I am once again sitting in a hotel room across from the MD Anderson Cancer Center campus in Houston.
Two weeks ago, after giving blood for something called a Signatera blood biopsy, I found out I still have a DNA signature of the tumor they removed floating around in my bloodstream. The first test showed .04 parts per million. Small enough that they wanted to run a second test to make sure it was not a false positive.
This morning, I got those results back.
.05 parts per million.
Tiny numbers, but not zero. Small, but there. Enough that it has to be dealt with.
I should probably be angry tonight. Honestly, I kind of want to be. I want to yell at God. I want to drop a long string of F-bombs while asking, “What the hell?”
You can insert whichever curse words you think sound most natural in my voice there. I cleaned most of them up for my mom and some of her friends who read this blog, but trust me, there would absolutely be profanity involved in that conversation tonight.
And honestly, I think most people would say I earned the right to ask that question at some point.
If you stacked up all the “what the hell?” moments in my life together, my dad dying of cancer, diabetes, going blind, family struggles, the torn Achilles, career setbacks, cancer round one, eventually it would seem reasonable to look toward the sky and yell:
“Seriously, WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK, GOD?”
Sorry, Mom.
But weirdly, that is not really where my head is tonight as I wait for tomorrow’s CT scan and whatever news comes after it.
And it is not because I am blindly optimistic or pretending this is fine.
It is just hard to stay angry when life keeps giving you things you once desperately prayed for.
Most afternoons last week around 5:30, I was flat on my back on the hot old AstroTurf behind my CrossFit gym, sweating out what felt like every ounce of water left in my body while my Whoop app politely informed me that my heart rate had been hovering somewhere near 180 BPM for the last twenty minutes of a fifty-minute workout.
I felt absolutely cooked.
No energy left. Legs shot. Lungs burning.
And somehow I still could not stop smiling.
Because only a couple months ago, I remember sitting in a hospital bed asking God over and over to just let me get back to that exact moment someday.
That exact miserable moment.
Laying on the ground trying not to throw up after assault bike sprints, sled pushes, ski ergs, wall balls, and dumbbell snatches sounded like the greatest privilege in the world when I was stuck in a hospital wondering what my future was going to look like.
And last week, there I was again.
Completely exhausted. Sweaty. Struggling to breathe. Whispering “get the hell up” to myself before forcing out one more rep.
Happily.
That is the weird thing cancer has done to my brain. It has made me unbelievably grateful for things that used to feel ordinary.
It is hard to stay too angry at God, or fate, or whatever it is you believe in, when you realize so many of your old prayers were quietly answered without you even noticing at the time.
Of course, I did not pray for cancer. And I have prayed alongside so many of you for this cancer to completely disappear.
But somewhere in all of this, I have also learned that God works on a timeline I do not fully understand and probably never will while I am here.
Maybe years from now I will be old, unable to work out anymore, laughing while telling somebody this exact story.
Maybe life goes differently than I hope.
But I honestly believe that someday all of this will make sense in a way I cannot see right now.
So no, I am not screaming “WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?” tonight, even if things are continuing in directions I wish they would not.
Because I still have hope.
I still have faith.
And I still believe there is a very good chance I will spend years laying on that AstroTurf, sweaty, exhausted, smiling, and cancer free.
And if life turns out differently than I want, I think I am okay with that too.
So for now, I will see what tomorrow brings.
One more time.