06 - Something Is Wrong With Me, Part 3

Good evening, Walking Buddies all. I took a day off yesterday, a day of quiet and calm just for me. It was the first day both of my parents had returned to work (at my urging that I am well and okay and still loosely capable of making a sandwich should the situation turn most dire, and we run out of every other leftover ever from everywhere). My mother told me afterward that it was very difficult to drive away from me in the morning, and I commiserated with her as best I could, sharing with her how it's also a little heartbreaking for me when I turn or walk away from mirrors in my own life.

It's seriously hard. How could you abandon this face?

I try to make sure they get a good chuckle or three out of having me at home every day, when I can. I mean, they didn't ask for life's sharp left turn to bring me back home again after all these years any more than I did, so why shouldn't I try to make sure it's always as inversely positive an effect of the negative storm as it can be? Nobody would gain anything from me railing at life, the universe and everything about the raw hand I'd been dealt, taking it out on anyone and everyone nearby. So far I haven't missed a day yet, on earning at least a handful of genuine laughs from the people who matter most to me. Without laughter, what's the point of clinging to or fighting for life anyway? Funny things don't grow any less so just because a tumor or three has decided it wants in on the party, after all. They're still what they are, and I am still what I am: largely irrepressible, more than a little goofy on the surface, but most of all aware of and actively working toward the continued enjoyment of my own life and those I can reach from where I am standing. There can be no greater base purpose for a life than the enjoyment of itself and others, I wholly believe. It's why I want to tell stories. It's why I write at all. I want to reach out my mind and brush the lives of others, and I want them to think. I want them to smile. I want them to feel something. A life lived only for me would be (has been) an empty life, a wasted life.

I'll probably be doing that periodically, just taking a day for me sometimes when I realize it's been four or five and I haven't had one. What I consider to be "doing work" right now is pretty light stuff as it is anyway; I come and sit at my computer, I write for a little while, I reach out and view and answer every message I can that I've received over the past few hours, and I listen to music or browse Imgur. I love Imgur. It brings so much random positivity and happiness into my days, and since it's all user-created and -uploaded images it metamorphs every single day to new snapshots of humanity. If you haven't been by there to visit for some pure slice of internet humanity from day to day, you should check it out. But what I'm really looking for right now is work I can do from here, to start earning some money in anticipation of the medical costs that are mounting invisibly behind everything that has happened to and for me so far. Does anybody know anyone who needs some writing/editing done? Could I earn something writing an article or two here or there? Any leads would be very welcome.

So let's see... when last we hit the roadside we were talking about my decision not to bring my longest-running and closest friend in on the cold news of my new and improved, limited-edition lumpy neck. As I said before, it wasn't a decision I made lightly, but weighed methodically and came to a very reasoned conclusion that Kathleen had to have more time to adapt to the changing circumstances of our upcoming parting of ways before I allowed her to get to work imagining every dark medical drama scenario that a lump in the neck could mean. From chest-bursters to Dark Passengers, I had my own hands full scanning the home turf of my body for any other changes which could come to indicate what I was looking down the barrel of; the last thing I needed was for my companion to lose her head entirely. She was, after all, the breadwinner of the household at the time. But no longer could I ignore that Something Was Wrong With Me; that had become a dark and silent certainty.

What I discovered was an odd itchy rash that began forming on the backs of my ankles, first one and then the other, each fading in turn, before finally appearing spontaneously about my left elbow and beginning to spread outward there. A similar rash appeared under each arm, first on the right side and fading, then under the left. As a few days passed, I noticed something which alarmed me somewhat more so.

My neck had very subtly begun to grow thicker.

It was the kind of thing nobody else would really even notice at first, but I did almost immediately, partly because I was paying such close attention by now... and partly because I've never had a football player's neck before. There's supposed to be this sort of curve between my jawline and my shoulders, a remnant of my gangly youth; no matter how normal-sized I became bone-wise as a grown man, I still had the uniquely thin neck of my teenage years to remind me that it was the size of my head which mattered, not my biceps. When that disappeared, I noticed, and I was not happy to see it go. Around this time the last and most telling symptom also appeared: a small circular net of visible blue veins appeared in the center of my chest, which over the next two weeks would begin spiderwebbing outward across my entire upper chest. I mistook this for bruising due to it feeling exactly like so, but did not fail to note that there was no telltale discoloration of the skin which should have accompanied a bruise. My body was in the middle of some kind of a battle, and I had no idea who the enemy was, or if I was winning or losing. And still I said nothing.

I wasn't just waiting around to get better, though, nor was I wrapped in a bubble of denial. I knew that Something Was Wrong, and increasingly seriously so. I also suspected firmly by this point that this problem was not going to resolve itself; the slow spreading of the distended veins across my chest, the increasing discomfort of my neck changing shape over the slow course of days into weeks... it was all indicative of a trend rather than an isolated episode, and that put me well on my guard. But I was also on the bare cusp of possibly my best chance in the past year at a solid, decent job at a local area college which would, if offered, start with immediate full state benefits. I'd hand-crafted my application to suit the job, emphasizing that my experience was actually sort of uniquely suited for it. I'd restructured my resume to reflect it as well. And then to top it off, when called for the interview I was prompt, professional, and (in my personal opinion) I had a near-perfect interview of thorough answers to complex "what would you do" scenario questions. This was followed by a professional letter response to a mock-upset parent of a student, and some basic Microsoft Excel skill demonstration. I was gambling my time and health on the chance that when I did go to get this problem formally identified, I wouldn't have to drag my family and friend into bankruptcy due to my unemployed and uninsured status, and I wasn't doing so blindly. I had a real shot at this job, I thought.

As the days went by, the decision was revisited again and again. Prudence dictated that I re-examine it once a day, look at myself in the mirror every time, and gauge the progression to try and determine when and where the invisible cutoff point of no return would be from an unidentified internal medical threat. The moment my health seemed to be in imminent danger I would have gone to seek care at the emergency room, of course, but in the end I came to a different conclusion without a direct cause forcing me into it. It was no longer wise to wait and see, and the job and its insurance cushioning could not be the cause of my delay and continued quiet danger any longer. I needed a formal medical opinion of my current state to make a more intelligent decision, even if I couldn't yet afford the resultant care I might require. My grandfather once made the mistake of delaying medical care for too long to prevent a serious problem from growing ever more so, and I was not going to dishonor the memory of the lesson he left me by recommitting the same error. Finances be damned; I'm a clever and resourceful fellow. I can always find a way to earn more money. The dark voice in my mind whispered in sibilant undertone in reply to this, that it had been a solid year and no one wanted to hire me now... how was that going to get anything but less likely if I turned out to be debilitated by a serious illness or condition? I stared into that dark corner until the voice fell silent, and then held my gaze on it until it slunk quietly away into the recesses again. My fears were not unfounded, but they could not be allowed to make my decision for me; too closely already was I riding the line between stupidity and gallantry in waiting for the job to call back after my stellar interview over a full week prior.

My parents had seen me by this point, as they had very graciously come up on a weekend to help me begin to move my things from Harrisonburg to Kathleen's new apartment in Staunton. They became aware that something was wrong, and though I did not share everything that I was experiencing with them, I did share with them my unquiet that what was wrong might not turn out to be simple. Like any loving parents who don't wish to face the idea that their son may be in serious danger with no resources, they concurred with me on the several things it could very well have been which were not remotely life-threatening, but agreed that it would be a good time to get a doctor's diagnostic opinion. My father offered to pay the visit fee to an emergency care clinic for an examination, which I thought was very nice of him.

The resulting visit was absolutely, incredibly unhelpful. The doctor informed me that my skin rash was caused by some variation of poison ivy or oak, and seemed quite unconcerned with my reply that I am in fact a Casper-skinned shut in who had an effective zero percent chance of having encountered any combative plant life during the previous month unless they had somehow begun to sprout invisibly out of my Xbox 360 to caress me gently and inexplicably about the left elbow and each ankle in turn like a blind virgin lover. He prescribed me a topical steroid cream for the rash, an anti-allergen nasal spray for my persistent cough despite my having no historical or present indication of any allergies whatsoever, advised me to get an over-the-counter antifungal cream for the underarm rash, and handed me a list of local surgeons I could consult regarding the lump in my neck, none of which I could afford to see since they all worked out of the hospital at RMH. It was a shotgun solution, a bundle of stab-in-the-dark treatments for each of my individual symptoms without regard for determining any link or underlying cause, because he most likely wasn't trained to do so anyway. I left feeling the opposite of reassured, and annoyed at having spent over a hundred dollars of my father's money on essentially no information.

Three days later, however, I would encounter in passing a recommendation of a different area doctor I could see who ended up effectively saving my life from the absolutely real, imminent danger of sudden death it would turn out I was in during every hour of my "wait and see" gamble.

But that can be a continuation of the tale for another day, Walking Buddy. My throat's dry from all this self-interested prattle I've been boring you with. Can we talk about you for a little bit instead, do you think? I think I'd like that instead for awhile. ...How about this?

In the comments below, leave me something about you. Tell me the thing you do best in the world, the thing which has made you the most special during our stage time on this earth.

I would like to tell you that mine is writing, my talent with the languid leanings of language and lurid lexiconography laid low... but truth be told that's only ever been my hobby. Learned skills. I wasn't naturally any kind of a writer at all, I just wanted to be. So I read everything I could put my hands on and wrote terrible stories until I lucked into one I didn't hate, and thus found a purpose and passion.

No, my true talent is in the way I can look at a person for the very first time or the fiftieth, and see both everything they mean to show me and a dozen things they do not, all simultaneously. I read people the way you would read a pamphlet at the dentist's office, idly and without need for extra effort of even particular focus, and it gives me an enormous amount of information which can, properly comprehended, provide me a substantial social advantage... which just so happens to almost entirely offset my intense social awkwardness that comes from knowing way too much about every new person you meet without ever being 100% clear on what is "normally" visible and what is being provided by my underlying always-on empathic/body language analytic antenna.

It's not, as odd personal abilities go, exactly gilded in gold. This is what underlays my sometime admissions of being a loner despite my ready stance with a joke and generally outgoing capability... always feeling disconnected and separate from other people regardless of how surrounded I may be, and so on... I think differently, because I see differently. To you we are just sitting and having a simple conversation; to me, you are speaking in one audible voice and shouting silently in another every minute detail of your current emotional state by the flicking of your fingers, the twitch of a crossed leg, the flicker of your eyes, and it's all coming out at once, a cacophony of information it took me years to be able to process separately and discern "normal" meaning from. It is still a source of mystery to me that most people can look directly into the face of all of that cascading information and discern no more than what the person is choosing to say aloud.

In a way... it can be accurately posited that I spent so much time learning the grasp of the language so deeply and so well, just so that I might one day have a shot at making myself genuinely understood to other people who cannot ever naturally see me the million myriad ways I see them.

That's my personal confession for you this evening, Walking Buddy. I am irreparably unusual in this way, and it has been as much struggle as power in my life to date. Tell me the thing you do better than anything else, now. The thing that makes you... you, and unique. You won't go leaving me hanging out here on my own, exposed like this, will you?

Catch you on the morrow, Walking Buddy. I'm thinking I'll take an interlude from telling the linear tale here, and maybe tell the story of how Kathleen and I met and became friends next time instead, since a few of you have expressed interest in that. It's a pretty good story, and between her blog and my own I think we can tell the whole tale together, she and I. Speaking of which, why not go and visit her sometime? As I said, she's been having a tough time through all of this, and I am not by far the only person who can benefit from the kind of light and love each of you have shown me you can bring to the soul of another. I'm sure any comments there would be greatly appreciated, and in return she is offering the perspective of what it is like to see this situation unfold not from within, but in the person you count on and care about the most. It is a different and no less impactful view from my own.

See you all here again soon.

It's so hard to say goodbye...

- Gabriel, Seriously Walking Away From The Mirror Now

05 - Something Is Wrong With Me, Part 2

I awoke just now, thoughts scattered, immediately gathered them and sat up in the dark and the quiet, trying to identify what is wrong. I felt different. I sat, eyes closed, and thought, and calmed the sweeping searchlights of my mind with a mental wave of my hand, set them back on a slower, more methodical course, and took two long breaths. Waited for one hundred and twenty seconds. Identify the situation, do not flee from it. Look inside. Listen.

...I am just hungry.

Very hungry. It's 5:23am, and I haven't eaten since around 8pm last night, and I am just hungry now. The remnants of the Prednisone steroids in my system continue to charge my appetite, so I got up and poured a cup of milk and microwaved a piece of a cinnamon roll to tide me over for a few hours until other people get up and a proper breakfast can be had... and only just now do I fully realize that I am living in tight wariness of the looming moment when whatever bubble of unnatural reaction I am living in pops and all I am left with is feeling very, very sick. I do not know why I have not yet experienced the nausea, the wasted feelings of fatigue and muscle ache, the cumulative ravages of having pumped a cocktail of precision-crafted poisons through my veins almost a solid week ago. And I am not confident that my continued presentation as an exception to that probability can continue indefinitely. Now I need to acknowledge that the weight of that wariness, the state of constant readiness for worse proceeding to worst bears its own weight and as such is a force in reality that I must deal with. It isn't fear, exactly, nor is it just meek or exhausted resignation in the face of a coming storm; rather I feel like a man in the jungle alone, surrounded by a hundred sounds a minute which could all or each or none represent a threat to me. It is unfamiliar, I am alone but for a knife, I can't know where to go or to hide since I don't know where I am making every direction more risk than tactic, and no one else can hear or see any of it, the vines, the grasses, the twisted trunks and darkened canopy above, the knife, or the darting look in my mind's eye... no one but me. I stand, poised, but how long can one remain on the pressed toes of one's metaphorical feet before one begins to cramp, slip, suffer, and lose that focus? Yet I can't stop watching. I will not be blindsided by my own selfish complacency, not while all around me others move mountains to ensure my future comfort and ease.

But this morning I am just hungry, so I've just eaten a bit of bread and sugar and if I can't sleep I thought I'd hike on down to the roadside for a bit and see who, if anybody, might be waiting there to talk a walk for a ways this morning.

Did you sleep well last night, Walking Buddy? Let's kick rocks awhile.

When we left off last night I had just hit the first barrier symptom of Something Being Wrong With Me, a sharp shift to shortness of breath which was somewhat in excess of what I should have been experiencing from such a break in my "training" for my "participation" in the Tough Mudder event. However, due to a combination of factors personal and self-perceptual, I was unable to see the warning for what it was, and continued to believe that my deteriorating condition was really just due to my own lack of dedication to the whim I'd followed dear dashing dauntless Andrew out on a limb to explore. It Was Probably Nothing.

A few weeks later, marked by continuing depreciating performance physically which were masked by a collapsing regularity with which I was willing to attend the gym, I got up one morning and took a shower, then got out to shave. And it was there in that moment that I happened to be staring at my own reflected eyes in the mirror when my fingers brushing over my neck first encountered a distended lump there beneath the skin, just above my collarbone in my neck, which had no predictable business being there. Because I happened to be looking at my own reflected eyes at the time, I experienced a very strange moment of mental feedback loop in which I clearly stared into my own eyes asking a question, waiting for my reflection to have an answer I did not. What the hell was this?

Finding a lump is never a good thing. I have encountered enough breast cancer awareness warnings out in the world to be able to determine that people should both:

1. Check themselves regularly all over for all kinds of problems of any sort anywhere, and
2. Be absolutely terrified of what they might find, 'cause that shit don't play around.

As you can see, my grasp of preventative medical precautions was a bit slapdash, but I had the gist of it. And the undeniable fact of the matter is, that isn't a two-step list you want to suddenly find yourself on Step Two of. I stood stock-still in the bathroom for a period no longer than sixty seconds, during which my computer brain went into brief overdrive producing forward event calculations and probabilities. That process would be impossible to transpose accurately, but I'm going to attempt a reasonable reconstruction anyway if only because I have recently become immediately and completely tired of having to pretend as though I think and reason as others might. That sixty seconds went a little something like this, my eyes never leaving their reflected twins:

This is an actual thing - not imagined - right now one person knows - controlled information - medical - without insurance medical options limited - priority: identification - more information needed - could be nothing? - impossible - nothing would be no lump - has a cause - potential reactions of others - parents will leap into action - clear action to take? - none yet - too many wrong choices - wasted resources - cannot allow - Kathleen - already in transition - currently brittle - unsafe for her - no benefit to me - Kathleen must not know - potential life changes - vast - too numerous to consider - retract sphere of consideration - limit parameter: current situation overview - no money no doctor negligible medical knowledge slim personal resources - identify impulse: pressure to dismiss as harmless - possible - not logical - circumstances cannot supersede logic - situation must not be allowed to self-determine - more information needed - DO NOTHING FOR NOW.

In sixty seconds, I took responsibility for myself in my life alone staring into a bathroom mirror, and I made what turned out to be a rather calm and solid overview judgment call, all things considered. I didn't know what was happening, but I had stared into my own eyes and watched no fear cloud them as my brain rapidly flipped through successive pages of its own data readout, and I had reached a conclusion that had in its genesis required the discarding of several alternatives for being ill-considered... a good sign. The unstable mind, the mind which cannot be trusted, it does not methodically consider and discard options, it grasps as if falling. Clutches, regardless of qualifying factor. I had learned something about myself.

For some reason, while I was surprised by this, I was not afraid. And it was only later that I would remember the underlying reason why this was. It turned out that I had considered this scenario (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) before.

Kathleen Herring is my best friend. She and I found our lives intertwined some years ago by a series of unusual events made just beautiful enough by individual choices to be irreversibly cemented. Back then I was the older guy, the one who knew things she did not and saw the world in ways she's never dreamed, and for my part she was like this human-shaped young doe of a girl, all innocent liquid deer eyes and wandering wondering unarmored unpreparedness for the world. Whatever she saw in me, in her I found an instinctive but totally elective protective need... the world was going to eat this young woman alive if she was left unattended, with the likely rapidity that I would have to watch it happen if I didn't actively try and prevent it. The story of our meeting and the genesis of our friendship is one I enjoy telling, though I wouldn't bore you with it unasked, Walking Buddy. If you'd like to hear more about it, though, or for that matter about anything else in particular along the road here, please always feel free to let me know in the comments. I love all the feedback and replies I get there, but I do want to mention that questions are perfectly okay too. I don't have any grand plan in this storytelling here that would be interrupted by dialogue, and isn't a part of seeing this whole thing as a stroll the idea that we can just talk awhile? If there's anything along the way you'd like to hear more about, put it in the comments below and I'll be glad to address them as I'm able.

Anyway, by this point Kathleen and I had lived together for six years, barring one in which she'd moved back home with her parents while I was working at Rosetta Stone. We were everything we were going to be (best friends, confidants, trusted and trusting, in possession of the fullest road map of one anothers' strengths and inadequacies), and beyond all the things we would never be but which simple people perpetually feel the urge to slyly hint at knowing we really are deep down (lovers, secretly-for-no-goddamn-reason romantic partners, etc.) until I want to punch them in the face. You wish you had a best friendship like mine.

This is Kathleen, if you don't know her personally, Walking Buddy:

Here she is looking happy at Renn Faire.

She and I at her JMU graduation.

This whole process, the situation, it hasn't been easy on her.

And before any of you think some misaimed noble nonsense about "why is he spending his time worrying about how she is doing when he's got all this on his plate" or some like variant, you need to understand that I am not going to change my program now. Not because of cancer, not because of anything. I first joined this gentle, beautiful girl's story by willfully interceding into a situation that had as a likely ending her rape, and I have spent years living alongside her, experiencing her emotions, learning her every way, and by any method be it subtle or sledgehammer guiding her into the ideas of personal competence, strength, self-reliance and capability that I myself hold dearest. She is not my project, she is not my subordinate, she is not and has never been my girlfriend or my lover, but she is my responsibility. Because she gave me that power in her life, and because I chose to ask for it. And since then she has kept me alive when I would have fallen after trying to walk alone for too many years. She has survived underneath my piercing gaze, my laser-focused perceptions that slice right through your defenses and pretenses and comfortable self-deceptions before you've even been made aware how many there are; that is not a comfortable or easy way to live, nor I such a person to live with. She has weathered the storms of my enduring sense of loneliness and disconnection from my species, my gender, my family and my life, and tried to help me make sense of the many myriad mysterious ways that I am and to always be able to remember the odd beautiful things I am capable of which look like magic to others before sinking into the darkness and the limitations and the ways in which I am destructively different. In many ways, if I am still as this new stage rises up into my life capable of thinking it possible that I am not just innately broken as a person, irreparably destructively different, it is because she sustained me in that belief and kept me from falling into the darkness through years without the outside world providing any evidence of it on its own.

I would not be who I am without Kathleen. I would not be here, and I would not be strong.

I tell you all of this in such rapid-fire fashion, Walking Buddy (and I am sorry for the barrage of it all, actually; you didn't actually go any say any of those qualifying misperceptions, and here I am correcting you sharply as if you had), because you need to understand something that I came to understand a few years ago. Everyone wishes to tell me about how remarkable it is that I am bearing up this well, how incredible my spirit is and amazing that I can still make a joke with the same readiness that I could two weeks ago, and I find it all terribly warming but not entirely accurate. I am not what I am because of my own will and development alone; I am the sum of my own will multiplied by the goodness of the people around me. People like Kathleen. It is the others in my life who changed me, those lives which impacted mine and bounced away, or those which have traveled alongside mine for a time, which had as much to do with who and what I became as any independent decisions I made on my own. Not that I don't acknowledge that I, as a person, have actively chosen to mine every ounce of every lesson my abnormal brainpan can process from each and every single event, interaction, and encounter of my life. Because I do that, and I do it with a focused purpose that would look like a freaking laser if it were to be made visible. I am an experiential laser-miner of self-improvement and -expansion, and that is by choice.

But it's the good people in my life who give me experiences to process. My part is just to learn ~150% from every one, so that I might grow and change and adapt and always be more useful to the next person I can be of any assistance to than they could have possibly expected me to be, so that when they look at me with that expression of surprise at my understanding or insight or whatever I get that little thrill of knowing I am living my life remarkably and not just disappearing into the ocean of the forgettable average. There is no greater death to me than that.

I kept my initial observations from Kathleen because I logically assessed that she would not be able to process the ramifications of the situation to a degree which would leave her unharmed, better prepared, or able to assist me in any notable way. I did so with a heaviness in my heart, as well, as I do not lightly or comfortably keep things from the one person in my life (at that time, and for some time) who can by her unique placement veto my executive decisions with the legislative power of alternate perception. But I knew in this case my decision was correct. Kathleen and I were right in the absolute middle of a heavy transitional period that had been coming for some time and which I was running operational point on: the separation of our two young lives, for the future health and maximal growth potential of both. It was time for us to go separate ways and carve out from the world our own individual corners for ourselves, and the truth is that Kathleen was already suffering widespread debilitating effects from the upcoming realities of that transition. Even with weeks and months to go where we would be living together in the new apartment she'd picked out in Staunton before I set out to get my own place, there was no turning away from the fact that we had deliberately chosen a place she could afford on her own... the fact that she had signed a year lease and I had not... the fact that the place we'd chosen was too small to fit me and my life as well as her own for any longer than we had planned. The wheels were already turning, and Kathleen was already feeling frightened and ground between them before my health problems had even begun to arise.

So there I was, staring into a mirror, inarguably proven solid in sixty silent seconds of Real Life Test... but also completely alone as I'd always been and always been afraid I'd be forever. The reverse of egotism's coin is the other side where if you truly have the guts to believe you are the best man for a particular situation, then you had better be prepared to stand alone if need be when the fires rise around you. The floor grew warm.

I wasn't going to tell anyone yet. But there was no more question whatsoever, and could be none. I had a lump in my neck. Something Was Definitely Wrong With Me.

...This is far enough for today, Walking Buddy. I'll come back down to the roadside when I can sometime soon and we can stroll on a bit farther, but we've made good ground today anyway. I continue to have an unbroken string of "good days" where I could be experiencing mild to moderate chemotherapy system shocks, and yet am suffering none beyond a general lowered sense of total energy and a kind of passive mild heaviness of the muscles all over. And then on top of all of that, I am writing this now lying on my brand new bed (which felt like waking up in a cloud this morning; I've never been so comfortable sleeping before), in my ridiculously clean Extreme Junk Room Makeover Home Edition bedroom (complete with fresh-painted walls in a soothing pale jade, a brand new 55" smart television I've done absolutely nothing to earn but must... not... feel... guilty about elating at having, and my just-today completely reconnected Xbox 360, PS3, and surround sound system). I have nothing I could even begin to reach to complain about.

...Cancer's probably getting a bit jealous, come to think of it. All it's gotten out of this attention explosion so far is a massive dose of poison.

We'll continue this tale soon, Walking Buddy.

- Gabriel, Replugged And Shinier For It

04 - Something Is Wrong With Me, Part 1

Every story starts somewhere. This one actually began with what I consider in halted retrospect to be one of the flashiest stupid decisions I ever spontaneously made in my young life.

My friend Andrew has always been something of an inspiration to me, which is a good sort of balance to strike in a friendship since in conversation he's shared with me that I am equally so to him in perpendicular areas. This way we don't clash and compete at much of anything, we just interact with a kind of casual comfort of mutual acknowledged awesomeness. It's a good friendship to have.

I hope you have one like that with somebody, Walking Buddy.

Andrew's a cool little contradiction of a young man. He likes computers and hardware, loves to take things apart and then build them back together again but with lasers, and so on. On top of that, he's also a part-time traceur (that's what people who do parkour, or free-running, call themselves), and a sometime participant in allegedly fun athletic prove-yourself events like the Warrior Dash or the Great Gauntlet of Masochism or whatever other names they've come up with for those completely unnecessary national runs with obstacle courses designed to teach Americans just how fat and lazy we all don't want to admit we are through hugely public failure to complete them. And then at the end, you paid to be there, so you don't even get to complain to anybody about it being unfair or feeling forced into it. It's all very silly, which is what makes it so funny to watch.

At least, that was my line of thinking about them up until the day when Andrew messaged me to mention he was putting together a team for a Tough Mudder event in Virginia Beach this coming June. My response was something like, "Well, have fun with that, and by fun I mean am I already in your will? Because that would be cool if we got that ironed out."

Then he asked me to join the team. He had this whole persuasive argument prepared which was really rather masterful for him, who is usually a pretty plainspoken fellow without much interest in formalized debate. The argument had as its major thrust the thesis that just because a fellow is not in fact fit and in shape nor remotely athletically inclined, it doesn't mean he can't run a special forces-level training course in five months if he elects to and is willing to change his entire life routine to that end. Which is, let's be honest, true only in the most technical and least practical fashion. It is equally as possible that within five months I could be a competent professional juggler street artist living and sleeping under a bench in a St. Louis city park, or a humbled and nature-attuned rice farmer working a paddy in Southeast Asia waiting for my dark past to catch up to me, or a moderately successful writer receiving pay for his work for the first time. All of these seemed exactly as likely as me being able to not die for twelve miles in a row on a Tough Mudder course.

So naturally, I said yes.

It turns out that I am no less immune to the creeping notion that I am living substantially underneath my actual potential than just about any other young red-blooded American male who has never swung from a vine and rescued a damsel from a gorilla or something. Deep down underneath my substantial video game collection, my assortment of essentially-healthy and well-formed friendships with others and my family, and my aspirations to be a professional writer that I'd just never had the guts to take the first step on... there was a hole in there, well-hidden. Somewhere inside, I was aware that I had never been all that manly, really, and the idea that a single effort, a mere attempt at something undeniably manly might earn me enough credit to never have to worry about it again down the road... Well, it was actually, briefly attractive.

An unfortunate counter-convenience truth is that in the digital era, "briefly" is exactly long enough a time to put in your credit card information and spend almost two hundred dollars on a nonrefundable signup fee for an event you will regard with amazed terror and disbelief two minutes from now. For a penniless writer living with his best friend and sharing finances, what I had just done was a betrayal of Judas-level proportions, much as if I'd waited at the front door for her to come home from work with two weeks' groceries strewn at our feet and lit it on fire in front of her eyes, dancing a merry devil's jig. I was mortified. Andrew was sort of happy, though.

This turned out to be the very beginning of my early warning system that Something Would Be Wrong With Me within several months. If I hadn't gone against everything I understood and believed in order to sign up for an event I had no actual interest in nor faith in my ability to complete, against my best friend's wishes and knowledge and despite my poverty and general sluggish level of physical activity, and toward the end of proving something to myself and anybody else who gave a damn (which was nobody) which even I had to admit I don't actually really care about... I would never have had my very first clear warning sign.

I put off my training for three solid months in a row, during which I faithfully paid for a gym membership that I hadn't actually used yet. Classic stuff, really, as faux motivation and the barest shadow of pre-accomplishment back-patting goes. Then one day I put in a couple more job applications (long since having given up the hope of any of them coming back with anything but crickets), realized it was only noon, and that I really had no excuse to slog over to my chair and put in a video game. So I went to the gym instead. And it was awful, exactly as you'd expect: my flailing efforts in the machines, wheezing on the treadmill, and puzzled head-cocked studying of the how-to diagrams on the equipment like an archaeologist studying Egyptian hieroglyphs in the bowels of a pyramid all told a grand tale of That Rookie Guy At The Gym, again which nobody noticed or even cared about since they were busy running eighty miles before breakfast and being in shape for the airplane-pull they'd be doing this afternoon.

But hey. I'd pulled motivation out of the air (out of the beginning miasma of real despair at my stagnant financial and professional situation, in honest retrospect, actually, which I am sort of proud of since most people don't just take flight once they're already sinking) and gotten my ass out there, and two days later I did it again, and before I knew it I'd actually spent a week having gone to the gym. And from there, I could do another week the same way, and I actually began to find the beginnings of a new routine. My focus became on building endurance; I knew Tough Mudder was a long race from obstacle to obstacle, so I wanted to make sure I could run a sufficient total distance that I'd be able to make the whole length in one go if I had to. Andrew had told me (somewhat reluctantly, as if afraid that providing me this information would simply ensure I would do it for every single one with 100% certainty) that any participant can elect to just run or walk right around any obstacle they don't feel like trying, anytime they want. After all, the thing's not actually a competition. There is no winner, because it isn't a race. You just finish it, or you don't, and either way they got your money and you got your... whatever you came there to find. So in the end, my lofty goal was to be able to run twelve miles in one sustained effort, so that in case Andrew got far enough ahead of me that he'd have no idea I could in fact just skip every precarious climbing wall and icy water pit and freaking hanging live electrical wires (yes, that is a real Tough Mudder obstacle, I am told) if I wasn't feeling suicidal that day.

I eventually got up to seven miles, and I was so elated afterward that I had to admit that I'd stopped more because I was really damned bored on the treadmill than because I couldn't do any more. I hadn't reached my goal yet, but I was improving at something on absolutely no steam but my own for the first time in years, being challenged for the first real time in years, and that was worth everything to me. In gratitude, I gave myself the next gym visit off. This is, of course, about as logical as rewarding a prisoner for three weeks of good behavior by giving him a gun and a set of keys, so I doubt you'd really be surprised to hear that my next visit off stretched into the following weekend, and by the time I did drag my ass back to the gym five full days had passed since my last exercise of any kind. Momentum thoroughly broken.

And just like it was my ridiculous notion that I could be a Tough Mudder participant which first clued me in that Something Was Wrong With Me, it was my sheepish guilt at having waited that long since my last workout which gave me my first misdiagnosis excuse, that It Was Probably Nothing After All. Because when I could only run five and a half miles that next time before I felt absolutely awful, like worse by far than I ever had even leading up to the original seven, I already had a reason to explain it away. And that reason was that I sucked at dedication and had let my momentum slip, and as a result I'd lost a lot of conditioning in a very short time by breaking my momentum. Had I been thinking more clearly, or had a high school coach or someone to run it by, I might have been made aware of the fact that the body doesn't atrophy at nearly the speed at which it can grow and be made stronger; basically, there is little chance that I should have lost that much ground and potential in such a short time not running.

I ignored the sign, and I missed my first warning signal. I was too willing by far to believe the fault was mine, having spent the past years being convinced by life, the job market, the world and my own subconscious of my own great potential worthlessness that it was no great stretch for me to conclude that if something was wrong, it was because I had screwed it up. But I was wrong; greater and subtler forces were already at work here.

...How we doing, Walking Buddy? Why don't we call it a day here. Dogs're gonna be barking if we keep on for now, I think. I can pick up the story tomorrow, and we can stroll on a bit farther. Plenty of road left to go, both between here and where I sit now, and stretching ahead of me into the distance besides.

In the meantime, though, try and remember what I already know to be true: your real intelligence, wisdom, mental agility or whatever... it's not about how much you know. I'm not an idiot for missing that first signal I just mentioned before. How sharp you really are, that's in how fast you learn. Adapt. Alter course, change plans, remain flexible. Remember that for yourself as well, because none of us are blessed to know everything we're going to need to know to get out every time life throws us into the fire. But in the end, the ones who survive and are made better aren't, by and large, the ones who were great smoking know-it-alls going in anyway.

It's the ones who watch the walls as they're falling, burning but aware, mentally marking the handholds they're going to be using to get back out again even as they sail down into the flames and the dark.

Catch you tomorrow, Walking Buddy.

- Gabriel, Slightly Charred But No Less Cool For The Fact

03 - The Cleansing Deluge

Well well well. You go and tell everybody that you're going to write a good long post to make up for yesterday's busy day, and then the steady stream of visitors all day long pour in and the hours tick past and now here I am after 11pm and this sentence is exactly as run-on as the point it is attempting to make. BOOM. Metaphor, son. That's writer game, right there.

My original intent was to write today about my story from the beginning, the days when I first began to notice that something was seriously wrong with me, which have led me to this bed and laptop and, frankly, into the acquaintance/minds/hearts/mild amusement of so many fine new friends out there. I still fully intend to do that, but I have a doctor's followup appointment at 8am tomorrow and it's one minute before midnight now, so it's just not going to happen. Instead of just writing another nothing placeholder, though, I did want to take a few minutes to describe what the past few days have been like in terms of the support I've suddenly begun to receive from so many unexpected sources far and near. I've been describing it as a waterfall... it's gorgeous from a concept standpoint, it's beautiful up close, but from right underneath it gets harder to deny the fact that it's also pounding down on you with a great deal of force. But oh, man, is it awesome to stand under. It doesn't feel like weight, it doesn't crush or harm, it just cleanses me inside and out.

The shortest way I can put it is that you're just incredible. Reading this. You. Yes. You came here because you heard I was ailing, or else you knew me beforehand and have read day to day. Some people have said they stop by for the humor, which is sort of funny to me as well since from my perspective this is really just me sitting around talking about adjusting to having cancer one step at a time... not exactly a typical set at open mic night, you know? I guess I could riff about airline food, or segue into a funny anecdote about what happened when I was driving here today... but I guess you'd probably see through that, since everybody knows I've been sitting right here for the past two days producing the societal equivalent of a turnip. There aren't a lot of frequent flier miles in professional vegetating, and the only funny thing that happened in the car on the way here was the part where I wasn't driving at all and pulled up behind my own car at the end, leaving me wondering if I'd gone through a quantum wormhole or something. Still getting used to this whole idea that from the moment I went into the hospital every aspect of my carefully-constructed independent life got automatically swept up in the wave of my shifting life goals... no more moving to Staunton with my best friend, I live at home now... sometimes my car moves to completely different places and I didn't move it. It's like Poltergeist, except that the ghost is actually my dad and instead of screaming at me to get out of his house, he's totally bringing me in to protect and guard me. He hasn't tried to put me in a TV yet either, for which I'm grateful since this is the flatscreen era and while I've been warned I might lose weight through this whole thing, that isn't how I really pictured it happening.

Maybe you're reading this post first, and might go back and check out the others that came before, or else maybe you've been with me from the start a few days back and have just kept stride with me. I can't describe how comforting that image is for me, when I see a comment on a post one day and then see another comment from the same person on the next day's post as well; it's exactly as if you were there with me, kicking tumbleweeds down the side of the long dry road step for step, just... there, with me. The internet is a wonderful thing. Because you see, I can take that walk with anyone and still find the light and love in it. A new friend made, an old friend caught up with, stories and similar experiences shared... sure, the majority of that conversation is just happening in my head. I mean, I've got downtime on my hands here. But that idea of the part of the walk where you were with me, it really floats me a ways.

So thank you, for keeping stride with me. That you're even here reading this is a gift to me, and I am aware of the crowd dynamic where an individual well-wish might otherwise feel as though it were drowning in a sea of similarities, and I don't want that to happen. It's still at the point now where I can and do personally read everything which is coming my way, and that will continue up until the point that it's not feasible anymore. And even after that point, I'll be coming right here every day to talk to you directly, and letting your half of the conversation play out in the imaginary walk down the long dusty desert road.

Let's kick a tumbleweed or two, and carry on. See you tomorrow?

02 - Homecoming

Hey guys... No long post tonight. Forgive the lack of detailed information; there's lots to tell, but I'm just a bit too tired after all the final tests at the hospital, removal of all my remaining medical attachments (save the port surgically implanted in my chest for my future five treatments), and the return trip home to my parents' place.

Just had dinner, pizza and chocolate milk. I stared into a mirror for three solid minutes to work up the courage to stab myself in the stomach with a needle for the first time ever. I felt the bare stirrings of creeping nausea, got my first case of very mild, but constant shakes of the muscles which continues even now. I believe I am on the cusp of my first descent into the darkness of the treatment's ravages... I only wonder how bad it will get, and how long until I start feeling better again for a short while.

I am full of questions, but I am home. I have only the scant formings of a plan, but my mind is calm like still water. I wait. I watch.

I'll write about these things in more detail tomorrow, once I'm not posting from my phone and get my laptop set up again. Maybe I'll jump back and tell the story from the very beginning, from when I started to notice something serious may be wrong with me. I don't know. *smiles* What would you guys like to hear about? Let me know in the comments.

Have a good night, all. See you all tomorrow!