florida, working at a pawn shop and falling ill with Hodgkin's lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system.
Hodgkin's is usually curable with chemotherapy and radiation.
But Archie lost his job -- and his insurance -- a few months after his cancer was diagnosed. He dropped out of treatment and the cancer spread.
Then he reconnected with John Flickinger, an old mentor, who helped get Archie back into care.
But standard treatment was no longer enough, so Archie's doctor arranged for him to travel to Tampa to the Moffitt Cancer Center at the University of South Florida for a more radical treatment that would leave him hospitalized for more than a month.
Flickinger traveled to Tampa to help Archie check in and friends visited periodically. But Archie was alone much of the time, and he struggled to keep his head.
A few weeks into the treatment, he developed a rash that covered his entire body. One day not long after, he stumbled into the hallway trying to get a glass of water. He was hyperventilating behind the surgical mask he wore to prevent infection.
''They were looking at my eyes and thought I was going crazy,'' Archie said. He was, in his words, ''very angry and very rude'' to the nurses.
A week later, it happened again -- he lost his temper when a drug he had taken to fight the rash made his face swell up.
''I look like a moon-faced guy, like a marshmallow man,'' Archie said at the time.
He cursed at a nurse, demanding to see a dermatologist.
The outbursts were out of character for a man one friend described as ''such a bright light'' and ``the most upbeat, positive guy I know.
''
A turning point came soon after, when Archie tried to take a shower, grew short of breath and couldn't remain standing.
''I pulled the nurse's cord and went to the floor,'' he said. ``People came in.
They wrapped me in sheets because I was naked. They took care of me. That was the same people I was being rude to.
''
A few weeks later, he was back home at his apartment in Miramar, trying to gain weight, going to church -- and waiting to find out if the treatment had cured him. He was optimistic.
''I feel good being back,'' he said.
``I feel like I can go to sleep and not think about stupid stuff like dying and wondering if I'm going to get cured.''
He was supposed to get a scan three months after his treatment ended, to see whether his cancer was gone for good. But he had problems with his health insurance, and it was late July before he had the scan.
By that time, he had enrolled in summer classes at Miami-Dade College -- the first time he had been in school since he dropped out of Florida A M in 2001.
''Everything is going in order,'' Archie said a few days before the scan. ``I need this [scan] to go well, and to just keep moving on.
Keep praying, too.''
Then a week later: ``The scan came up positive. Cancer is still there.
''
He sounded very, very tired.
''I won't be going to school this fall. I won't be doing anything, just trying to focus on this disease so I can kick it back into remission and go on with my life,'' he said.
By the end of August, he had moved out of his apartment and back into his old room in his grandmother's three-bedroom Overtown apartment. His sister and her two children, ages 2 and 3, live there as well.
He started going for low-dose weekly chemotherapy.
''Classically speaking, we can't cure you. We just want to tamp it down,'' his doctor, Leonard Kalman, told him in September. ``In a young man, otherwise healthy, is there anything we can do to knock it out?
I don't know.''
A friend told Archie: ``This is going to be your life story. .
. . This is what you're going to tell people, when you tell them about your life.
''
Archie tried to get his head in order. He spent time in Homestead, making music with a friend who has a recording studio. Earlier this month, he got a job at a call center, selling satellite television packages to businesses.
He makes $9.50 an hour plus commissions.
He feels OK -- he's able to play half-court basketball, and he reconnected with old friends at a recent dinner, where a local cancer foundation gave him an award for courage.
But without some kind of radical treatment, his odds aren't good, Kalman says.
Kalman thinks Archie's best chance might be a bone-marrow transplant, combined with aggressive chemotherapy. He cited a team at the University of Washington that has had some success with patients like Archie.
''If I had my choice, sometime in January he'd take a trip,'' to Seattle, or to another center that might be able to help him, Kalman said.
For the transplant to go forward, doctors would have to decide Archie is an appropriate patient, his insurance company would have to agree to cover the procedure and a matching bone-marrow donor would need to be found.
Even if all that occurs, there is no guarantee the procedure would work.
''I'm trying to save my life, so if that's what needs to happen, I'm all for it,'' Archie said. ``I can't say no.
News RSS