This blog was supposed to be over already.
That was the plan anyway.
But like most of the stupid plans I’ve made throughout my life, this one also fell apart almost immediately. I don’t know if “fell apart” counts as a colon joke anymore or if my brain is just permanently broken now. Either way, I think I’m running out of energy for cancer humor.
Although apparently not completely.
Because even now, I still can’t stop myself from making shit jokes.
The reason I thought this blog was ending was because I thought cancer was behind me. I thought I had done the hard part already. Surgery was over. Chemo was over. I had mentally started putting this entire chapter of my life into storage somewhere.
Then Tuesday happened.
On Tuesday, I got the results from a Signatera blood test showing trace amounts of metastatic cancer cells still in my bloodstream.
Last year, my first test came back at 1.98 parts per million.
In January, it dropped to .05.
This week it came back at .04.
Which, to me, sounded good. Lower seemed good. Lower is the direction numbers are supposed to go when you’re trying very hard not to die.
Apparently not low enough.
Doctors wanted zero.
So now this story keeps going whether I want it to or not.
The strange part is that the results are simultaneously scary and almost encouraging at the same time. The amount they found is so incredibly small that there’s a good chance it wouldn’t even show up on a CT scan yet. It likely hasn’t spread anywhere visible. There’s even a possibility the result was a false positive because the level detected was basically the lowest measurable amount the test can find.
So right now I exist somewhere in the middle of all of it. Not healthy enough to fully celebrate. Not sick enough to fully panic. Just sort of stuck in this weird emotional waiting room where nobody really knows what comes next yet.
Tuesday hit me harder than I expected.
Not because I thought I was dying immediately, but because I had already emotionally moved on from this version of my life. I had already started relearning how to exist without cancer sitting in the middle of every thought I had.
And now suddenly it’s back.
Or maybe it never really left.
I left work early Tuesday and did the only thing that made sense to me at the time. I went to the CrossFit gym, got on an assault bike outside in the Texas heat, and worked until I could barely stand anymore.
At some point between nearly throwing up and questioning every life decision that led me to voluntarily exercising in 100 degree weather, the pity party ended. The frustration disappeared too. And for the first time since getting the news, my brain got quiet again.
I think part of what scares me most is chemotherapy.
I made it through chemo fairly well the first time compared to what a lot of people experience. But “fairly well” is still relative because chemo still sucked in ways that are hard to explain to people who haven’t done it.
Driving to Houston before sunrise on Fridays. Getting accessed through a chest port that hurt for nearly a year. Sitting there while poison got pumped directly into my bloodstream knowing the next several days were already gone before they even started.
Then driving myself home alone down I-10 with a chemo pump attached to me, listening to podcasts because silence gave me too much time to think about what was happening.
That part was hard.
Really hard.
And if I have to do it again, I honestly don’t know yet how I feel about that.
If this ends up being oral medication or something smaller and manageable, then fine. I can do that. Hell, after the last year, I can probably do more than I think I can.
But I also know enough now to understand what the harder version of this looks like too.
That’s difficult knowledge to carry around once you have it.
What’s also been strange is telling people.
People want this story to be over almost as badly as I do. They want to celebrate. They want the happy ending. And honestly, for a while there, I thought we had one.
So telling people this might not be over creates these awkward little pauses where nobody really knows the correct thing to say next.
Some people just say, “Cancer sucks.”
And honestly, I appreciate that response more than most.
Because it does suck.
There’s really no smarter or deeper way to say it than that.
But I also don’t think that’s the full story anymore either.
Because somehow, in a very strange way, cancer also created space for optimism and hope that I don’t think existed in me before all this started. And over the last year, I’ve had people reach out to me saying that the hope they saw in me helped them somehow during their own difficult situations.
I still don’t fully understand that.
But if the way I’ve handled this helps somebody else carry their own heavy thing a little easier, then maybe there’s value in that somewhere.
Maybe that matters.
And maybe that means this entire experience becomes something bigger than just fear and hospitals and chemotherapy and bad scan results.
I don’t know.
What I do know is that I still have hope. Maybe stubbornly so.
And I still don’t believe this is where my story ends.
But tonight, I’m done thinking about all of it.
It’s Saturday night. Tugboat is asleep at the foot of the bed dreaming about food he can’t eat because he’s fat and currently on a diet. His entire world right now is basically just hunger and inconvenience, and honestly, that seems peaceful compared to whatever is happening in my brain.
So tonight I’m going to be more like Tugboat.
I’m going to enjoy the evening.
And I’ll worry about tomorrow when, or if, it comes.
Good night.