Monday Motivation: Me

 

First day of chemo. I was terrified.

If you are anything like me, you find it hard to talk about yourself. Good, bad, ugly...it doesn't matter. I can yap all day long about the intricacies of traveler trim and slot size while beating upwind, but ask me to tell a bunch of strangers how it feels to get cancer? That's gonna be a no from me dawg. 

This is the rector who married Ashley and I, giving me a 
blessing, minutes before they wheeled me away for surgery.

Yet here I am, about to share what it feels like to get cancer with a bunch of strangers. Why? I'm reminded of a quote from Sergeant Horvath, right before the final battle in Saving Private Ryan: "Someday we might look back on this and decide that saving Private Ryan was one decent thing we were able to pull out of this whole godawful shitty mess." Replace "Saving Private Ryan" with "sharing my story, so others can maybe get through something awful too", and it's on the money. 

Looking into the PET Scan machine. I didn't know Ashley took
this photo until recently.

In efforts to keep this a blog post, and not a short novel, I'm going to skip forward in the timeline a bit.  I'm recovering from surgery, know that my biopsy has confirmed that I do have cancer, and have had a PET Scan to determine the severity of the disease in my body (a PET scan is kind of like a super accurate CT, but they put the radiation in you and detect it, rather than bouncing radiation off of you like an x-ray). We are sitting in a tiny room at the oncologist's office, we'll call her Dr. Can Do. The hum of a computer fan and an overpowering antiseptic smell are the only distractions from the building dread while we wait for the doc. The paper on the exam table gives little comfort to my sweaty palms as the door creaks open and Dr. Can Do squeezes into the tiny room with us. I try, unsuccessfully, to get a read from her facial expression. Oncologists are skilled at maintaining a professional demeanor with patients. Ashley and I make darting eye contact with each other, fearful of bursting into tears if we linger too long. We are scared; however, at this point, I was expecting to hear I had stage one colon cancer and would need around six months of chemo.

 

These photos are the hardest to view. The kids 
were champs through the whole journey. 

Doc's lips were moving, but I was no longer hearing the words she was saying. The air seemed to have all rushed out of the room at once, and my mind was spinning. She had just informed us that my cancer had spread to my liver and lymph nodes all the way up into my neck. I had advanced, aggressive, stage four colon cancer. It was the worst-case scenario, a death sentence. 

Leaving the hospital after surgery. I was in for two weeks.
This was some of the first food I was able to eat.

Have you ever been let go from a job unexpectedly? How about getting in big trouble at school and having to go to the office? That hot feeling on the back of your neck, a little bit of nausea, and the instantaneous BO? Those are the best analogies I can think of to describe finding out you are more likely to die than live. 

Even big, tough dads need a teddy sometimes.

I hope most of you are still here, because this is the good part! It's easy to give up when the odds are stacked against us. When the mountain seems too impossibly tall to climb. The good news is, we don't have to climb the whole mountain right away. What do we do when we get devastating news, like having cancer, losing our jobs, or the loss of a loved one? We start chipping away at recovery. I will be totally honest, at first, I was just getting from minute to minute, trying to quiet my mind enough to sleep for an hour or two. As time went by, I was able to process days, weeks, and now, even thinking about years. There's a climbing parable that many have heard me share: "A Western climber arrives at a giant mountain. He tells his Sherpa (local climbing guide) "I can't possibly make it to the top, it's just too large". The Sherpa replies, "I know you can't make it to the top, but can you take one step, and one more after that?" 

This photo was taken two weeks ago, on the deck
at the Foggy Goggle, Seven Springs PA.  

There are a lot of things we can't control. Sometimes, we can't control whether we live or die. That's a scary thought! For those of us who have looked into that hole and lived to tell the story, there's an understanding that worrying about things out of our hands is a waste of our limited energy. Maybe the chemo will work, maybe the risky new job will pay off, maybe we are ready to start a family? We don't know the answers, and I'm certain we won't find them on our couches with a bowl of ice cream at three am. The only thing we can do is give it our all and do it with a smile on our faces. 

The "motivation" part is that you never know! My surgeon told me, "Even if there's only a 25% chance, if you are in the 25%, it's 100% for you". We have to fight! Fight for ourselves, fight for those we care about, fight for those who need our help!

Fortitudine Vincimus, 

Ryan