Playing with House Money
I’m not supposed to be here.
Pretty wild feeling. And I still remember sinking to my chair in shock when my oncologist read the grim statistics after 5 recurrences of bone cancer: less than 10% to live.
Walking out of the hospital that day, the terror reached a peak intensity that I didn’t even know was possible. My nervous system was already fried from unsustainable stress levels of life in constant survival mode… and here came another setback.
The worst part, being told I was almost certainly going to die. Right in front of my family. DEATH. What the fuck? I’d just turned 30.
I haven’t revisited these emotions in a while and lately it feels important to remind myself. Because I did work my ass off to somehow pull off a miracle. At the time, I literally remember thinking just how much a miracle was my only chance, but had no clue where to find it and knew I was up against the clock. Tick tock, tick tock… The guidebook wasn’t out there, believe me I looked. No easy buttons. But with the help of an incredible support system, I kept pushing myself… Disciplined trial and error, extreme sacrifice of anything not geared towards survival, all in hopes of the slightest chance at making something happen.
See, I forget all this. Or I talk and type about it, but the meaning doesn’t resonate the same for me anymore. Lately, when I share my story, the events that I know so well, that I lived, feel more like a scene out of a movie than real life. Maybe that’s a protective mechanism. And while I defied the statistics and all the doctors who told me they’d never seen a patient overcome what I was up against, it’s hard to really keep the magnitude of this fortune front of mind. I’m alive and I shouldn’t be. I’m with my wife and I shouldn’t be. I get to ride out another chance at life when I shouldn’t be here.
On the other hand, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies. COVID has been crazy. Aging is unsettling. Friends and family, my once ever-present rock of support, have moved away and this next chapter of life is a foreign landscape. I’m trying to figure it out as I go, feeling very much caught in a gray area between knowing how lucky I am compared to other struggling cancer fighters, while still managing my own trauma and keeping up with the pressure of responsibilities back in the real world.
It can feel overwhelming, but I do realize I’m blessed. And sometimes I just need to remind myself to smile and take a breath—because really, it’s all house money at this point. If only I could remember that more.