Round six. I’m back in this tiny hospital bed again—hooked up to machines with lights and beeps and tubes that all have one job: to pump poison straight into my heart and call it healing. Usually, the room hums with the kind of clinical chaos that makes you feel like a walking science experiment.
But not today.
Today, my buddy Don handed me a lifeline: Explosions in the Sky. I knew the music from Friday Night Lights, but couldn’t have named the band if my life depended on it. Now, they’re scoring my treatment session, and the beeping machines fade into the background. (And Ed, don’t get any ideas—just because I’m using this music to ignore the noise doesn’t mean you get to use it to ignore me. I’m not that easy to tune out.)
This is the part of treatment where the whispers usually start—the ones that say, Maybe this is the round that breaks you. Maybe this is the one where your hair falls out, or you spend the week hugging a toilet. The annoying thing is, chemo doesn’t follow rules. Just because the last round went okay doesn’t mean this one will. It’s like playing roulette with your body—spin the wheel, see what symptom you land on.
But despite all that, I’ve been lucky. And I keep choosing to believe I’ll keep being lucky, even when doubt keeps tugging at my sleeve with no off switch.
The strange thing is, cancer hasn’t just brought pain. It’s also brought people. Reconnected me with old friends, unearthed forgotten bonds, reminded me that time is a lousy excuse for losing touch. There’s this quote you see online: Friends come into your life for a season, a reason, or a lifetime. I used to like that one. Now I just disagree with it. Because when I look around, I see a whole bunch of people who’ve come into my life for a reason—and somehow stuck around for a lifetime.
People I haven’t spoken to in years are suddenly back—calling, texting, showing up. And here’s the beautiful part: it doesn’t feel weird. It doesn’t feel forced. It’s like no time has passed at all. Sure, life’s changed—jobs, kids, moves, marriages—but the friendship hasn’t. It’s still there. Still solid. Like it was just waiting for us to pick it back up again.
And yeah, it sucks that cancer had to be the reason. But honestly, I don’t really care what the reason is. I care that they showed up.
So here I am. Round six. A few more hours to go. I don’t feel like I got hit by a truck. I just keep waiting to see if one’s coming. There’s a difference.
And while I’m sitting here getting pumped full of medicine, I’m also listening to good music, texting with old friends, and queuing up Happy Gilmore 2. Because if I can’t be back in college eating bad pizza with no responsibilities, at least I can pretend for a couple hours.
There’s still good in the middle of all this garbage. Sometimes you just have to look for it. Sometimes it shows up on its own.