13 - The Cloudy Future, The Recorded Past

I've been thinking a lot lately about what life's going to be like after the treatments are all over. The first thought one has, of course, is a sort of casual head-cocking at the intrigue of the idea that there could have very realistically been no (or a lot less) life after treatment. On the one hand, I'd be dead already and in my grave for circa two months now had I not come into the hospital when I did. On the other, I could very well have been facing the chemo treatments now with no guarantee they were even working, no visible results at all. That happens to a lot of people, too. Instead I got the third hand, which makes my choice of "hands" for this analogy a pretty poor one, and also is where the treatments seem to be working perfectly and I'm a couple of weeks shy of being officially declared completely cancer-free.

Each of those potentialities is a bit of a pause moment. It's the thoughts like that which comprise the perspective shift that accompanies reality/mortality checkpoint events, and they are also the hardest thing to convey to another who is not experiencing the same thing, and/or has never. I can speak the headline to you plainly enough: "Young Man Realizes His Life Could End Soon, And He Hasn't Even Ever Eaten A Crumpet Yet To Know What They Taste Like", but that doesn't actually convey the million-pointed caltrop of the experience anywhere near sufficiently. Because the headline is just the surface; it's the dozens of layers of substrata that bring the whole experience into sharp reality for each individual going through the event, and there's just not time or words or willing memory to convey it all while it's happening. So it all just drifts away, and we adventurers just look at you weeks or months or years later in response to your well-meaning questions of what it's really like, think a half a hundred things there aren't always easy accessible words for, and then throw out a blanket statement like "Well, it's just really heavy, you know? Everything changes." And you learn next to nothing really about the vast underground fungal colony dwelling invisibly beneath that seemingly-simple statement, and I get to go back to lying down and playing a video game, and everybody seems to win for the moment.

It was in anticipatory defiance of this probability that I first sat down and started writing the early entries to this blog: for no better nor more profound purpose than that I might not then have to tell the exact same story eighty times to eighty separate people, which would really be quite a cumulative interruption to any lying down and/or playing of video games I might prefer to be doing at any given eighty moments in time. It's probably easy to assume that when I first sat down I had no notion whatsoever that this blog might be visited eight thousand times (at the time of this writing; 8631, to be exact, and can you even believe that?!) by anyone, ever, anywhere, for any why. That possibility never once occurred to me. But the counterassumption is that I was originally just putting down my thoughts for my own edification, and lo and behold, people actually found it somewhat interesting for some reason, and the blog took off to a degree. That all sounds very feasible. Unfortunately, it's just not the truth. The questions I so often get are often variations of:

"So... how does that go, exactly, with your treatment schedule?"

"What's chemo like? Like, what does it feel like?"

"What was it like when you first realized, 'I have cancer'?"

So yeah... honest dishing: it was really just so I could answer these and select future questions expediently by pointing to a URL, or handing out a card. Because no matter how patient a person is (and I am terribly patient when I elect to be, at least according to my Skyrim saved game which has clocked a frankly ludicrous 362 hours of play thus far), telling a long-form personal tale about a life event to even just one new person a day, every day, begins to wear on one's patience with the joy of storytelling quickly. I'm just not narcissistic enough to actually have a desire or anything to gain from sitting and being listened to every single day as I say the same words again and again. (I am, however, just narcissistic enough that a little part of me is disappointed to be failing at being narcissistic enough for the first part.)

Packaged with the questions, masquerading as warmly well-meaning and respectably personally interested (because WE'RE SUCH GOOD FRIENDS, HARRY, like Gilderoy Lockhart throwing his arm around your shoulders and pulling you close solely because there's a camera present), comes this invisible glass ceiling to where they're no longer honestly interested if it means they have to actually independently go to a place and sit in front of a thing and type some stuff and then read for a few minutes. They'd rather hear it directly from me here and now, or meh, no thanks. Even if it took the same amount of time, even if it was the same exact words, they'd rather sit and hear me say it than sit somewhere else and have to read it on their own. I should probably take that as a complimenting backhand, really; it can't be an all-bad thing to be more interesting in person than one's words are on the page or screen, but it does land a bit perpendicular when the core reason I spent the time creating all these words in the first place was because no sane human being would ever actually have the time and energy to convey it all in person individually this many times in a row. Eight Thousand Six Hundred And Thirty One times!

The problem with that notion anyway is that there are no shorthand answers to the questions I am commonly asked. And many people have this unusual moment of quickly-masked hesitant disappointment when I reply to one with "That's a good question, and I actually wrote a blog post addressing that"; whether they elect to admit it or not, I immediately correctly identified this as an almost laughable-when-undressed impulse on behalf of the asker. Namely, I have inadvertently encountered the upper edge of how interested they were in actually learning the answer to the question they have asked me to spend my time and energy answering. Peel away the layers of politeness and curiosity and the stranger strata of social convention demanding that they be just this interested and just that perfect level of sympathetic, and you uncover a truth so completely believable and really just so perfectly modern human that you almost can't help but laugh at it.

They don't want to have to read about it.

Like, literally that. And nothing more or less. Just that fact. They want to know what it's all like enough that they'll ask me for my time and sit and listen to me talk about it, because active social interaction is entertaining and I guess I can perhaps be as well at times... but tell them that I have already taken the personal time and expended my precious limited energy to write down a detailed and descriptive, still-fully-personal answer to just that question and so many people get this ever-so-brief look of mild consternation on their faces. Like I'm assigning them homework, or something. I don't know what else to do, except laugh a little to myself inside. Incredulous laughter, mind you, the kind where I just can't really wrap my head entirely around the way people are at times, but laughter all the same. Because the unveiled truth is that we've just uncomfortably revealed the turning point to which they aren't actually interested anymore; if they can't have the details and information conveyed in a manner which is sufficiently lively and entertaining as well as informative, then they're actually content to simply take a step back and return to just being distantly glad I'm doing okay, and looking forward to hearing the all-clear weeks down the road. I've even had select family members fall into this tactic where I am concerned, some after weeks of pretending otherwise until they just got tired, or caught me in one bad mood, or in some other way dropped the facade. That insufferable, enviable freedom that everybody else gets which I and my parents do not, where they can just disengage and go do other things for awhile, and when they come back I'll be better and they'll have successfully dodged the undesirable problem I've become. In a better mood. Easier to deal with. Having more energy, and thus more able to be entertaining for them, or at least not all depressing and complicated. And every time I realize someone has done that thing, even inadvertently, even when it couldn't be helped and they were just busy and even when I'm honest enough with myself to freely admit that I wouldn't have wanted them hanging around anyway... this dark part of my mind still hates them a little, for having that freedom I do not to change the channel during the goddamn commercials and then just pop back in when the boring/heavy/complicated/uncomfortable parts to watch are all painlessly over with. It's not a justified feeling. It isn't even remotely fair, since it's essentially little more than petulantly, silently wishing the experience of cancer and the odyssey of treatment on another person, and I don't allow myself the leeway to experience it often, but it does exist. Involuntarily, it does. And the only time I don't feel bad about it is when I recognize that the person has chosen to decomplicate themselves in the moment by disconnecting from me on purpose, and for no other purpose than that they're tired from pretending to be better people/friends/family than they realized it would take actual energy and thought to be.

Those people can go engage in self-intercourse.

So go ahead. Tell me that silent "ah, shit, I have to read?" response isn't vaguely offensive, and honestly a little depressing. On the one hand (here we go again; maybe by now I've learned to only do this in two-example scenarios) I've just revealed that the person has this tangible, too-accessible limit to how much of a crap they give about me. On the other, I catch myself feeling like I'm somehow the pushy one, making people read stuff just to find out how I'm doing, when the truth is so far to the opposite it's barely funny. Like there aren't twenty out of twenty-one days during my chemo cycles where I'd have given anything not to have to see and answer to and perform for anyone at all, but they just kept on showing up in one form or another and my choices were to either face their worry and actively quiet their fears by projecting strength and certitude I might not even have at my command and won't know until I try and possibly fail right there in front of whoever it is or else beg off from the dinner or the outing or what have you and know that all I was really doing was inevitably queuing up even more worry/pity/incessant tell-me-how-you're-doing-in-full-detail-so-I-don't-have-to-worry-for-one-night private messages that I am going to have to deal with eventually anyway so dammit I might as well just square up and go wade through the needy grasping ocean of my support.

...And then I feel like an asshole. Because I've now gone and fully twisted the honest and well-meaning positivity of so many of the people around me into something to be dreaded and at times avoided, simply because a few among them are less than honest (with themselves as much as with me, make no mistake about that!) and to varying degrees insincere about how much they actually care, and I can always, always tell the difference.

There is nothing simple about being a cancer patient. I hope I'm able to convey at least a part of this overwhelming truth. Even the positive aspects of it can flip on a dime at times and weigh you down to the ground, by a combination of factors even my superhuman perception and lightning analytical abilities can't reliably see coming. And that's where dread begins, for me. I have ever relied on the aspects of my mind which are supernormal to sustain me through things that would bear another to the ground, but when the unique parts become the reason I can't just be obliviously grateful for a well-wish without an on-the-spot analysis of datapoint: eye contact/breathing rate/body language/phrasing; cross-check with emote veracity; cross-check with known habits; evaluate for total sincerity all unfolding within a single second...

Sometimes I don't want to see the wizard behind the curtain of another person's true feelings about a thing right then and there, in the moment. But I always do. I always do.

My superpower, and burden. Woe be I, and all that.

The blog is serving so much more of a purpose than I could have ever imagined back at the beginning, though, now. I am in the process of evaluating and slowly re-editing each of the posts toward the end of turning this journal into a more cohesive book about disaster, about cancer, about coping, personal philosophy and finding motivation when it's hardest. And it's all thank to you guys! You've taken a tough time in my life and singlehandedly turned this aspect of its inception into a pulsing, still-growing beacon of hope... hope of the possibility of turning this event into the springboard for the career as a writer and a motivational speaker that I've always wanted (or, in the latter case, that I had no idea I could possibly have wanted).

LATE-GAME DISCLAIMER: Obviously none of the observations I've made in this post actually apply to you. You do realize that, do you not? By the mere act of having taken the time to read this and any other blog posts to date, you're categorically not among the demographic I was describing and lamenting earlier in this post. In that light, my sincere thanks go out to every single one of you who has taken the time to read along, keep up with me here, and in so doing stand by my side without asking anything of me for the privilege of your company. Additionally, many people who are not reading this and have read none of my blog posts to date are also likewise not among the people I was discussing, because their sympathy was sincere, without a pre-packaged subtle selfish component.

In short, you're all amazing. Thank you, for taking the time out of your own lives to join me in this perfectly-balanced way for walks down the winding desert highway of my own. See you all again soon!

- Gabriel, Who Still Wonders 'Bout Dem Crumpets Like Hmm

Crumpets with faces. Because.

12 - I Am Not At War

Well now! Hello there, all.

I will refrain from wasting too much of our precious time together by mouthing a bunch of empty observational platitudes and excuses for how terribly, terribly long it's been since my last post. The shortest version of the plain truth is just that for the majority of the latter of my chemo treatments, I didn't feel up writing at any length, and chose instead to rest as completely as possible and not to write lesser quality or quantity placeholders just to be posting things. But now we are back in step once again, and I am driven to use this opportunity to share with you guys some of my recent thoughts and feelings.

A fair warning and disclaimer, however: Some aspects of the following are most certainly going to qualify as a rant. The rest is undiluted personal philosophy. There are rough and unsanded edges to these emotions yet, and I am choosing to present them to you honestly-if-unvarnished, rather than polished-but-processed in form. Like most things to do with my core beliefs and the feelings stemming from them, there is fire in the sky above and steel in the earth below what I'm about to say, but please rest assured that neither is directed at anyone in particular. I have had months to turn these thoughts over but little time and less desire to actively drag them out into the light for deep-tissue examination... until today. Thus warned and armored (I sincerely hope) against taking offense, let us proceed steadily together into the present, and the future it promises.

To begin with, a bit of catchup and current events for those who haven't been following along with my personal page on Facebook and may not be aware of more recent developments during the long hiatus.

• Chemotherapy is completed! I have persevered through six full three-week cycles of chemo, and today marks three weeks to the day from my final infusion. I am officially done with chemo, and have begun to physically and mentally recover from its ill effects for the last time these past couple of days.
• I have one additional surgery upcoming, to have my surgical port removed from my chest now that I no longer need it to help infuse chemo drugs into my system. It looks like this:

• Oh, whoops. Sorry. Unrelated. I meant this:

• With chemo out of the way I have three weeks of radiation treatments to look forward to, which don't actually start for at least another week from tomorrow. So this isn't by any means the end of the road or its purpose-filled journey. We're getting there, though, steadily. Because we march without fear.

So! How I am feeling. This is the tricky part... because I have been having mixed feelings about the reactions of others as I have come closer and closer to what they (distinction deliberate) perceive as being the "end" of my treatment. I say tricky because... well, honestly, how does one justify criticizing caring support one is being freely given? I can think of few things more blatantly assholish in execution than a person who stiffly corrects another in the midst of being praised or wished well by that person. So I have not done so, fearing that my feelings on the matter were misdirected or refracted from some other stress... but as the time passes I have come to realize that the friction is coming from my never having made my own views and beliefs about my own situation fully and completely clear, and until I do I actually bear the responsibility for others not knowing them. And in lieu of knowing them, is it any wonder I am approached every day with the common views of cancer as an afflicting and malevolent force that strikes with ill luck and malicious intent? Yet these are not my views.

Let us start with a general overview of my present situation.

Between upcoming surgery, continuing to have to go into the hospital once every single day for a Lovenox injection, and the prospect of at least three additional weeks of treatment, I can't really afford to relax or celebrate just yet; I actually feel zero compulsion to do either, and would kindly prefer people stop pressuring me to (directly or indirectly). Trust me when I say nobody wants this all to be done with more than I do; this has been a long and difficult journey, and I will be quite relieved to remove my dust-choked boots at its properly earned, patiently sought-out end.

However.

Nobody else but me has to directly experience every new and unexpected obstacle, every bloodletting, every injection and surgery and procedure either, so I ask you to recognize the fact that the optimal mindset for me to continue to do so is not the one in which I am desperately wanting it all to be over as soon as possible. All that can accomplish is make me dread every remaining thing that must be done all the more, and I refuse to begin fearing any of this now just because the people around me grow (kindly, empathetically) weary of watching me struggle with it. When a new wrinkle comes up, when more blood must be drawn and I am just told a moment before the tray with needles and empty tubes arrives, when the bills aren't all going to be covered by my financial aid and I have to face the prospect of partial payments, endless phone calls, further financial burden on my caring already-taxed parents and ultimately finding crappy part-time work sooner instead of having months to rest and recover from all of this in actual health, worry-free, after my final treatments are completed... I cannot permit myself to carry a mindset that would demand or encourage that I react to new necessity by getting frustrated, irritated, angry, self-pitying, or any other negative vortex of wasted time and energy. And that is all I can be, from the moment I start to dread the next step, resent the treatment, or waste too much time bemoaning my own discomfort.

I must instead be calm and flexible, like water.

Each test and treatment I am going through is something that must be done to minimize the risk of cancer resurgence in my near future, and I am committed to that. I elect this path. I accept these tests, this treatment.

I accept that cancer has happened to me, and that this is all a part of it.

And as well-meaning as the concern is that's come from some of you, that which comes from a place of "wishing it had never occurred" or "wishing you didn't have to go through this" is not useful to me, and can only tempt me into uselessly, negatively beginning to wish the same. Not once through this whole process have I ever fallen to wringing my hands and crying "woe is me," and I do not intend to start now. I apologize for the blunt necessity of having to state any such a thing, but I will speak my mind on this:

Stop asking me to regret this. I freely accept the cards that life has dealt me.

And do not expect me to share your fear of it. I play each hand steadfastly.

I can handle this. I remain unafraid. Shuffle, cut, and deal again. I'm still right here, staring the dealer unflinchingly in the eye.

But it grows more difficult to uphold that when I keep having to pause my own in-progress mental programs to address someone else's worries and concerns for how I can possibly be facing all of this, or the prospect of even more weeks of treatment, or how soon I get to ring the silly bell at the hospital to indicate that it is "over." Don't you understand that it will never truly be over? I'll be on watch for signs and symptoms of cancer for the rest of my life. And I am square with that. It doesn't trouble me to know that I have unique dangers in my future. It isn't out of my way to be uncommonly watchful and self-aware physically as well as mentally and emotionally. What I mean to say is, I DO NOT FEEL I HAVE BEEN DEALT WITH UNFAIRLY. To even begin to allow thoughts of that weak color and shallow depth is to have accepted the selfish fallacy that Life somehow owes me or anyone particular conduct based on arbitrarily assigned values, and I do not believe that either. I have already been given statistically uncommon advantage in that I was born in modern America; I have access to resources and treatment I would not in somewhere around eighty percent of the rest of the world. To say, to even think that I somehow didn't "deserve" to get cancer would be the same as to arrogantly proclaim that I did "deserve" to be born a white American, or to have good parents who are still together, or to be of particular intellect, or literally any other single factor over which I had no say and have no control. I cannot logically and reasoningly decry one thing as unfair to me without implying both that I think "fair" exists, and that it defines every other thing I have been dealt in my life's cards, and I. Will. Not. Commit. That. Fallacy.

You don't get to take credit for only one side of the coin. I will not fall into the traps of common thinking, of entitlement in ways no person can logically be entitled. "I think, therefore I inherently deserve" is not something I support in any form. I will not sink into the archaic lazy notion that a man's worth is defined by anything other than the works he has done with the life he was given. However long it lasts. Whatever takes it in the end.

As a great billionaire vigilante once said, "It's not who I am underneath, but what I do, that defines me."

I do not view this experience the way I have come to realize it is commonly seen and viewed. I am not "battling" cancer. I am not "fighting" anything. I understand the use of those metaphors to others in situations similar to my own and believe me when I say I would never speak against them; every single person walking this long road through treatment has exactly my equal right to choose and follow and utilize whatever metaphor works best for them to describe their own situation in the manner which helps them to rise and face the next day. I just have a much different view of my own personal circumstances, that's all. I cannot proclaim myself a "warrior" with a straight face, as I am not personally doing any of the fighting. Chemotherapy drugs are, coursing through my system and poisoning cancer cells by the millions. Radiation blasts will be actively killing scattered cancer cells that survived the initial chemo deluge. Both of which were administered by doctors and nurses looking out for my health and well-being. Who went through a solid decade of school and training, taught by uncountable mentors and professionals in the medical field. Do you understand what I am saying? If this is a war, then it is a war being fought by proxies. I am not either of the armies on the field, here. I am the battlefield itself. This war is being fought and won by mercenaries, by the service professionals who are taking pay to provide the forces and tools with which cancer can be defeated and removed from the battlefield.

There are warriors here. I simply am not one of them. I am the owner of the land, the interested party who hires the warriors to fight on my behalf. I am involved. I am vested. I am central and self-valuing. But I am not the hero holding the sword. Not in this scenario. And anyone who wants to make me out to be, you are dramatizing my situation in a way you think will make me feel better, or braver, but I can now calmly tell you in reply, "Thank you for your consideration and the gift of its metaphor, but I do not require such. I know what I am, and feel proud of it already. I do not need to claim glory I do not deserve in order to face this situation without fear. For that, I can do already."

And once more, let me disclaim here: By no means am I saying that any other person who is themselves surviving cancer is in any way incorrect in stating that they are battling it. My views are mine alone, and pertain only to my own situation. I would never restrict the belief of another to view their own personal struggle, battle, or journey in whatever way they saw fit. The act of naming a thing is an inborn privilege of the sentient; it gives us leverage. It gives us structure. And through both together, we gain power over the thing. I myself named cancer in my last post, calling it the physical depression, a metaphorical manifestation of the dark shadows that had haunted my mind; I gave it a name, that I might call it without fear. I will not ever take that power away from any other. I speak only of myself in this missive.

So... that's one point of view I hold. Here's another.

There is no evil enemy here. There is only cancer, doing what cancer does. Cancer manifests, it grows, it consumes and converts, it takes over and spreads. Humans do the same, merely on a different scale. We grow, we fight, we kill and eat, we spread and multiply. We change and sometimes ruin the things and places we touch as we do so; we are, as a species, in the process of polluting areas of the surface of our own planet steadily to such a degree that they have become unable to support us any longer. How is that any different on a fundamental level from the mindless cancer which multiplies and eats and spreads blindly until it has accidentally killed its own host? But we are sentient beings, carbon-based life that wants to live and will fight for the right to do so against anything standing in our way. We can think, unlike cancer. We can change and moderate and grow according to thought and reason, instead of pure instinct and blind desire of the moment. We can be greater. Cancer cannot. That is cancer's doom, the combination of predatory genetic destiny too similar to our own, and intellectual inability to rise above that and attain a higher purpose for its own existence than simply "Because I must." So yes, I count myself greater than cancer. But I am not so small-minded and arrogantly narrow of vision to believe that makes cancer itself, which is by definition an intentionless mass of unthinking cells, some kind of evil villain. It's just... nature. I had as well hate the ocean for being capable of drowning me.

I will kill the cancer within me if it be within the power of the medical mercenaries I can hire to do so, to save my own life and protect my self-determined right to live and mate and create and persist. But I will not hate the cancer to do so. There is no hate without fear, and I do not fear death. It is the last part of life, an irrevocable part of the whole and inevitable in its inclusion. I cannot glorify life, and still fear death; to do so is to lie to oneself about what life is. Temporary. Finite. Valuable because of its limited duration. Cancer is not sentient; it does not want, so far as any human definition of the word can apprehend. It has no greater goals or dreams, other than the carbon-based life imperative to continue to exist. The very same imperative that I follow. So I will fight it for the use of my brain's locomotive carbon flesh-and-bone-and-blood machine, but I will not deceive myself into thinking I don't understand its simple motive in the profound manner which is reserved only to those with firsthand recognition. I also exist, and in so doing wish to continue to. I will not hate that which I understand so well. I cannot hate that which I also am.

And above all else, I do not need to hate in order to fight, to win, to kill in defense of my own life with a clear conscience. That is melodrama. A villain is not required for there to be a fight with every bit of meaning and honor possible in one that has a genuine bad guy. To believe so is to fool yourself, justifying an unsure position by personifying its elements to suit your desires of the moment. One of the greatest arrogances I believe we carry as a species lies within this sphere: to misuse our amazing scientific, biologic, genetic gift of perceiving the infinite beauty and majesty of the universe around us in order to twist those perceptions away from truth and into the lies which suit our own desires. I won't do it.

Cancer's not a villain. It's not a roving shadowcasting terror. It's not a demon come to earth. It's not even actually my own depression given form; that's just a melodramatic parallel I drew toward the purpose of explaining how I was able to initially react to my diagnosis without fear or surprise. It's just a nothing versus my sentience, a mindless amoeba devouring what it can, knowing nothing of me or itself or anything beyond spreading itself the one way it is designed to do. I will stop it because that is my prerogative, as the being in the situation with greater understanding. But I will not hate it for being what it is. The moment I do, by the principle of the two-sided coin I do likewise invite the earth itself to drown me in its oceans, to crush me under one of its mountains, to choke the life from me by taking my oxygenated atmosphere away. The day I hate a parasite for being what it is before my species has evolved beyond its own remaining parasitism, I drown my soul in an ocean of my own hypocrisy. And I am better than that.

I am not at war.

I am on a journey.

And I am glad to be back here, walking with you once more.

- Gabriel, He Who Would Rather Be Truthful, Than Justified