Life in the Stupid Lane

It’s 184 miles from the Intercontinental Hotel at MD Anderson, where i was staying this week, to the front door of my condo in Austin. That meant I had a little under three hours today to feel sorry for myself, driving through rural East Texas to a soundtrack mostly made up of ’90s grunge rock.

After yesterday, I was struggling to shake something Dr. Yu said: the tumor was Stage 3 but could become Stage 4 soon.

Because the original pathology report said Stage 2, then the MRI said Stage 3, and now MD Anderson was saying potentially Stage 4, the steady progression of bad news had me spiraling. So there I was, somewhere between Houston and nowhere, wrestling with this while listening to the soundtrack of my teenage years—Nirvana, Stone Temple Pilots, and Blur, most notably. Song 2 still holds up.

There were two things I couldn’t get out of my head on my drive home.

The first was the “what now?” question.

This shouldn’t have been that hard to figure out. I like to think I’m fairly pragmatic when it comes to the important stuff in life. But this question had me more stumped than any problem I’ve run into in recent memory.

I couldn’t seem to move past it to even attempt an answer. And every time the song changed during the drive, the question looped back in my mind like a skipping record.

The second thing I kept circling around was the whole idea that cancer is a fight.

This one wasn’t upsetting—it was just confusing. I don’t know why almost everyone in medicine insists on using that language. It’s not a fight, at least not in the sense that I can physically do something to impact the outcome.

The only “fight” I can foresee in this process is the one I’ll have when some well-meaning hippy starts telling me to cure cancer with magnets, ionized water, or essential oils. That person, God help them, is going to get a Jason Statham-style dropkick to the chest like they’re a nameless henchman in one of his movies.

But cancer? It’s not a fight. It’s a process. A step-by-step ordeal. And right about the time I came to that conclusion, I figured out how to answer the “what now?” question.

This is going to suck. That part’s guaranteed. But we have a plan. And all I can—and will—do is follow that plan:

See a doctor.
Get scoped.
See another doctor.
Get a chemo port.
Get chemo (yay!).
Get radiation.
Practice drop kick technique.
Drop kick advocate for essential oils as a cure for cancer.
Get more chemo.
Drop kick idiot telling me magnets will cure cancer.
Get surgery.
Don’t die.

I’m not sure why it took the better part of 100 miles for that to finally settle into place. But there it was. Pity party over—just in time to stop at Buc-ee’s in Bastrop for all the junk food my doctors now say I shouldn’t eat… FML.

By the time I pulled back into Austin, I’d also realized that not much is actually going to change right now.

I’m still going to CrossFit—had to include this just to make Ed roll his eyes while reading from vacation.  I’m still going to work and see through the big project we’ve got coming up, because I like my team.  I’m still going to walk Tugboat and get ignored by women who only want to talk to him.  I’ll still play video games with my brothers, read the 12 books stacked on my nightstand, keep grinding through grad school, and talk shit—no colon pun intended—to Dean and Mike over Saturday coffee at Nate’s Baked Goods.

Most interesting of all: I’m going to work on a solution to help fix a gap I’ve seen in healthcare education—especially in oncology offices—with the help of some great friends. That feels like something worth doing.

I guess the point of this rambling post is that I’m going to be okay, regardless of what happens with the cancer. Life’s challenging for all of us. This just happens to be my very public challenge…mostly of my own doing, I know.

And I’ll face it with the same lack of dignity and seriousness I tend to apply to most things in life—and we’ll see what happens.

Stay tuned for the rest, if you’d like.

If nothing else, it’ll be interesting to see how many people I end up drop-kicking in the next few months.

 

My dad died in 1985 from a glioblastoma—a brain tumor that spread into his spine. I only have pieces of memories from that time. I was six years old.

One sliver I do remember is sitting in a hospital, looking through the porthole of a hyperbaric chamber as he sat in a metal room with other sickly-looking people receiving treatment. I remember how fragile he looked.

This morning, while I sat in a waiting room in the main building of MD Anderson watching people walk past, that memory was at the forefront of my mind—but maybe not for the reason you’d expect.

I found myself smiling, thinking about all the times my dad might have sat in the same kind of rooms, waiting for news on his prognosis. In that moment, I felt connected to my dad in a way that brought me peace—comfort I haven’t often felt in my life.

I’ve said I believe in God, and I choose to believe that this wasn’t just a random childhood memory rushing back from some subconscious trigger. Maybe it was something more. Either way, it was the comfort I didn’t know I needed—and I found myself sitting there smiling like an idiot.

I don’t know if it’s just my nature or something else, but as depressing as a cancer hospital can be, I kept catching myself smiling at people, saying hello, trying to make conversation—just being upbeat.

Partially for my own sanity, but mostly for those around me. I don’t know if it made a difference to anyone specifically, but I figure it didn’t hurt. It’s like a prayer. It costs nothing to give, and it might change everything for someone—even if you never know.

One lesson I did learn today: never ask someone, “What type of cancer do you have?” Because if it turns into a competition, nobody wants to win that game. The trophy sucks ass—pun fully intended.

I met with a colorectal specialist named Dr. Yu. She came highly recommended by medical professionals who are much smarter than I’ll ever be.

I had a sense of what to expect, thanks to the prep work my nurse advocate walked me through. So when I found myself on an exam table in the fetal position with a camera “in me,” watching my own tumor on a screen while Dr. Yu explained what was good and what was bad, I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all.

Then she started taking biopsies—live, on screen, while I felt it happening in real time. It was the worst interactive movie ever made. Zero stars.

Once I recovered—I’ll spare you those details, though I will say I’m glad I never put much stock in dignity—Dr. Yu told me the cancer was Stage 3 and could be progressing to Stage 4.

That hit harder than any procedure so far. What ran screaming through my brain was the drop in five-year survival rates from Stage 3 to Stage 4—about a 70% difference.

I tried to stay focused. We laid out a treatment plan that’s aggressive but feels hopeful: two months of intravenous chemo, followed by radiation, more chemo (I think), and then surgery.

There were other options, but they involved colostomy bags or experimental treatments that had a zero percent chance of granting superpowers. So, I chose the reasonable path, all things considered.

I took a free shuttle from MD Anderson back to the hotel. During the 10-minute ride—I would’ve walked if I hadn’t just been anally probed for the better part of an hour—while I stared out the window at the passing medical center and talked to God. Mostly about all the things I still want to do before my time’s up.

This evening, back at the hotel, still looking out the same hotel window at that hospital that’s now going to have to save my life soon, I ran back through that list—and I smiled again.

 

Here’s that list:

1. I really want to go to F1 with Dave and his son in October.
2. I want to take Dean’s Cobra from Antwerp down to Tivat with Mike and Dean next year.
3. I really want to see the last Fast & Furious movie with my brothers and Zac.
4. I’d like to finish my master’s and spend a summer weekend at Ed Skoudis’s beach house talking theology and books.
5. I’d like to work for Mike Hanley at some point.
6. I’d like to take Tugboat on a road trip where he doesn’t freak out the entire time—which I assume is an indictment of my driving, according to him.
7. I really want to take my mom back to Berlin with my siblings before time runs out.
8. I’d like to play the new Borderlands with my brothers.
9. I want to see all my nieces and nephews grow into adults.
10. And while some will roll their eyes at this—I want to see my dev team get through 2025 with the same success we had in 2024.

 

I’m sitting in my hotel room at the Intercontinental Hotel, staring out the window at MD Anderson and wondering if tomorrow, they’ll be telling me whether or not they can save my life. This is a surreal moment—almost certainly a seminal moment in my life—and as good a place to start this story as any other.

A month ago—April 2nd—I was most concerned with applying for internal cybersecurity jobs at my company while trying to get through my most recent grad school class. Then I had a colonoscopy, and all those things faded into the background of life, like strangers’ conversations in a coffee shop.

Cancer is a strange thing to hear you have—though technically, I didn’t get told I had cancer. No, I got handed a piece of paper while getting into a car, still coming down from anesthesia, that said, “full obstruction in the colon.” That’s still the thing I’m most upset about, at least so far. I could go on a rant here, but I just don’t have the energy this evening.

In the next couple of weeks, I had visits with a surgeon who was awesome—even after he put things up my ass while I lay on an exam table in the fetal position. I had CT scans and MRIs. I met with oncologists who spoke in a near-foreign language that I still don’t see the need for. For as expensive as medical care is, you’d think they’d dumb it down to the most common language possible for the customer.

Instead, I needed my brother, who’s also a doctor, to act as a translator. He explained the pathology report said I had stage 2 cancer, which at the time was somehow good news. I would have thought good news meant hearing they made a terrible mistake and confused my medical records with some terrible human being who deserved this kind of news. But I guess there are degrees of good news when it comes to cancer.

One thing I did know was definitely good news: the cancer was nowhere near the egress hole—I’m trying out new ways to describe the asshole that sound more polite, to keep my mom from getting upset at my language—which meant it was unlikely I’d need a colostomy bag as a result of what was coming. That was in fact good news!

Eventually, after meeting with a team in Austin, my older brother wanted a second opinion and was able to work with friends to help get an appointment at MD Anderson. I don’t know if they’ll tell me anything different. I hope they do, but if not—or if the news is worse—I’ll find a way to make do and keep moving forward.

Looking back on everything that’s happened since I got the bad news, the hardest part by far was telling my mom. She went through enough cancer horrors with my dad—her husband—in the 80s, and the fear of opening old scars weighed heavily on me. A family friend, one of the great doctors we’re lucky enough to call lifelong friends, reminded me in a text that my mom is way stronger than I was giving her credit for. He was right. But still, there’s something about the idea that my mom might have to bury one of her kids that makes it hard not to cry at night—when it’s just me and Tugboat.

(Tugboat is my corgi, for those who don’t know him.)

There are a few things I take comfort in each day. One is that I’ve always believed in God. That statement can be divisive—I get why—but for me, I’ve been asking God for a way to show my faith more easily. I’m not sure this is exactly what I meant, but if this is how God wants it—I have to assume it is—then so be it.

Second, this has made it really easy to tell people I love them, and that alone is a beautiful thing.

I’m clearly not private or shy. I’ll try to update this story as it unfolds. For now, it’s 11 p.m., and tomorrow morning I get to take an enema before getting a scope stuck in me. That seems like as good a place to sign off as any.