Life in the Stupid Lane

It’s been five days since I last wrote. Healing seems to be going well—especially after The Great Sneezing Incident of 2026, which thankfully did not result in anything dramatic popping open inside my body. Apparently things can just… move around in there post-surgery without immediately killing you. Good to know.

I’m still not sure if that means I’m lucky, or if I’m slowly deteriorating into some kind of polite, articulate zombie and just haven’t noticed yet. Since I’m still cognitive enough to type full sentences, I’m choosing to believe it’s luck.

The biggest improvement over the last few days is mobility. A week ago, getting out of bed or off the couch was an Olympic event. My surgeon did, after all, cut through most of my abdominal wall, so that tracks. But still—every time I needed to get up, it involved rolling onto my side, propping myself on one elbow, sliding my feet out, and performing what can only be described as a slow-motion Turkish get-up. (You might have to Google that. It’s a CrossFit thing. This one’s for you, Ed.)

And since I had to get up roughly twice an hour—to get water, get food, or empty this brand-new level of ostomy-bag hell—I was basically running that event nonstop. It was exhausting. And painful. And humbling.

Thankfully, that part is mostly behind me now. Getting up isn’t easy, but it’s no longer a full production.

What I do have is a spectacular bruise line across my waist, right below my belly button, like I’ve been wearing an invisible championship belt. There’s also a weird bulge that looks and feels… unsettling. I’m choosing to believe it’s just leftover swelling from a 13-hour surgery. If it’s something else, I am in absolutely no hurry to find out.

A lot has changed since surgery. Most notably: no colon, and by extension, no cancer. Hard to beat that.

But one thing remains: the bag.

Well. Technically, a new bag.

They closed the original location and relocated it to the other side of my body. The section of intestine it was attached to got removed, and in order to let everything heal where they reconnected things to my “exit hole,” they had to reroute traffic. So now it’s connected to my small intestine instead.

Enter: the ileostomy.

Going into this, I expected exactly one thing: a literal shit bag attached to my stomach. (Not a metaphor. Just… facts.)

What I did not expect is that it fills completely differently. The contents are more like applesauce, have almost no odor, and somehow manage to be both deeply gross and strangely better than before.

Still: I hate it.

I am counting down the days until it gets reversed and I can regain some semblance of my old life. I would’ve said “normal life,” but I think normal is gone. And honestly, “normal” doesn’t mean much anyway.

I don’t know what my new normal will look like.

I do know I’ll eventually be able to wear something other than black and navy. Light colors show the outline of the bag way too clearly, and my emotional stability can’t handle that yet. So for now, I’m dressed like a depressed minimalist.

Beyond that? It’ll be trial and error. How to eat. How to use the bathroom. How to manage the exciting new anxiety of possibly defecating in my pants as a grown adult.

Yet another square on my 2026 Life Bingo card.

And somehow, it’s only January.

At this point, I’m not even sure what other squares could possibly top the ones I’ve already filled.

But—because this is me, and because every one of these posts eventually turns this way—there is good stuff too.

I’ve been smiling more. Like, genuinely. I’ve been enjoying small things with a level of happiness I don’t remember having as an adult. I feel curious again. About what’s coming. About what’s possible. About what might be waiting just outside my field of view.

I’m already more careful with my time. I don’t want to spend it on things I won’t be able to explain to my future self. “Why did you do that?” is becoming a real filter.

I’m looking forward to opportunities at work to say, “I don’t know,” and then figure it out alongside new friends and colleagues.

I’m looking forward to taking Dean’s Shelby to Antwerp and driving down to Tivat, like Mike, Dov, Dean, and I talked about last year.

That three-piece bespoke suit is getting closer to being real too—though given how much weight I’ve lost, my measurements are now a complete mystery. So that should be an exciting adventure in itself.

All in all, yeah, I’ve still got challenges ahead with this stupid cancer story. Recovery isn’t over. The bag isn’t gone. There’s more work to do.

But I also have more opportunities than I’ve ever felt before.

And I don’t plan to waste them.

It should be a good year.

If nothing else, it’s already started better than last year.

On this exact day last year, I was sitting at the Grey Ghost in Detroit, staring at my favorite burger on the planet, unable to eat more than two bites without getting sick. That was the first real sign that something was wrong.

I’m going back there soon.

I’m finishing that burger.

I’ve been craving it for far too long.

I thought the last post could have been the ending to this story.  

If this whole thing were a Netflix series, we’d have wrapped it up neatly—soft music, hopeful resolution, me walking into the sunset feeling lighter than I had in months. Instead, it turns out I’d just stumbled into the literary equivalent of a false ending. I learned that term this week. Thanks, Google.

The physical recovery was the part I expected. Pain, logistics, healing tissue, awkward medical accessories I’ll explain later. What I didn’t anticipate was the mental hangover—the way fear sneaks back in after you’ve convinced yourself the danger has passed.

I’ve been sleeping on the couch since I got home. Not out of drama, but practicality. It’s easier to roll off, get upright, deal with the new realities of post-surgery life, and take Tugboat outside. Also, the TV is bigger. Let’s not pretend that didn’t factor in.

After three nights, I decided to graduate back to the bedroom. Tugboat disagreed. He was stretched across the bed horizontally, somehow occupying more space than physics allows. A thirty-inch corgi with king-size confidence. He relocated with protest.

I climbed in, settled down, and sneezed.

Then came the pop.

If you’ve ever been given a post-surgical briefing, you know there are words you don’t want to hear used casually. Leakage. Tearing. Those words immediately reintroduced themselves to my imagination. I spent the rest of the night conducting a silent internal investigation: pain levels, bleeding, differences, hypotheticals. My brain went full incident-response mode.

Logic held for a while. Fatigue eventually won. Sleep arrived—and brought its own brand of chaos. Dreams strip away reason. I woke up more than once convinced something was terribly wrong when it wasn’t.

The doctor has been called. My older brother—who has the calm, rational brain I borrow when mine goes rogue—talked me down. Healing tissue does strange things. The critical areas are reinforced. Low-grade fever is common. A sneeze is dramatic, not catastrophic.

And just like that, the hysteria loosened its grip.

No one really warns you that the last stretch is as mental as it is physical. Endurance sounds heroic until you’re alone, exhausted, and bargaining with God at 2 a.m. I’ve had those moments quietly, privately. God has absorbed more than His share of frustration. Thankfully, He’s sturdy like that.

What’s carried me through hasn’t been grit. It’s been people.

I don’t accept help easily. I hate inconvenience. But the steady drip of kindness—the texts, the dumb GIFs, the check-ins, the visits, the Slack jokes—has been the scaffolding holding my brain upright. It’s hard to spiral when you’re being held up from every direction.

So yes, yesterday rattled me. Today steadied me. And the trajectory still points forward.

Tonight I’ll sleep in the bed again. Tugboat will be displeased by the loss of his territorial rights. The couch has served its purpose, but it’s been officially demoted.

The credits haven’t rolled yet.
But the story is still moving the right way.

I’m not going to bury the lead here: as of this post, I am cancer free.

That is a hell of a thing to be able to say.

I actually started writing this on Friday with the best of intentions, but thankfully the pain meds stepped in and saved the internet from what was shaping up to be less a blog post and more a madman’s manifesto. I tried again on Saturday. That version was mostly just a chronological list of the day’s indignities—ranging from soiling myself while laying in a hospital bed wearing medical underwear (which I did not know existed, nor that I was wearing them until that moment), to arguing with nurses who were trying to follow prescriptive diabetes orders that I knew—deeply and confidently—were going to kill me unless they ignored them.

By Sunday, the post had evolved into a detailed inventory of the various medical-looking atrocities protruding from my body: a catheter, a drainage tube, and what felt like eleven IV ports. Somewhere in there it also dawned on me that I had, at that moment, three sizable holes in my body as a direct result of surgery I had just endured. At that point, I decided it was probably best to hold off on posting any of that. I’ll still tell the story—but I’ll tone it down here so I don’t gross everyone out too badly.

Here’s the short, less-horrifying synopsis.

They removed the last two feet of my large intestine, then sewed what remained together. I have no idea what that means long term, but I’m cancer free, so I’ll deal with it. They also reversed the bag—but had to put in a new one, higher up in the intestinal tract, to give everything time to heal without risking infection. This was expected, but it’s a whole new challenge. This bag is connected to the small intestine, which means everything is liquid, much more frequent, and—oddly—nearly odorless. I genuinely can’t tell yet if that’s good or bad. Either way, it’s temporary. Two months. I can manage that.

I now also have a hole where the old bag was. They used a technique meant to minimize scarring, which currently makes it look like I took a bullet to the abdomen. I mentioned the drainage tube earlier, and if you’ve never had the pleasure of having a three-foot tube pulled out of your insides, I would strongly recommend keeping it that way. That’s one of those memories that lodges itself deep in your brain and refuses to leave.

I’m home now. The pain is real—mostly from having to sit up and get out of bed—but I’m managing it largely medication free. I was warned to watch for certain risks, and I don’t want to dull pain that might actually be trying to tell me something important. All in all, it’s not too bad. Just a long road to recovery ahead.

The most surprising part of all of this didn’t really hit me until I was driving home from the hospital. It was a simple question: what now?

That question had floated through my head a few times while I lay in a brutally uncomfortable hospital bed, wrapped in a gown that made me feel far more exposed than anyone should ever feel, and it followed me all the way home. There’s a moment in Fight Club—which I think I’ve referenced before—where Brad Pitt’s character drags a convenience store clerk into an alley at gunpoint and interrogates him about why he’s let his life stall out instead of pursuing his dreams. Pitt lets him go and explains to Edward Norton that the clerk will wake up tomorrow with an appreciation for life neither of them will ever truly understand, because of the second chance he was just given.

My circumstances aren’t quite that dramatic, but the feeling is familiar. And it keeps circling back to that same question: what now?

The honest answer is that I don’t know.

I believe God doesn’t give you hardships to punish you, or worse—but to grow you. You don’t get stronger, braver, or wiser during the easy seasons, so it stands to reason that something comes next. What that is, I have no idea. I’m pretty dense when it comes to hearing clear answers from God—but I’m fairly confident it’s something good. For now, I’m leaving the question open-ended and seeing what life throws at me next.

What I do notice is a new sense of opportunity—and a quiet resolve not to squander it on things I wouldn’t be able to explain to myself a year from now.

For now, I’m going to fall asleep on the couch, listening to Tugboat snore happily in his little bed, and try not to cry for the twentieth time in the last few days as it sinks in, again, that I am cancer free.

What a hell of a year it has been.

Well, it’s just about time for this story—at least this chapter of it—to come to a close. Surgery is in about eight hours, and it will take roughly nine to complete.

Someone pointed out recently that anesthesia is a bit like time travel: you close your eyes, and the world skips ahead without you. That will be one small silver lining tomorrow. The other, more obvious one, is that when the day is over, there’s a very good chance I’ll be cancer-free. That feels like it should be the headline. It is a big deal. And yet, as I sit here in a new hotel room—I tried a different one this time—it doesn’t feel as significant as the long road that led to tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the last year. All the appointments, scans, conversations, waiting rooms, and strange little moments in between. I could run through all of that now, but it feels too early for a “year in review.” The story isn’t finished yet. So this will be a short post.

Most people assume I’m scared, or anxious, or overwhelmed tonight. The truth is much less cinematic. I’m tired. And I really want bean and cheese tacos, which I can’t have because I haven’t eaten in the last 24 hours. It turns out it’s hard to be afraid when you’re hungry. Or at least, that’s how it works for me. Strange things you learn when you’re on the doorstep of major surgery.

So that’s it for tonight. It’s time for bed. The faster I get to tomorrow, the faster I get to the other side of all of this.

And when I do—when I wake up on the far side of this long day—I’ll come back and finish telling the story. Not from anticipation or fear, but from whatever comes next. However it ends, it deserves to be told from the other side of the threshold.

Surgery is four days away.

I wish I could say I’m not counting, but I am. Not obsessively, not every minute of the day—but enough that I always know where I am in the countdown. I can distract myself for hours at a time, sometimes long enough to feel almost normal, but the moment things slow down, it comes back into focus.

Usually late at night.

Brain: You scared yet?
Me: Not really.
Brain: Okay, but just checking.

That’s the rhythm right now. Not panic. Not denial. Just a low-level awareness that doesn’t fully go away. If I said that out loud to strangers, it might raise some eyebrows, so instead I’ve leaned into the most socially acceptable coping mechanism there is: productivity.

I’ve been staying busy in the most boring ways possible. Laundry. Mopping. Organizing things that have been disorganized for years. The kind of tasks that never feel urgent—until suddenly they do. It turns out routine is a decent way to keep your thoughts from wandering too far ahead of you.

Eventually, though, the list ran out of easy wins and landed on the one thing I’d been avoiding for a long time: making a will.

I didn’t put it off because I thought it would be hard. I put it off because it required me to sit still with ideas I’ve always preferred to keep abstract. Mortality. Finality. Loose ends. I told myself I didn’t really have anything worth worrying about. Other than Tugboat, of course—and if I die before he does, I’m confident he’ll drain my bank accounts, find a sugar mama, and disappear into a life of leisure somewhere expensive.

Tugboat has never been to the beach, but he feels like a beach dog. I can imagine him on the French Riviera, wearing linen, yelling at people in a language he doesn’t speak, living his best life. He’ll be fine.

Still, it turns out there are things I need to take care of. Practical things. Stuff I don’t want tangled up in probate or left unresolved because I avoided dealing with it. On a normal timeline, this would just be annoying paperwork. With surgery days away, it feels heavier than that—not dramatic, just uncomfortably well-timed.

Thinking about a will has a way of pulling other thoughts along with it. I’m not afraid of thinking about mortality, but it’s not something I’ve ever lingered on. Doing this made it unavoidable.

I still believe I have a lot of life left to live. That hasn’t changed. But I’m also aware that I’m at the age where these conversations make sense. Where friends start getting sick. Where losses accumulate slowly and then all at once. Where you realize there’s more past than future.

That realization is supposed to be sobering. For me, it’s been clarifying.

It’s stripped away some of the noise. I can see the things I still want to do more clearly now, and I can see how little patience I have for the rest. I’ve always been bad at saying no. I say yes because it’s easier, because it avoids friction, because I don’t want to disappoint people. Lately, that’s changing.

Time feels more finite, and that makes decisions simpler. I’m saying no without the long internal negotiations. If someone is planning to ask me to compete in extreme ironing, chase a wheel of cheese down a hill, or do anything that requires unnecessary risk or effort for no real payoff, they’re going to be disappointed.

I’m also realizing that while I genuinely like my job and the people I work with, I don’t want work to be the thing that consumes the best parts of my life. The version of the future that keeps resurfacing is quieter: somewhere near the water, good books, excellent coffee, and days that don’t need to be optimized.

So no, I don’t want to be making a will. Even if it does keep my mind occupied enough to avoid thinking too hard about surgery, it’s not how I’d choose to spend my time. But I’m glad I did it. Not because of the paperwork, but because of what it forced me to confront.

It’s strange how easy it is to find small moments of clarity in the middle of absolute shit (colon cancer pun intentional). I’m not grateful for cancer. I never will be. But I am grateful for the way it’s sharpened my focus. For the growth it’s forced. Just not for the thing that caused it.

Four days to go.

For now, I’ll keep doing the laundry, checking things off lists, and staying just busy enough to keep my thoughts where they belong—right here, instead of too far ahead.

I didn’t write last night because I got home too late, and because sometimes good news still knocks the wind out of you.

The drive back from Houston was long and dark and mostly quiet, the kind of drive that gives your thoughts too much room to stretch out. Earlier that day I’d sat in exam rooms, stared at scans, and endured the third—though apparently not final—time someone put a tube where no one ever wants a tube while fully awake. And then, somewhere between all of that and the drive home, I was told the thing that matters most: the tumor has shrunk by more than fifty percent. The cancer hasn’t spread anywhere they can see. In a week, they’re going to surgically remove what’s left.

Eventually, the ostomy bag will be reversed too. Probably not before March, but still—almost all of this is good news. I would’ve preferred a version of this story where surgery wasn’t part of the plan at all, but that was wishful thinking, a fact my older brother helpfully and bluntly confirmed.

I spent most of the drive home fixated on the surgery. Nearly two feet of intestine will be removed. Things will change. There will be a before and an after. But when you compare that to the alternatives—living indefinitely with a bag, or living with cancer that spreads somewhere it can’t be cut out—“changes in quality of life” starts to sound a lot like winning. Whatever those changes are, I’ll learn them as I go.

What hijacked my brain yesterday wasn’t the news itself so much as the delivery. My surgeon is incredible—everyone I meet in the medical world tells me how lucky I am to have her—and she is relentlessly honest. She walked me through every possible complication, from manageable pain all the way to catastrophic, life-ending scenarios. Leaks. Sepsis. Sutures failing. Bleeding out. The bag returning permanently like some kind of medical ghost.

None of it was sugarcoated. And none of it was framed as likely. But once you hear those words, they move in and start unpacking. And when you’re driving across Texas in the dark, there’s nothing to stop them.

It took hours—and a Diet Coke—to remember what actually mattered: the cancer is shrinking. It hasn’t spread. There is a plan. Today, with a little distance from yesterday, it’s clear that this was a good day carrying good news, even if it didn’t feel that way at the time.

Now I’m hoping the next part goes according to plan. That my intestines are cut, stretched like a slinky, and reattached to the egress port (still my favorite clinical term for the butthole) without incident. If all goes well, March will arrive with a different kind of reflection—one where I look back on the past year and wonder how I made it through without falling apart, or disappearing into something darker.

I don’t entirely know how I’ve done that so far. I suspect it’s some combination of friends, family, faith, and Tugboat. Last night he climbed into bed and curled up next to me, which was unexpected and oddly grounding. It didn’t last long—eventually I disrupted his ability to get the eighteen hours of sleep required to sustain his difficult, loaf-shaped existence—but it was nice while it lasted.

I leave for surgery Wednesday night. I don’t know how long I’ll be in the hospital, but if last time is any indication, it’ll be at least three days. Hospital beds are engineered somewhere between “thick wool blanket” and “punishment device,” which explains both bedsores and why sleep becomes a distant memory after day two. I’m also curious how quickly I’ll irritate the nurses. Last time it took less than a day, mostly because I interpreted “you can walk to get coffee” as permission to leave the hospital and go to Starbucks. Apparently they meant the one inside the building. Lesson learned. Probably.

For now, this is where things stand. Surgery is coming. The news is good. The fear hasn’t disappeared, but it no longer gets to be the headline.

Thank you for the prayers, the texts, and the steady reminders that I’m not walking through this alone.

It’s two hours before I head to MD Anderson to find out how well—or how poorly—I responded to chemo and radiation over the last year, and what the next, and hopefully final, steps of this whole thing will be.

It’s another one of those seminal moments, not unlike the first time I came here early last year. I don’t know if it’s irony, symmetry, or something else entirely, but I’m sitting in the exact same hotel room where this all started. Staring out at the same signage I stared at then. I’m sure my woo-woo friends will someday have plenty to say about that. For now, it just is.

In a bit, I’ll shower, then walk down Holcombe Boulevard, turn into that little alleyway that cuts between two medical buildings—the one with copper stains streaking down the walls from the steam vents that hiss constantly in a way I’ve somehow come to love—pass the Starbucks where the security guard DJ and I have become friends, and enter the back side of the main MD Anderson campus. Again.

It’ll be my 100th time walking into the hosptal. I know because I’ve been counting for some reason. More irony or symmetry for people to read into later.

I didn’t write at all the last two days, even though I got to Houston on Monday. Not much happened, really. CT scans, MRIs, and other invasive-but-necessary scans to tee things up for today. Yesterday was simple. Easy, uncomfortable, sure, but easy.

What has been keeping me at easy is the amount of outreach, concern, and prayer from so many people. Most messages assume I’m scared, not sleeping, not eating, and generally a distressed wreck. I assumed the same thing about myself. But since getting here, it’s been the opposite. I’ve eaten like a fat kid, slept well, and felt completely calm.

Yesterday afternoon I sat in a coffee shop reading after leaving the hospital, then ended up meeting some random new friends at a BBQ place who were in town for their very first MD Anderson consultation. We talked, ate, and prayed together. It was one of those moments that happens only because I talk too much to strangers—whether it’s an elderly couple in an elevator going to see their grandson before surgery, or a young mom and her mom standing in line at a BBQ joint, trying Texas barbecue for the first time before her husband learns about his pancreatic cancer treatment options the next morning.

I think God gave me this calm not just for me, but so I could offer it to other people. That might sound arrogant, but it’s something I’ve noticed the last couple days: people seem to gravitate toward my outlook this time around more than before. And that actually makes all of this easier, because I’ve always felt better when I can help someone else, even in the smallest way.

It might be hard to believe that I’m not scared this morning, but walking to get coffee earlier this morning, I realized why. Beyond all the love and support from everyone in my life, my mom gave me the blueprint for how to handle all this shit—last colon cancer pun ever, I promise—when she went through it with my dad forty years ago. Watching a mother of four navigate something harder, with fewer resources, makes what I’m doing now feel surprisingly manageable by comparison.

So today, I’ll walk into these appointments feeling more excited than anything else.

I’ll update this blog again this evening after I get my results. Radiation oncologist at 11. Surgeon—probably the most important meeting—at 1:30. Chemo doctor shortly after that. Then I’ll climb into that great self-driving car GM gave me, point it toward home, stop at Whataburger for a big-ass Diet Coke, and listen to an audiobook.

I’m really looking forward to that part.

See you on the other side.

Five Days & Counting

I should probably be more nervous than I am. A week from now I’ll find out how effective radiation and chemo have been, and that feels like the kind of thing a person is supposed to spiral about. But over the last week or so, I’ve settled into something that looks a lot like peace. Not denial. Not bravery. Just acceptance of whatever might be coming for me next.

On the sixth, I have three scans.

First up is a CT scan with dye contrast — the one that absolutely sucks. The techs always warn you ahead of time, and at MD Anderson they like to mention that they use a stronger contrast dye than other places. I don’t remember why they do that, because right after they explain it, the dye hits your bloodstream and your body feels like it’s on fire. Then comes the overwhelming sensation that you’re actively urinating on yourself while lying on the CT table.

You are not, thankfully, urinating. But at this point, if I were, it wouldn’t even crack the top ten list of dignity-robbing things that have happened over the last year. And I assume there are still some truly unimaginable ones waiting their turn.

After the CT scan, there’s a couple-hour window where I sit around the hospital watching thousands of other sick people move through the hallways. I always wonder how I look to them. I usually feel like I look healthier than most, but I’m also noticeably younger. Sometimes I wonder if that annoys anyone — if I look like I’m taking up space I don’t deserve yet. I catch myself wanting to shrink, to make myself less visible so I don’t upset anyone inadvertently. I don’t really know how I’d do that, though, so I just sit there and wait.

Later that day is a pelvic MRI without contrast. This one is new to me. I think until now my experiences have been limited to CT scans or being anally probed — a phrase I still refuse to stop typing, even though it remains the worst thing I’ve endured in this entire year of shit. I don’t really know what the MRI shows that the CT doesn’t, but I assume it has a purpose I just haven’t bothered to ask about yet.

The final “scan” is visual. An ostomy nurse will look at how I’ve been attaching my bags and will either tell me I’m doing something horribly wrong or stare at me in quiet horror as I explain what I’ve been doing. The bags are holding, but I am almost certainly using far too much adhesive caulk. When I remove them, I’m always surprised I don’t take skin with me.

Imagine getting waxed, but with super glue. That’s about right.

Whatever the ostomy nurse says, I’ll probably just point out that unless it’s really bad, this thing should be coming off sometime around March. That’s still the plan, as far as I’ve been led to believe, and it’s the thing I’m hoping for most.

On the seventh, I meet with all my doctors. They’ll have reviewed the scans and — ideally — they’ll tell me things look better than expected. Maybe some remaining treatments get expedited. Maybe the road shortens a bit. If you’re one of the many people praying for me, that’s what I’m praying for too.

Last week, I went to a friend’s house — a buddy who used to be one of the pastors at a church I attended years ago. They host an annual evening of prayer and asked if I’d come so people could pray for my health. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I’ve always leaned toward the idea that prayer is private, shaped largely by Matthew 6:6, where Jesus talks about praying quietly and unseen.

But it turned out to be surprisingly comforting to have a room full of people spending their evening asking God to help someone they mostly just met.

I’ve been thinking a lot about prayer lately, even before that night. About its power. About its purpose. If God already has a plan, and my prayer doesn’t match it, is prayer pointless? Before I could even ask that question out loud, my buddy Ryan talked about prayer being something God places in your heart — something that aligns you with His desires and draws you closer to Him.

That’s at least how I remember it. There was a lot going on that night, and my mind wasn’t exactly locked in. But it made sense to me.

It’s also probably why I’ve found myself praying more — not just about my upcoming scans, but about my little brother. He’s had a hard year too, and lately that’s what occupies my thoughts the most. I don’t know if that’s because I’m using his struggles as a distraction from my own, or because that’s genuinely where my heart is being pulled, or because I’m just grasping for meaning in random events.

Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. It’s where my calm is coming from.

So tonight, like the last few weeks, I’ll pray for good news. I’ll pray for strength to handle it well if the news isn’t what I want. And more than anything, I’ll pray for my little brother as he tries to turn the corner on a shitty 2025 — yes, I’m using a colon cancer pun for someone else this time — and start 2026 on better footing than this year ended.

If you’re someone who prays for me, feel free to use that as a guide. If you’re not, that’s okay too. I’d still appreciate whatever version of a request to a higher power you’re comfortable with. I doubt God is particularly concerned with what anyone calls Him.

For now, it’s time for bed.

That makes it just four more days to go.

I’m sitting in my favorite coffee shop in Austin — Nate’s Baked Goods. It’s a little bungalow house that’s been converted into a cozy coffee shop, and I love it for exactly that reason. It’s comfortable. Familiar. The kind of place where nothing is trying too hard. I come here a few times a week at a minimum, usually with buddies, and it’s where I like to start both good days and bad ones.

Today, I’m here by myself.

Austin has slowed down over the past week as Christmas gets closer. It’s a transplant town, and when the holidays roll around, a lot of people head home — wherever home happens to be for them. The city gets quieter as a result, and honestly, it’s really nice. I’ve always liked having people around, but as January 6th gets closer, the quiet feels like a small gift. Fewer conversations. Fewer check-ins. Fewer well-meaning questions about how I’m feeling or how I’m doing.

To be clear, I don’t mind talking about cancer. It would be pretty dense of me to say that, given the theme of this blog and how much time I’ve spent writing about it. I genuinely appreciate the concern — the texts, the prayers, the way people take time out of their lives to care about mine. That part still matters to me.

But over the last ten months, my identity has slowly shifted into something I didn’t ask for: AJ — the guy with cancer… and Tugboat.

I used to enjoy sympathy before all of this started. I don’t know why, and I won’t pretend that’s a flattering thing to admit, but it’s true. These days, while I still appreciate the sentiment behind it, I don’t enjoy it the way I once did. Somewhere along the way, sympathy stopped feeling comforting and started feeling limiting — like it was quietly shrinking me down to one story.

Recently, someone sent me a video — one of those things I’d normally scroll past without a second thought. It’s some random guy who kind of looks like Channing Tatum, which already felt suspicious. In the video, he talks about making it through just one more hard day and how that alone is something to be proud of. He says your future self needs you, but your past self doesn’t. The goal isn’t to be perfect — it’s just to carry on and aim to get a little better each day.

I don’t usually subscribe to clickbait motivation, but this one stuck with me.

These quiet days — the ones without constant conversations about what’s wrong — have given me space to think about what’s right. And I realized two things.

First, as much as I appreciate sympathy when people offer it, I’d choose admiration over it every time if given the option.

And second, when I actually take inventory, I have a lot to be proud of.

I’m not going to list those things out. That feels arrogant and also exhausting. But in the aggregate — and that word matters — I’ve gotten better at something every single day since all of this shit started. Yes, that was absolutely a pun.

Have there been rocky days? Of course. There were a few recently where my brain went down some truly idiotic rabbit holes. That still happens. But when I zoom out instead of fixating on the noise, I’m proud of where I am this morning — sitting in a quiet coffee shop, drinking my coffee, writing this, planning out a few small things I’ll do today to be just a little better tomorrow than I am right now.

I’m doing okay.

I’m not defined by my cancer.

I’m optimistic about what comes next — with cancer and without it — and I’m doing my best to get better each day, whether that improvement has anything to do with cancer at all.

And honestly, the day I’m most looking forward to isn’t some dramatic milestone or perfectly clean scan. It’s the day I get to be defined again by all the same stupid things that defined me before cancer. There are so so so many stupid things to choose from on that day…

That will be a good day.

That will be a day worth admiring.

It’s nearly midnight on a Sunday as I write this. I’m stretched out on the couch, wide awake, listening to Tugboat snore contentedly from his bed across the room. He’s on his back, feet sticking straight up in the air—the position he only finds when he’s fully at peace. I’ve come to learn that’s his tell. When he sleeps like that, he’s happy. Probably dreaming about food. Or getting pets from literally anyone in the building. Either way, it makes me smile.

In a few minutes, the calendar will roll over to the 15th. That means I have twenty-two days left before I learn what comes next in this cancer story. Twenty-two days until scans, answers, and whatever reality is waiting on the other side of early January.

Since radiation ended, sleep hasn’t come easily. It’s not that I don’t sleep at all—I do—but it’s restless, shallow, and easily interrupted by my own thoughts. These nights are strange because they’re both exciting and terrifying at the same time. That probably sounds contradictory, but it’s true.

They’re exciting because I can imagine a version of January where I’m told the radiation worked incredibly well. Where the words “we don’t see any cancer” are said plainly, almost casually, as if they aren’t capable of rearranging an entire life in a single sentence. That version of the future is easy to picture, and it fills me with real optimism.

But I’ve also become more of a realist than I used to be—maybe because of all this, maybe because you don’t get to be naïve forever. I know the odds aren’t great. A coin toss at best. And that means I have to hold space for the possibility that the news won’t be ideal, and that this road doesn’t end as cleanly or quickly as I’d like.

I want to be clear about something, though: this isn’t despair. I’m not spiraling or sinking or giving up. I still have hope. I still have faith. What I do have is a lot of quiet time to think—about mortality, about time, about what actually matters when the noise dies down. That might sound cliché or even a little pompous, but given the circumstances, it feels unavoidable.

This is usually the part where that Tim McGraw song sneaks into my head—“I went skydiving, I went Rocky Mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu.” To be extremely clear: I will not be skydiving, I will not be bull riding, and there is a zero percent chance I will be spending even a fraction of a second on a bull named Fu Man Chu. I’m reflecting on life, not actively trying to shorten it.

Still, the song does its job. It got me thinking about the things I do want to do, and that list surprised me.

I want to live in Montenegro for a while, drinking coffee by the water and working my way through the eighty-four books currently sitting in my backlog. I want to graduate from being a modestly competent cook to a genuinely impressive one. I want to give away all my bourbon to people who will save it for the right moments—to forget hard times, remember good ones, and laugh at everything in between that made our friendships what they are.

I want to get a bespoke three-piece suit made in Italy, wait until cancer is firmly in the rearview mirror, and then wear it to hit on a woman wildly out of my league—fully expecting to get rejected and enjoying the absurdity of it anyway. I want to watch my nieces and nephews grow into adults who are better people than I ever managed to be. I want my mom to go back to Germany, where she met my dad, before she gave up so much of her own life to help her kids become adults half as good as she is.

More than anything, I want to get better at saying no—to the noise, the distractions, the things that feel important in the moment but won’t matter at all when you finally sit down and take inventory of your life. And I want to keep adding to this list as time goes on.

This isn’t a morbid bucket list. It’s not wishful thinking born out of fear. It’s a future I’m genuinely excited about. That’s why these sleepless nights are strange—they’re filled with both anticipation and uncertainty. The fear that some of these things might not happen is real, but the truth is that fear exists for everyone, cancer or not. None of us are guaranteed time.

Time is precious. It’s strange and fragile and unbelievably valuable. And wasting it—out of habit, fear, or apathy—feels especially stupid once you’re forced to really look at it.

So with that, I’m going to close the laptop and pick up my book. Because I know someone will ask, it’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong, and it’s incredible.

If the posts between now and early January are a little sparse, that’s intentional. There isn’t much new to report in these twenty-two days, and I’ll do my best not to sound pretentious or boring while we wait. Come January sixth and seventh, though, I’ll have a story to tell—good or bad.

And if you have any book recommendations, I can always make room for an eighty-fifth.