184 Miles, A Plan, and a Dropkick

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.