THE BEGINNING

- "How are you going to celebrate New Year's eve?" - "I don't care about it. I'll just be sleeping"
- "Well! You can't do that! "
- "Why not? "
- "Superstition... "
- "I don't want anything. And I sleep all the time "
- "It is necessary to perform a ritual, to be lucky".
- "These are just conventions. It's a normal day, I've never considered it different."

We persuaded him to visit some friends and celebrate New Year's with them. But he was sleeping all the time and after that he spent all the time in bed, it seemed that he was depressed. "What's the matter? Give it up!" "Something is wrong". He basically never went out, there was no purpose or place to go to. He slept, slept and slept. He didn't want anything. When the doctors announced the diagnosis, over two months had already passed since the beginning of the disease. It turned out that he fell ill just before New Year's, approximately.
At the end of January we traveled to Rotterdam to the Cinema Festival. We went there just to watch films. (The film "Dust" was introduced at the festival the previous year). We were registered as press and really intended to write an article about the festival. Lesha had been waiting for this trip to Holland for a long time and at last he became alive. During the trip he was active and cheerful, only by the end of the trip he became gloomy: he didn't want to go back home in Moscow. I remember how we were checking our mail and found a message "Il'ya Kormil'cev has a cancer of the 4-th class, he needs money." And then another one "Il'ya Kormil'cev died". "Aaaaaaah! How could it happen!" That is how our cancer year began.
On the airplane Lesha's ear was blocked. He cleaned and cleaned it with compressed air but nothing came out of it. A week passed, the ear was still blocked. The doctor decided that it was arthritis and prescribed homoeopathic pills. "Do you think it will help?" Lesha worried. Several more days passed but nothing changed. The ear could not hear properly but it didn't prevent us from chatting. "I'm holding the phone at the blocked ear, everything seems to be all right but the sound is still unnatural"
The doctor thought a bit and prescribed antibiotics. We were in touch through icq as we usually do and were reading medicine sites. "How long has it been blocked for?" "I don't remember... for a long time.." "Hmmm. That's not good. It shouldn't be like that. It doesn't look like arthritis" "Maybe I have cancer?" "Nonsense!". No matter what illness he caught, he'd ask "Maybe I have cancer?" "Lesha! Give it up! Nobody in your family ever had cancer!". He even decided to take a test for onco-markers once. We looked through the sites but the analysis for revealing different possible kinds of cancer turned out to be expensive. It was necessary to rule out something at least. Eh! If only we had checked everything at that time.
One day Lesha looked at himself in the mirror and it seemed to him that his face had changed. One eye seemed to be different from the other. "Has it been like that all the time or just now?" he asked and sent me a photo taken with his mobile phone. Hmm. We looked through the old photos but failed to understand how it used to be and how it has changed. "Look! In the photo in Rotterdam there is a slight asymmetry: it means that it already existed at that time". Then another day he opened his mouth and looked at his tonsils. They had swollen, were white and were hanging like rags. "Do you think it will be necessary to have them out? Is it painful?" There was a description of how one should hold a bowl for blood to trickle down. How terrible. "Go see a doctor! And don't torture yourself over it!" He overslept his visit to the doctor. Then he developed huge lumps on his neck. "Do you think it's cancer?" "Nonsense. Probably, it's just lymphatic knots. Go to the doctor at once!". He took a blood test. "I'm in Solncevo. I'm going to see a hematologist. Something is wrong with the blood. Do you think it's serious?" "No, it might be because of the inflammation". Several hours later "They said there's a suspicion for an acute form of blood cancer. Are you on-line? Could you look up what it is?" "Just a moment. A minute. It might be some trifles... but... no. Lesha. No. You don't have it." "What does it say?" "I won't read it to you..."
In the evening he was in hospital. We had to put on a disposable smock and cap to enter the ward. He was so pale that they gave him coloured clothes so that he wouldn't melt into the background of the sheets. His eyes were really smaller, his ears, now both of them, were blocked. It was scary. The day before it all seemed to be trifles and then everything became so serious. And suddenly we started to laugh at the fact that he has such bad luck. He had reached the phenomenal heights of bad luck. Nothing worse could happen.