March 23

I guess I'm going to use this old space that no one reads as a way to record my unedited thoughts. So here goes. 

On March 5, 2021 I was officially diagnosed with stage 3/4 indolent B-cell lymphoma, which is a type of cancer of the lymphatic system. It still sends my mind reeling to talk about myself, my own body, and cancer in the same sentence. Cancer, of course, is so quotidian and unremarkable that it barely bears mention. You hear people saying "my aunt had cancer, my grandma, my dad, my cousin, my friend" and on and on. Everyone has at least known someone with cancer. It's stultifyingly normal. But so then apply the word to yourself and everything changes. What's normal becomes a cruel betrayal. My body has betrayed me at a fundamental level, and now I know it. My lymphatic system, which is supposed to protect me, has turned on me and become the enemy. But even then, framing this cancer as my enemy, as something foreign or alien growing inside of me, isn't right. It is my body. It has my DNA, albeit mutated. Lymphoma isn't the xenomorph that will burst through my stomach and devour me whole from the inside. No, it's just simply me run amok. There's still nothing here but me, my own body. Only now, in an irrevocable way, it has turned chronically against me. A betrayal so deep that there's no bottom to it because it's just me all the way down. 

There's no way to know how long this cancer has been inside my body, growing. They, the oncologists and doctors and experts, call it a slow growing cancer. This implies a fast-growing kind, and yes that's true, it's real and thank god I don't have that. But how slow growing? Was it with me when my daughter was born? What about my son? Was it there, slowly getting bigger when I got married over 20 years ago? It's dizzying to think about how things are exactly the same as before and also completely different. Was I already betrayed before I knew my children? Or perhaps "slow-growing" is a relative term? Perhaps it's recent, or at least recent-ish. It feels like it must be. It feels like a physical extension of the past year, a metaphor for disease growth and spread that takes over our lives. It is disease growth and spread that is now taking over my life. No metaphor needed. 

And it all feels so unfair. I'm sure all who live to see such times feel the same. I'm in the prime of my life, or should be. I'm happy in my marriage. I'm happy as a father. I'm successful enough at my job to provide my family with security, a home, luxuries that neither of us, my wife or I, had as kids. My life was, for lack of a better word, good. I drank with friends. I traveled for work and pleasure. I met so many people. Things felt, if not unlimited, than at least bountiful. And now it feels as if my life is measured out in coffee spoons. Just a little bit at a time. From now until my next appointment. From then until my next treatment. And on and on until it ends. And there's the crux of what is so unfair. The end is suddenly in sight. The doctors think it's still a long ways off, and they're probably right. I could be in remission for decades. But but but. This will probably be what kills me. If not, it will still be there when I die. The only way to rid the world of my lymphoma is to rid the world of me, a thing that seems so much less abstract than it used to. I am not ready yet. Probably I will never be. I'm not even really ready to look at it yet, so I am thankful for the coffee spoons to keep me here in the imminent present. The hole that fills my life a decade hence is too much abyss for me right now. It was so solid, so secure, so much to be looked forward to until March 5, 2021. Now it feels like pit I'm walking toward, and I just want to keep my eyes on the ground one step in front of me so that I don't have to look at it. Ignorance certainly isn't bliss, but it seems better than the alternative.