TERMINAL CANCER AND CONSTANT PAIN TOOK A SINGLE FATHER, 35, TO THE BRINK MORE THAN ONCE - UNTIL ONE NIGHT AT THE HOSPITAL WHEN HE FOUND ... AN ANGEL OF HOPE.

Byline: Jenifer Hanrahan Daily News Staff Writer

Ray Garay's cane wobbles under the pressure of his white-knuckle grip as he rises to his feet.

It's 7:30 p.m. He switches off ``Wheel of Fortune,'' cutting short contestant No. 1's wild clapping.

Soon, he'll go to the hospital for a shot of Demerol in his hip that will dim, but not extinguish, the ache.

``It never leaves me alone,'' he says.

Doctors have given up trying to keep at bay the cancer ravaging his thyroid, lung, throat and bones.

Now, he says with a sardonic laugh, they just want to keep him comfortable.

He could have ended the pain last night, this afternoon, whenever. Methadone, Valium, codeine - enough for an overdose - litters his night stand.

Three times, he surrendered. He gulped dozens of pills. The last suicide attempt got him three days in the intensive care unit.

He surely would have killed himself by now, he says, if not for a chance encounter with an emergency room nurse.

Lydia. He doesn't know her last name.

Tonight, he'll get to see her. Just one hour till she's on, working the graveyard shift at North Hollywood Medical Center.

On one desperate night, she told him to keep living, making memories with his children.

But he doesn't have much time left.

At 35 years old, he is going to die.

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Ray takes measured steps past the ambulance in the loading dock, past the paramedics wheeling a blanketed body through the steel doors that say ``EMERGENCY'' in red.

He takes a seat in the overheated waiting room that looks like an out-of-the-way Greyhound bus station, with rows of thinly padded chairs welded to a metal frame.

A sheen of perspiration erupts on his upper lip and forehead. His eyelids droop. The rims are moist. His face contorts. He doesn't want to cry.

``Maybe I should go see what's taking so long,'' he says.

In moments, a nurse, holding his chart, calls his name.

He heaves his body from the chair, pausing at the door to steady himself.

Lydia Altomare, R.N., 5-foot-8 in running sneakers, spots him in an instant.

She throws her arms around him, enveloping his head and pulling him close.

``Oh, my poor baby.''

Ray doesn't have the heart to tell her the hugs hurt, like pressing on a bruise.

She asks about his son. She puts her hand on his head, her gold-painted fingernails spreading out like a sunbeam.

They whisper as she takes his blood pressure.

``Nothing ever turns out the way it's supposed to be,'' she says. ``All you can do for me is feel better. I'll be back soon.''

She closes the curtain - stained brown by blood in one corner - with a whoosh.

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Ray lies on a bed covered with thin white sheets and closes his eyes.

A child behind the next curtain giggles.

``Be quiet, this is a hospital,'' a woman's voice says. ``People are sick.''

``No, they're not,'' says the child, impetuously.

The child's voice turns Ray's thoughts to his own children, Ronnie, 10, and Ilene, 12.

``I want to live to watch my son grow up to be a man and my daughter grow up to be a woman,'' he says. ``I want to tell them I love them. I want to tell them `Happy Birthday' for each year. I want to tell my daughter to be careful the first time she falls in love.''

In a few minutes, Lydia is back. Ray rolls over to his side, undoes his belt and zipper and pulls down his pants.

He doesn't flinch when she injects the painkiller.

``I'm so used to it,'' he says.

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The night Ray met Lydia, he was desperate for relief. He had gone to a hospital in Burbank earlier that night. But when he rolled up his sleeves, he revealed his past.

His forearms bear the telltale markings of a gangster - a black widow spider, initials of a former girlfriend and SV, for the gang in the Sun Valley projects where he grew up.

Near his elbow joint, on the inner side where blueish veins should be, scars are etched into the skin - track marks from his days as a heroin user.

The nurse, hardened by years on the job, cast a suspicious glare.

``I think you're drug-seeking,'' she said, the hospital term for addicts looking for a fix.

She refused to administer the drugs until she checked his medical records and called his personal physician, a process that often takes hours.

Humiliated, Ray walked out.

He tried another hospital, this time North Hollywood Medical Center, where Lydia was working in triage.

Ray handed Lydia the doctor's note written on a small slip of paper, a prescription order form on which his doctor had scrawled Ray's future: ``Patient has terminal cancer of the throat and lung.''

``She read it, and her eyes watered up,'' Ray says. ``I thought, `This nurse is weird.' ''

Then he spotted the 6-inch scar on her neck, just like his. Once he started talking, it all came pouring out - his anger, depression, fear. He confessed he tried to kill himself three times.

``She told me she was really glad that I didn't die,'' Ray says. ``She told me, with the little time I have left, I should spend it with my son and making memories for him. She just put everything in perspective for me.

``She held my hand,'' he said. ``She let me know that I'm not alone.''

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Lydia. At 40, she looks like a blond Cher, with mascara-rimmed blue eyes, long hair and sparkling diamond rings on her fingers.

She met her soon-to-be-second husband shooting pool at Yankee Doodles. She always wins.

But life hasn't always been so good, she says.

As a young woman, she lived on a kibbutz in Israel, modeled in New York, married her childhood sweetheart, had two kids, divorced.

Right about that time, she took her son for a checkup. The doctor's eyes honed in on the black mole on her neck.

``She said, `What ... is that on your neck?' '' Lydia recalled. ``I thought it was a black beauty mark.''

A biopsy came back: melanoma. She had surgery that required 70 stitches.

Then, a year and a half ago, she started hemorrhaging. Tests showed she had cervical cancer.

She underwent an emergency radical hysterectomy.

``I think that God made this happen to me so that I could be more compassionate to people,'' Lydia says. ``I've had a lot of pain. When you know what it's like, you can be a much better nurse.''

When Ray handed her that note, she sized up his soul, not his appearance.

``He's a sweet, wonderful, caring man whose had the worst sh-- luck. I thought I had the worst sh-- luck. My heart broke for him.

``He has such a pure soul,'' she says. ``I just feel it.''

She let him talk, held his hand, prayed with him, kissed the top of his head.

``I think my purpose in this world is to get people out of pain and to make them feel good,'' she says. ``I hug him and hold him and kiss him and shoot him up with Demerol, and I won't let him leave until I know he's OK.''

Ray once saw Lydia give a $20 bill to a woman, a regular in the ER, who said she needed a pack of cigarettes and food. A few days later, the woman came back drunk with a bottle of vodka sticking out of her handbag. Another time, Lydia gave away her shoes.

A few minutes after the shot, the Demerol begins to bring Ray some relief. His face relaxes. He smiles at Lydia.

They go outside and share a cigarette. Smoke from the burning tips intertwines as it rises.

``I'm going to put in a good word for you when I get up there,'' Ray says.

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At home, Ray props up his head on the heel of his hand. He is woozy, but hurting less.

His bedroom smells of stale smoke from an ashtray filled with stubbed-out Marlboros.

Smoking didn't cause the cancer. Nor did the drugs. The guns and the gangbanging didn't do him in either.

In fact, for a few brief years, he thought his mistakes were over.

He moved out of the projects in Sun Valley to a North Hollywood apartment. He went to drug rehabilitation, earned a certificate in computerized accounting from Pacific Coast Technical Institute and Los Angeles Valley College and landed a job as a clerk in the legal department of a finance company.

``I was a terrible person. I was mean,'' he said. ``But I straightened up my life.

``We made it,'' he said. ``I had everything going for me.''

Then, like a thump from the hand of God, the cells of his thyroid went berserk. Ray's physician, Dr. Ignacio De Artola, said he could not have prevented it.

He underwent chemotherapy and radiation that made him horribly sick. The vomiting, the chills, the disorientation and weakness might have been worth it - if the treatment had worked. But the cancer continued its creep until doctors said it was inoperable. Terminal.

A single parent, Ray sent his daughter to live with an aunt. His mother moved in to help care for Ray and his son. He stopped working, started collecting Supplemental Security Insurance. He started doing street drugs again, until the numbing effects of prescribed narcotics made illegal drugs unnecessary.

He wanted to get dying over with - until he met Lydia.

``I believe that there are angels here on Earth. I believe she may be one of them.''

Ray runs his fingers along the artwork and photos of his two children that hang on the door to his bedroom: a card Ronnie made from aluminum foil and crayon that says ``Smile Now. Cry Later''; a Father's Day card from Ilene that says ``I Love you Daddy. 4 ever Daddy's Gril''; a picture of Ronnie in his Little League uniform, holding a bat; a cross his son made from two pieces of wood.

``He says he's going to put it on my grave,'' Ray says.

He has made peace with God, he says. But he has not made peace with leaving behind his children.

``Lydia battled cancer and she won,'' Ray says. ``Unfortunately, I'm losing. But she gives me hope. The doctors have written me off. I know I don't have much time. But maybe before I die they'll find a cure.''

It's 9:30 p.m.

Tonight at least, with the pain dulled, he'll rest easy.

CAPTION(S):

3 Photos

Photo: (1--Cover--Color) A Nurse Named Lydia; He doesn't know her last name, but she's the reason terminal cancer patient Ray Garay is still alive.

(2) Ray, suffering from cancer in his thyroid, lung, throat and bones, waits for Lydia, a nurse at North Hollywood Medical Center.

(3) `I believe that there are angels here on Earth. I believe she may be one of them.'

Ray Garay