Chapter 1 - The Beginning

I sit on the edge of my bed, holding the medication that could affect the rest of my life. Fourteen days the instructions say; take this medication for fourteen days. As I sit here, my mind remembers that time nineteen years ago when I began to experience what I thought was only a sore throat.

*****

The family doesn't remember exactly when the canker sores started. When you've lived with something so long, it's hard to remember. But as Blaine recalls, he was around twelve. "We figured it was something short term and the sores would be gone after awhile." What he remembers most was how concerned his mom and dad were, especially when they came to the realization that it was more than just a sore throat. The sores would come and go. They'd stay for three months or so, then be gone for two weeks. The longer the problem went on, the longer the sores stayed and each time they came back, they came back worse.

At first everyone assumed it was something simple, perhaps related to some dental work Blaine had had done. Perhaps he was allergic to the metal. That could easily be remedied with a trip back to the dentist to have a crown removed, but to no avail.

It must be something I'm doing wrong, Blaine thought, and if I quit, it will go away. In high school a doctor suggested it was stress from being a gay teen. Another suggested it was from singing all the leads in the Glee club. He ended up quitting the Dalton Academy Warblers just before Christmas break his sophomore year in hopes it would fix the problem. When it didn't, he joined them again at the start of his junior year.

Every doctor Blaine's parents took him to diagnosed him differently. An ear, nose and throat specialist had one name for it while a dermatologist diagnosed it as something else. "All of which was irrelevant," Blaine says, "since none of them could do anything about it. They just kept saying, 'Well, here's what we think it is, but you're going to have to see...' and they'd refer me to another specialist."

The hardest part for Blaine was the eating, which obviously makes up a large part of a teen's social life. He could handle the pain but he disliked making people feel uncomfortable. He knew they weren't enjoying their meal because he wasn't enjoying his. Thus he found himself spending more and more time alone, except for family and very close friends who knew of his illness.

People who didn't know Blaine well were unaware of his problem, as he seldom talked about it. But his parents shared his pain every day, along with his brother Cooper. The two had been raised in a family where music played an important part. Their grandma - their father's mother - was a woman who knew the words to every song in the church hymnal by heart. Her love for music was passed down to her children and ultimately her grandchildren, though their taste in music was a far cry from her own.

Blaine and Cooper had been taught to sing four part harmony along with their parents from an early age. Before they reached their teen years, they formed 'The Anderson Family' singing group with their father Martin singing from the piano. On weekends, they would pile into their Toyota Rav 4 and visit every nursing home, hospital and senior citizens complex they could gain entry to in Ohio.

During this time, the boys were able to make an album through the generosity of a man who worked with their father. Thomas Montgomery had been an alcoholic for years and through the not so subtle help of Martin, he cleaned up his life. He was a trust fund baby never needing for anything. Funding an album for 'The Anderson Family' kids was the least he could do to say thanks.

From these early days a dream began to grow in Blane's heart: he wanted to write and perform music. "It didn't take long to see that my baby brother was a unique individual and his ultimate goal was slightly different from mine," Cooper recalls. "He had a sense of urgency and passion where his music was concerned when it was just a hobby for me."

It was also in these early days of singing and traveling that Blaine's throat condition developed. His father remembers taking them places to sing when "it was so bad he couldn't even talk, but for some reason he was always able to sing."

It was hard on the whole family. "We watched him sit at the dining table each night and struggle to swallow even the smallest bites of food," his mom Cecilia remembers. "His whole body would tremble from the pain of swallowing, and he would slump over in his chair. I know the sores must have hurt a lot, but not because he told us. Even when it first started, he put on his dapper charm to hide it from us. He never wanted any of us to hear him complain."

Martin, his father, agrees. "Blaine never let anyone know how much it really hurt. He always told us, 'I'm doing fine; it doesn't hurt that much.' " Then he added, "But if you got close enough, the feverish breath and swollen lips told the real story."

All this time, his parents kept desperately seeking help for their son's problem. "They'd hear about some doctor, sometimes across the state or even country," Blaine says, "and they'd find a way to get us there. The doctors tried pills, everything. One doctor even said it would help if I took up smoking." What it boiled down to was that it was common enough that there should be something, but it was such a severe case of 'something common' that no one could find anything.

Their family doctor, seeing that Blaine was losing weight, asked him if there was anything he could eat in spite of the pain. The doctors office was near a fast-food restaurant and although his mother knew it wasn't a good all-round diet to be eating on a regular basis, the doctor said, "Whatever he can eat and get it down, no matter what it is, let him have it."

After going to a number of local doctors, Blaine's parents took him to the University of Michigan which had one of the top clinics in the country. The physician there gave him a battery of tests and said, "This medicine will help. Try it." Blaine tried it and it didn't work, so back to the clinic they went. The doctor tried another medication with the same result.

"He was so sick," his mother says, "that I called back and finally got through to the doctor. 'He isn't any better at all,' I told him. 'What am I supposed to do now?' "

"Im sorry," the doctor replied. "Just take him back to your family doctor. There is nothing more I can do."

Blaine's parents were so upset. "If our own doctor could have done something...anything, he wouldn't have sent us all the way to Ann Arbor in the first place."

One day during her lunch hour, Cecilia came home from her job as an elementary school secretary and, in frustration, called the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. She stayed on the phone until she was able to get an appointment for Blaine. The first appointment was on a Tuesday. Blaine and his parents drove the eleven hours to Rochester, back to Lima only to return on Friday of the same week to be seen again. That was the first of many visits there, and the first time the family realized just how rare the severity of the illness was.

At the clinic, the thirty or so doctors who examined Blaine said they knew what it was; aphthous stomatitis,but said it was the worst case they had ever seen. The miracle of all this was, the doctors said it looked like the esophagus had completely rotted away, except for the voice box, and that wasn't even touched! They did some blood work, put Blaine on a steroid and sent him home.

The steroids didn't work!

Everyone wanted to help. Friends knew someone who had something similar and they would pass on what worked for them. Blaine eventually had had enough 'help' and declared that it was no use, "I'm just going to live with it."

One bright spot during his teen years was when his Glee club, 'The Warblers'won the national show choir championship in New York. Blaine was awarded the MVP of the competition which came with a trip for two to Switzerland to attend TASIS, a summer music camp. Of course, his parents insisted he take Cooper, not that he cared too much.

Blaine was pretty weak on that trip. There wasn't a lot he could eat, so every day he would go to a little grocery store and get an apple and a coke. That is what he lived on for two weeks. "If I had to let my health determine the course of things, I wouldn't get anywhere in life," Blaine says frankly.

A friend of the family, Katherine Duval, has known Blaine since he was born. Blaine is the same age as the Duval's youngest son, Nicholas, and the two families did a lot of things together, including a cross-country trip. She remembers when Blaine first got his throat condition. "We prayed for him for years," she says, "because it was all we could do and our hearts went out to him. But he never played on people's sympathies. He'd get frustrated at times and down, but he never complained."

One thing she particularly admires about Blaine was his dedication to his family, friends and his music. "If he didn't have such a strong support system and an outlet for his emotions, who knows what would have happened to him."

But little did they know that in spite of all he would face, Blaine was destined to put a very large stamp on the world. There was a purpose to his pain, and while it would take years to see exactly what that was, the journey would be worth the end result!