It looked like a tiny corded mouse.

That’s what the thing looked like after almost a year inside me — my chemotherapy port, the thing that had made every infusion possible and made everything else harder — after every moment of embarrassment, every life adjustment large and small. Fifteen minutes and it was out. They held it up and that’s what it was. Small. Unremarkable. Anticlimactic in a way that felt almost insulting given everything it had put me through. I think I wanted some form of revenge on it. I wanted the removal to feel proportional to what it had cost me. Instead it looked like something you’d find tangled in the back of a desk drawer, and then it was gone.

I’m sitting in a Houston hotel room now, the incision point throbbing, and I’m smiling. That’s the last time it gets to hurt me. I’ll take that.

329 days ago I was sitting in this same hotel, staring out at the soft white glow of the MD Anderson marquee at the top of the hospital’s highest tower, wondering what was about to happen. I called it a seminal moment. That turned out to be accurate. Tonight feels like it could be another one, though I’m not sure yet.

Tomorrow, my surgeon — someone I’ve come to call a friend, though she might not say the same given that I am a difficult patient — will reverse my ostomy bag. Tomorrow should be, with some luck and the grace of God, my last surgery in this bullshit that has been cancer.

I’ve been pushing for both of these things for months. I wanted the port out. I wanted the reversal. There was hesitation from some people about removing the port this early — suggestions it stay in for a full year post-surgery, reasons ranging from what felt like superstition to the more obvious one nobody really wants to say out loud. I appreciated that conversation about as much as I did having the damn thing in me. While I was waiting in the procedure room I read that some people keep their ports for ten years. I don’t fully understand that, but I was grateful not to be one of them.

Here’s the part I’m still working out how to say.

For 329 days, cancer has been my entire identity. Every plan, every goal, every morning I woke up and knew exactly what I was doing and why — it was all pointed at the same thing. Get rid of it. All of it. And tomorrow, if everything goes the way it’s supposed to, that’s done.

I thought that would feel like pure relief. And part of it does. But there’s something else sitting underneath it that I didn’t expect — something closer to vertigo. Tomorrow will be the first day in almost a year that I don’t have a next thing. No port to fight to remove, no surgery to prepare for, no clear enemy. Just whatever comes after. I don’t know what that looks like yet, and that uncertainty — which is technically the good kind — is somehow harder to sit with than the certainty of the last year, even when that certainty was terrifying.

It’s a strange thing to realize you’ve gotten used to something you hated.

I’ll keep writing. There are things I’ve kept to myself this past year that probably deserve a page or two — if only for what writing them down does for me, which at this point I understand pretty well. I’ll write about the new normal, whatever that turns out to be. There is, for the record, a package of adult diapers in a CVS bag on the bed right now. My doctors told me to get them “just in case.” I expect that will make for a story.

But right now I’m going to get into this hotel bed and pick up the book I brought to Detroit a year ago — the trip I first got sick on — and never opened again after that. I’ve been carrying it around for 329 days. I think I can finish it here.

Seems like as good a place as any to start figuring out what comes next.

Yesterday I had to go back to the hospital for my post-op checkup — the appointment where I’d find out if I’d healed well enough to move on to what I hope will be the final surgery of this cancer journey. If the news was good, they would reverse my bag. It’s one of the very few things I’ve allowed myself to look forward to over the past year. Looking forward to a surgery sounds morbid, I know, but that’s where my life is right now, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why I hate the hospital.

I don’t hate the people. Far from it — they’ve saved my life, after all. But for a long time now, I haven’t been able to see that place as anything other than somewhere pain lives. I’ve kept that to myself, mostly. Attitude matters, in life and especially in something like this, so I’ve worked hard to stay positive. And besides, the sadness that seems to permeate every taupe-colored hallway of the MD Anderson complex doesn’t need me pointing it out, no matter how bright the furniture is or how shiny the slogans on the walls.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to yesterday, even with the finish line this close.

At some point during the visit, I found myself completely lost in the basement, wandering hallways I didn’t recognize, trying to find the place where I was scheduled to receive a barium enema. If you can’t understand why someone might dread a hospital visit, I’d invite you to schedule one of those for yourself and leave a Yelp review afterward. Five stars and I’d question your judgment — and suggest a different kind of hospital.

But here’s the thing about being lost and not trying very hard to be found: you start to notice things.

Maybe I’d missed them before out of self-pity. Maybe the day-to-day weight of cancer had just crowded everything else out. Or maybe I’m simply oblivious sometimes. But wandering those halls yesterday, I started to see the beauty that’s quietly everywhere in that place, if you take a moment to look past the surface.

I noticed an overworked medical resident who stopped mid-stride to help a lost stranger — just because he could see I needed it. I noticed a family tucked into a corner of the cafeteria, a parent holding an iPad so the kids could watch cartoons, doing their best to build a small, normal moment inside a place that is anything but. And then there was the barista. She was talking to the elderly woman ahead of me in line, and something made me stop and pay attention. Instead of rushing through the transaction, she was fully present — listening, really listening, to this woman who was clearly on the verge of breaking. No hollow words of comfort, no move to hurry things along. She just held her hand, and gave her a free coffee.

Small things. Simple things. But they hit me like a light coming on.

It’s remarkable how quickly something like that can pull you out of one way of seeing the world and drop you into a completely different one — a better one — almost without your permission.

I don’t know why it took me until this last visit to notice any of it. Maybe it’s because this will be my last real visit. The news yesterday was as good as it could possibly be. I healed well. The bag comes off next Thursday. The chemo port the day before. With a little luck and the grace of God, I may never have to walk those hallways again for anything more than a routine check-up.

And somehow, that’s exactly when I finally saw how beautiful that place can be. Not just the patients holding it together with everything they have, but the doctors, the staff, the people sitting quietly beside someone they love — all of it, remarkable.

I’m probably more emotional writing this tonight than I’d be on any other night. Being this close to the end will do that to you. But it felt like a story worth telling — maybe the best one to come out of yesterday.

So I’ll end with this: look for the small beauty in the places you don’t expect to find it. It might make all the difference — for you, or for someone nearby who needs it just as much.

For now, it’s late. Tugboat is snoring on the floor beside me, and I’m ready to call it a night.

Seven days and counting

Eleven Days and Counting

Eleven days. Eleven days until they remove my chemotherapy port, reverse this horrible bag, and I find out what my new normal looks like. All of that is contingent on my doctors telling me this Wednesday that my internal surgical connections have healed well enough to allow for the reversal. Waste can’t pass over incision points that are still healing — and if that goes wrong, it likely ends in something bad. Something that ends in death. That is definitely not the way I want to go out. Not after all the shit — yup, still doing colon cancer puns — I’ve already been through this past year.

It’s somehow hard to believe it’s already been a year since all this started, but it has. Given how far along the cancer was, I think I ended up lucky, and because of that I keep coming back to the same question: now what? I don’t think God gave me this second chance just to return to exactly what life looked like before all this. At least I sure hope not.

I don’t have the answer yet, and I’m not in a rush to do something rash. I’m not about to quit my job, sell everything, and buy a small boat to sail around the world with Tugboat. I don’t know how to sail. I get seasick easily. Lattes are hard to come by in the middle of the ocean, and dying at sea honestly feels like a fate almost worse than dying of cancer. So — no rash decisions. But things do need to change, and more than almost anything else right now, I find myself asking God to show me what that change needs to look like. For now I just don’t know, so I can’t say — I’ll have to keep you posted as it becomes clearer. I can be pretty dense sometimes, so it might take longer than it should. I hope not, but who knows.

That said, sitting with this question as long as I have has led me to a couple of realizations — some from my own reflection, some probably from people much smarter than me who said something that stuck, though I can’t remember who or when to give them proper credit.

The first is that I need to focus on the moment. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know I spend so much time dwelling on the past or worrying about the future that I completely miss what’s actually happening right now — and that’s just plain stupid. For the most part, I can’t control what’s coming, and I sure as hell can’t change what’s already happened. So why wouldn’t I just enjoy what’s going on in the moment and let the rest happen as it will? It’s a lot easier to say than to do, but it’s a work in progress. If that sounds like a good way to live to you, maybe give it a try.

The second is this: when you are in the moment, all the best things live on the other side of uncomfortable or embarrassing. I think that’s pretty self-explanatory, but in case it isn’t — embarrassment and discomfort seem to be the main blockers standing between most people and the really good stuff in life. I have no idea why anyone would run away from that instead of straight through it. I’m guilty of it all the time. But I’m done letting embarrassment hold me back. I’m going to seek out discomfort and see what’s waiting on the other side. At the very least, if it all goes sideways, it should make for great stories here.

Stay tuned — who knows what might happen.

For now, it’s bedtime. It’s 11pm, Tugboat is already in bed, and tomorrow is an interesting new adventure. See you soon.