Life in the Stupid Lane

I meant to write something sooner. The problem is there hasn’t really been much to write about.

Lately life has felt like driving through West Texas. Not the pretty parts. The other parts. The parts where you’ve been staring out the window for three hours and you’re not entirely convinced the scenery is changing at all. Every now and then a gas station shows up. Or a billboard advertising fireworks, Jesus, or fireworks for Jesus. Then it’s right back to miles of highway and scrub brush and the same horizon doing the same thing it was doing 20 minutes ago.

That’s kind of where I am right now.

I’m in the clinical trial. I don’t actually know when it starts yet, but I do know I’m in it. Which feels like a weird sentence to say out loud, but here we are. I know what the treatment plan will look like once it kicks off. Pills for 21 days. Infusion on day one. Seven days off. Then repeat that whole thing for six months and try not to overthink it.

I had a PET scan and it came back clean. Which is good. I think. Cancer has gotten really good at giving me updates that are both “great news” and “cool, still annoying though” at the same time. Nothing showed up on the scan, which is obviously what you want. But also, the reason nothing showed up is because whatever they’re looking for is apparently too small to see right now. So the official situation is: it’s there… we just can’t see it… which is awesome… and also not awesome.

So we wait. And we treat what we can’t see and hope it gets bored and leaves.

The treatment itself doesn’t sound too terrible. At least that’s what everyone keeps telling me, which is exactly what you say right before handing someone an 80-page list of things that could go wrong. I started reading it, then stopped reading it. Somewhere around page 12 it stopped feeling like medical information and started feeling like the Terms and Conditions for being alive.

I’m pretty sure I saw something in there about losing the ability to turn left, which I think is technically called Zoolander Syndrome. If you didn’t get that reference, just Google it. Or don’t. Your life is probably better either way.

What’s been interesting lately is how many people seem worried that I’m losing hope. That’s probably my fault. Because the truth is… not much has changed.

I still wake up. I still go to work. I still go to the gym. I still walk Tugboat. I still read. I still laugh at dumb things way too hard. I still spend way too much time thinking about books I’m not finishing, cars I’m not buying, trips I’m not taking yet. Most days are just… days.

And I think I’ve finally realized that’s not a downgrade.

When this all started, I think I expected a personality shift. Like the movies make it seem like you get diagnosed and immediately become someone who quits their job, climbs something dangerous, forgives everyone, and suddenly becomes spiritually enlightened while also learning piano. That hasn’t really happened.

What has happened is I mostly just want more Tuesdays. More boring mornings. More normal workouts. More evenings on the couch doing absolutely nothing important. More walks where Tugboat acts like he’s being recognized in public for reasons I still don’t understand.

I don’t really think about bucket lists the same way anymore. Not because there aren’t things I want to do — there are plenty. I still want to drive from Antwerp to Montenegro with Dean and Mike, stopping anytime something looks remotely interesting or stupid enough to justify pulling over. I still want to travel. I still want to see new places.

But I’ve realized that’s not really the thing I’m trying to hold onto. It’s everything around it. The boring stuff. The stuff you don’t think about when everything is normal. The stuff that doesn’t make a good story. The stuff you don’t post. The stuff you only realize mattered when someone reminds you it’s not guaranteed.

And the weird twist is that if this trial works — and I really hope it does — the actual reward isn’t some dramatic “new chapter.” It’s just… getting to be bored again. Back to work. Back to the gym. Back to reading books I probably bought too many of. Back to complaining about the Austin heat like it’s a personal betrayal. Back to Tugboat being a celebrity for no reason whatsoever.

Just the normal stuff. The good stuff.

Tonight I’ll read a little more of The Flamethrowers. I’ll probably try to pet Tugboat while he snores like he’s paying rent. I’ll look at the stack of 44 books on my dresser and pretend that was a responsible decision at some point in my life. It wasn’t. But that’s Future Me’s problem.

For now, I’m just sitting here in the middle of this long stretch of West Texas highway. The scenery still hasn’t changed much. And for once, I’m not in a rush for it to.

This week, I should be getting some news about what comes next.

I know I have a PET scan, which seems to be way easier than a CT scan from everything I have read. So of course that probably means it will be anything but easy. That’s generally how these things work.

After that, on Wednesday, I talk to the doctor about the clinical trial. There was one spot left in this trial, and it sounds like it may have been held for me for a while. I’m not sure whether I should be flattered by that or pissed off.

For now, I’m going to assume it’s God’s hand at work and that this is all going to go well.

I did get some paperwork the other day explaining the drugs I’ll be on. Most of it read like Greek. The part about side effects, however, was pretty interesting.

Compared to everything else I’ve been through, this sounds like it won’t be too hard on me, which is encouraging.

Of course, since it’s a drug trial, the pharmaceutical company listed every possible side effect known to mankind. The list seemed to range from fatigue all the way to your eyeballs melting out of your skull like the Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

So there’s that to look forward to.

I realized after getting some thoughtful messages from friends that my last couple of posts may have given off the impression that I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, one inconvenience away from completely imploding.

That’s not really the case.

I did have a pity party for about a day. That’s usually my M.O.

After that, I got over it and went back to normal.

I don’t know what’s going to happen, and that isn’t ideal. But I can control how I handle today and however many todays I get after that.

So life has largely returned to normal.

I’m still working, although I’ve been thinking about whether I should move into a different role so the team that depends on me gets the support they need and deserve this year. Last year, I had a lot of great people step in and help carry the load. This year, some of those people have moved on, so I’m looking at what makes the most sense.

Beyond that, I leave work around 4:30 most afternoons, drag some form of exercise equipment out into the Texas sun and humidity, and do my very best to nearly kill myself with a CrossFit-style workout.

There are a couple reasons for that.

The first is that I want my fitness as high as possible for whatever comes next. I know exercise and sunshine can’t kill cancer, but if I can get my cardiovascular fitness up, my VO2 max up, my heart rate variability up, my strength up, my body fat down, and my overall health moving in the right direction, it stands to reason that I’ll be better prepared for whatever fight is ahead.

At least that’s what I tell myself every time I’m lying on the ground in the middle of a workout, questioning my life choices while a little voice in my head screams, “Get up. Do another rep.”

So far, so good.

We’ll see.

The other thing exercise does is flood the brain with enough endorphins to make it really difficult to throw yourself a pity party for very long.

The workouts have been difficult, but I find myself grateful to God that I can still do them reasonably well.

There’s also something oddly satisfying about choosing to suffer on purpose for an hour. Cancer may get a vote in what happens next, but every afternoon I still get to choose to walk out into that heat and do something hard.

Regardless of what my Whoop app thinks about the situation.

For now, there isn’t much more to talk about.

I’m eating well. I avoid Diet Coke and processed foods most of the time. Tugboat still wants very little to do with me unless I am actively providing him with something of value.

Otherwise, I’m pretty sure he’d lock me in a closet with the vacuum cleaner.

If he weren’t terrified of the vacuum cleaner himself.

They say dogs can smell illness in the body. Since he doesn’t seem to be acting any more concerned than usual—and by “concerned” I mean being his normal level of jerk—maybe things are trending in the right direction.

If he could talk, I wonder what he’d tell me.

Actually, that’s not true.

I know exactly what he’d tell me.

“GIVE ME A DAMN PUP CUP AND GO AWAY.”

Oh well.

For now, it’s off to bed.

Tomorrow will get here whether I’m ready for it or not.

And if there’s one thing I’ve learned through all of this, it’s that worrying about tomorrow has never once made tomorrow easier.

So I’ll deal with it when it gets here.

Tonight, sleep sounds like a much better plan.

I think this week is going to be a test of the thing I do worst of all: patience.

I’ve been an instant gratification person my entire life, which probably speaks to some other issues I should unpack once I get past this damn cancer. But that feels like a problem for Future Me. Current Me is busy obsessively checking Natera’s website for blood test results like I’m waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 to finally release.

They conveniently gave me a tracking number for the blood they took last weekend, which I’m sure has to weird out at least a few people at FedEx. Somewhere out there is a guy scanning a box labeled with biological material while I’m at home refreshing tracking updates like it’s Christmas morning.

Still, I’m weirdly grateful for both the tracking number and the people moving my blood around the country because at least it feels like progress. According to the shipping updates and my own completely unqualified detective work, Wednesday seems like a realistic timeline for news.

Until then, I’ve been trying to distract myself.

Much to the frustration of Tugboat.

Man’s best friend is apparently supposed to comfort you during difficult times. They lay beside you on the couch, rest their head on your lap, and provide unconditional love and emotional support.

Not Tugboat.

Nope.

Tugboat’s version of support is trying every morning to slip out of his collar, sprint downstairs to the coffee shop at the base of my building, and convince complete strangers that he is both starving and horribly mistreated. It’s honestly impressive how committed he is to the performance. He wanders around looking like a Victorian orphan asking for scraps while I’m upstairs paying an embarrassing amount of money for prescription dog food he refuses to appreciate.

Once he exhausts the coffee shop crowd and squeezes out enough sympathy belly rubs, he usually starts trying to visit other residents in the building. On most days, he successfully finds someone willing to let him hang out for hours. If Tugboat could speak, he would probably say these people aren’t suckers at all, but generous benefactors honored to have him serve as their emotional support muse while they work from home.

He has an ego nobody really gets to see in public, but it is massive.

There are moments where he pretends to show me affection, but I see through the scam pretty easily. He becomes very loving around 7 AM and 5 PM, which just so happen to align perfectly with meal times. Even then, his affection is conditional upon whether I’m serving portions he finds acceptable, despite the fact that he is objectively fat and currently on a diet he deeply resents.

The low-calorie food has apparently ruined his life.

He voices this opinion often.

Meanwhile, when he visits other people, I get routine updates about how amazing he is. How they took a long nap together. How he stayed close to them all day. How comforting and sweet he was.

With me? He goes into the other room, attempts to claim the entire bed, and gives me judgmental looks when I have the audacity to try and sleep in my own apartment. He’ll move just far enough away to avoid accidental touching, but the second I get up in the middle of the night — which still happens regularly while I figure out how all my new plumbing works — he opportunistically reclaims every square inch of mattress space before I can get back.

He doesn’t care why I’m awake at 2 AM.

He doesn’t care that cancer is the reason he gets sent off to extended sleepovers full of treats and attention.

And honestly, I didn’t think he cared much about what I needed at all.

At least not until last night.

My brain would not shut off. I could feel the anxiety creeping in while I waited for news about whatever comes next with all of this. The blood test. The remaining cancer questions. More treatment. No treatment. All the stuff your brain likes to weaponize against you when the lights go out and things get quiet.

And then, completely unprompted, Tugboat came over and laid down close enough to snuggle.

Which genuinely made all the difference in the world.

Right up until I realized he was farting directly on me.

I turned on the light and I swear I could actually see him smiling in his sleep while he did it.

But honestly, it made me laugh. It broke the spiral in my head. For a little while, I stopped caring about blood tests and timelines and cancer.

And it reminded me that even though Tugboat is absolutely a little jerk sometimes… he’s still a good boy who cares in his own weird way.

Sitting on the couch with the NFL Draft humming in the background should feel like a clean return to normal. A year ago, this would’ve been exactly the kind of night I’d want, nothing urgent, nothing heavy, just football, a couch, and the slow drift toward sleep.

But it doesn’t feel quite right.

If you asked most people what I’d want after everything from the past year, they’d probably say this, normal life again. And that makes sense on paper. It just doesn’t quite land that way in reality. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling, that would be way too dramatic, but there’s something off about just sliding back into the same life I had before the diagnosis, like nothing happened.

It feels incomplete.

There’s this quiet assumption that going through something big is supposed to lead to something equally big on the other side. Some kind of transformation. A dramatic shift. Like you’re supposed to come out of it with a brand new life plan and a completely different version of yourself.

And I don’t know if that’s actually true.

What I do know is that it feels like a waste of a second chance to just pick up exactly where I left off. To go right back to the same routines, the same habits, the same everything. And yet, here I am, doing exactly that, letting the TV drone on while I slowly fall asleep on the couch.

The problem is, I don’t know what “different” is supposed to look like.

It’s not like I have some burning desire to blow up my life and start over. I’m not about to sell everything, quit my job, and move to Montenegro with Tugboat to drink Aperol Spritz and paint questionable watercolors. That version of reinvention sounds fun for about a week, maybe two, and then it turns into something that feels more performative than meaningful.

So if not that, then what?

Right now, I don’t have an answer. I don’t even really know how to go about finding one. I just have this underlying sense that something should change, I just can’t tell you what, when, or how.

And patience, historically, has not exactly been my strength.

To be fair, it’s only been a few weeks since I could definitively say cancer is behind me. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. Expecting clarity this quickly is probably unrealistic. Still, it’d be nice to have at least a hint of direction.

Until then, I’m trying to remind myself of something simpler.

Every day is still a gift, even if it looks exactly like the day before.

Even if it’s mundane. Even if it’s routine. Even if it’s just sitting on the couch with the draft on in the background and Tugboat snoring like he just worked a double shift.

Those things still count.

So maybe this post is less about figuring anything out and more about saying it out loud. Getting it out of my head. Because when I hear it, it does sound a little ungrateful, and I don’t think that’s what this is.

I think it’s just unfinished.

But for now, I’ll take the night for what it is. I’ll watch the rest of the draft, enjoy the soundtrack of Tugboat’s snoring, and let tomorrow show up however it’s going to show up.

I can say I’ve closed the cancer chapter of my life now. That feels like something I should pause on. Sit with it. Maybe even let it sound profound. But the truth is, the next chapter doesn’t exactly start clean. It starts at 2:30 in the morning, half asleep, trying to figure out if what just happened is gas… or a problem that requires a full shower, fresh clothes, and an immediate load of laundry.

This is the part nobody really writes about. Somewhere along the way, having my colon removed turned basic bodily functions into a nightly guessing game. And when you guess wrong, there’s no snooze button. There’s just the cold reality of being awake, annoyed, and very aware that you are not getting that hour of sleep back.

At one point, I briefly considered solving the problem by just throwing away every pair of boxer briefs involved. Maybe even investing in an incinerator. But that feels like a financially irresponsible response to a medical situation, so for now, laundry it is.

It’s frustrating. It’s inconvenient. It’s humbling in ways I wasn’t prepared for. And yet—somehow—it’s still better than the bag. So I remind myself of that. A lot. Because the bigger picture is that I’m healing. Slowly, but undeniably. Every day gets a little closer to normal, whatever that word even means now. This is what I prayed for. What a lot of people prayed for.

And now that I’m here, I didn’t expect this part: I’m as frustrated as I am grateful. Not because I’m not getting better—but because I am. Because “getting back to normal” comes with this quiet realization that I could very easily slide right back into the same life I had before. Same habits. Same routines. Same patterns. And that feels… like a missed opportunity.

You go through something like this, and you assume there will be clarity on the other side. Some obvious next step. A direction. A calling. Something. But mostly, it’s just you. Same as before. Just with a slightly different operating system and a much more complicated relationship with sleep.

A while back, I heard someone ask: If the version of you ten years from now could talk to you today, what would they say? I’ve always liked that question. You’d think that version of you would know. They’d have perspective. They’d point you somewhere. But if I’m being honest, I don’t hear some clear, life-altering instruction.

I hear Rusty. “Just aim to be 1% better in any one thing, and you’ll be good.” That was his thing. Simple. No drama. No overthinking. Rusty passed away last Tuesday.

And I can’t help but think if I had called him after my last surgery—told him I didn’t know what to do next, told him I felt like I was wasting whatever this second chance is—that’s exactly what he would’ve said. No big speech. No deep philosophy. Just: be a little better tomorrow.

I’ll be telling that story at his wake this Saturday. In front of a room full of people I’ve never met, trying to explain a guy who made things make sense by keeping them simple.

And maybe that’s the answer, at least for now. Not some massive life overhaul. Not some perfectly defined purpose. Just… 1% better. Maybe that honors him. Maybe that’s me listening to God. Maybe that’s exactly what the version of me ten years from now would hope I’d figure out. Or maybe it’s just the best I’ve got right now.

Either way, it feels like enough.

At this point, I’ve been up too long, spent too much time going back and forth between my bed and the bathroom, and Tugboat is officially concerned about my decision-making. So I’m calling it a night. And tomorrow, I’ll take a shot at being 1% better at something. Even if it’s just guessing right.

It’s been a week since the surgery. I needed to wait this long to write anything, because once they took the bag off and removed the chemo port, I wanted to make sure my insides actually worked — they do, sort of — before I let myself say out loud that this chapter of my life is coming to an end.

That realization first started to sink in the night I got home — last Saturday — when I sat in the shower for nearly fifty minutes, completely unbothered. No fear of the bag getting too wet and falling off. No fear of the ostomy discharging mid-shower and what that cleanup looks like after — and I’ll let you use your imagination there, but it involves a fair amount of bleach on the shower floor. For fifty minutes, I just sat there and enjoyed a shower in a way I’m not sure I ever truly had before.

It’s a strange thing, learning what you miss most when something simple is taken from you without warning.

What I don’t think I’d fully appreciated before the bag was how much of your life quietly reorganizes itself around it. What you wear — black, always black. Whether you go out, and for how long, and how far from a bathroom. Whether you let people get close enough to notice. Whether you stop at the sauna you used to love, or the restaurant with the long wait, or the friend’s house where you’d have to explain. You don’t make one big decision to shrink your life. You make about four hundred small ones, and one day you look up and realize how much smaller it got.

So yes. Fifty minutes in a shower. That’s what this year came down to, at least in the beginning.

If this were a movie, that shower would have been some kind of sweeping visual metaphor — washing away the memories of the last year, strings swelling in the background. But this isn’t a movie, and honestly, I don’t want it to be. I don’t have a clean takeaway from all of this yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But I do think whatever I’m meant to carry forward will become clear with time.

What I have found myself returning to are four personal truths — things I probably already believed somewhere deep down, but that this last year somehow pressed into permanence for me. They’re going to sound like fortune cookies. Some of them probably are. I’m sure I absorbed pieces of them from people smarter than me. But that doesn’t make them any less mine.

1. You can’t live a great story and have an easy life.
2. It’s an amazing privilege to complain about the life you begged God for when you were younger.
3. Everything good in life lives on the other side of fear, embarrassment, or discomfort. Run to that side any chance you get.
4. Always drink the good bourbon when you can. There is no reason to save it for a perfect moment that will never come.

Take from those whatever you’d like — or nothing at all.

I still don’t have a clear answer to what now? — and honestly, that’s equal parts terrifying and kind of thrilling, and I’m finding I’m okay with not knowing. I figure if I hold loosely to those four ideas, whatever comes next should be some kind of adventure. For now, I’m going to enjoy all the small things I had to give up when the bag went on: wearing something other than black, getting back to the sauna, and taking as many showers as my water bill will reasonably allow.

This is where this chapter ends — mostly. There are scans ahead, and cancer could come back. But that’s true for all of us in one way or another, so there isn’t much point in borrowing that worry today.

For now, it’s on to the next adventure. Thank you for reading this long cancer chapter, its been a heck of a story so far…