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I want to try something a little different over the next week or so. I’m going to write a three-part series about what I have been battling over the last eight months: Stage 4 cancer, while trying to stay sober.
Part 1 is going to be about finding out I have cancer, and then figuring out how to juggle treatment with an active sobriety program. Part 2 will be about the massive surgery I had this fall. And Part 3 will be about where I’m at today. Trust me when I say that this story has a scary beginning but a happy ending.
In March, I went in for my yearly physical. The verdict was tremendous—I was in the best shape of my adult life, and by every metric, it looked like my overall health had improved greatly over the previous five years. I was going to more 12-step meetings than ever, and I had started therapy and gotten my mental health to a really good place. At the end of the appointment, I mentioned to my doctor that I had seen some blood in the toilet a few times. He said it was probably a polyp of some kind, and recommended that I get the colonoscopy he told me to get at the previous year’s physical. I swear I listen better than ever to advice… but I do usually need to be told twice before it gets through the brain barricades I have built.
So I had a colonoscopy in late March, and within five minutes of me waking up, the doctor walked in and said, “I’m sorry. You have cancer, and it’s bad.” It was quite jarring to have a doctor make such a bold declaration. Usually they him-haw and say maybe it’s this thing, or maybe this other thing, and we’ll have to do some testing to figure out what’s going on. Not this time.
I was in shock walking to the car with my wife. But I didn’t feel scared. I don’t know if it was still the anesthesia tamping down my emotions, but I didn’t start catastrophizing.
But later that afternoon, I did start to ponder my own mortality, and I felt a little sorry for myself. I didn’t get to a meeting that night because I wanted to sulk. Looking back, I think the problem had a little to do with me being shallow. I kept thinking of all the cancers, I get rectal cancer? Couldn’t it have been a cooler cancer, like a brain tumor or lung cancer? Nope, I was going to die from my ass falling off, and I was embarrassed about that.
The good news is, I can feel right away now when I am starting to sink into that warm bath we call self pity, and I know the repercussions… and they’re not good. So the next night I made sure to hit a meeting, and I also told a few close friends. I felt like even though it was early in the process, I wanted to stay current with my connections in my inner circle.
I ended up having some more scans and finding out that the cancer had spread from my rectal area to my liver. So it counted as Stage 4 cancer, and at my first appointment with my oncologist, he said somebody in my situation typically has a 40 percent survival rate. I gulped a little bit at my chances, but I still felt good.
I started chemotherapy in April, and I made a key decision: I had to keep my spirit up. I could tell right away that the medication they were putting into me was a huge part of this fight, but my attitude was very, very important to whether I survived this thing or not. I had to cultivate that, so I pushed myself on three important things.
One was that I was going to continue going to the gym every day, even if I felt terrible. I had to keep that as a daily habit. I’ve found that there is a direct connection in my brain between physical activity and optimism—I’m moving forward and not letting physical stuff keep me stationary, and that impacts my overall sense of moving forward with everything else in my life. Move a muscle, change a thought, as the old sober saying goes.
The second decision was to get to as many meetings as possible. It got a little dicey being able to drive myself to meetings, but I had friends who offered rides and I often took them up on those offers. Meetings are spiritual places, and you can’t spell spiritual without the word “spirit.” I felt an injection of hope and fight every time I went to a meeting.
And the third was that I would continue to push myself at work—it gave me purpose and I like what I do for a living, so I kept plowing forward.
So that’s what I did. I had six rounds of chemo in late spring and early summer. I’d go in on a Wednesday for about six hours of a very high dose of chemotherapy drugs, then I would wear a pump for the next 42 hours. I experienced many of the common symptoms—nausea, headaches, neuropathy in my hands and feet—but they weren’t overwhelming at first. For those first few months, the chemo felt pretty manageable.
But down the home stretch, the doctors had warned me that the side effects would start to ramp up because chemo drugs are cumulative. I started to feel it heavier and heavier, and one of the big things that ended up happening was my ability to leave the house and be around people. You know how your old phone had a battery that was at 100 percent, then you’d take a call for 16 minutes and it suddenly had dropped to 67 percent? That was me. I kept going to meetings, but an hour around people was about my limit. I would start to get really bad headaches, nausea and extremely tired. I was that old phone.
Eventually I got through the six rounds of chemo and had a few weeks off before surgery. But the closer we got to the surgery, the scarier it got. My doctors said they rarely do this kind of procedure because it is fairly dangerous—they were going to cut 20 percent of my liver out with one surgeon, then another surgeon was going to cut out the rectal tumor and reroute my whole digestive tract through a colostamy bag. The whole thing would last about seven hours of me with my body sliced in half.
I also had to meet with a nurse who specializes in colostamy bags and it really derailed me. The one thing I didn’t want was a colostamy bag. For whatever reason, it was just the one thing that made me feel like the cancer was winning. I couldn’t get my head around being a guy with a bag of crap on his hip at all times for three months.
In my other appointments before the surgery, everybody laid out what they were going to do, and things got really real. The idea of a 7-hour surgery finally hit me. When they said they were going to need 50-100 staples down my chest to my groin to seal me up, it hit me that how significant that is. And when they mentioned they might get in there and have to pull back if anything goes sideways, I realized this was a surgery that I could conceivably not wake up from.
But I hit a meeting every night for a week before the surgery, and I got myself to a good place. Cancer is one day at a time—you cannot think about two months down the road or a year down the road. You have to be in today, and things are usually fine. Guess where I learned that from, guys!
So on the morning of the surgery, I went with my wife at 5 am to the hospital. I hadn’t eaten or drank anything in two days, and they had given me all the colon blaster drinks a fella could ever hope for, so my body was empty… but my heart was full. I had my family, my friends and my 12-step superstars all in my corner.
And I was going to need them.
Tune in for part 2 next Tuesday.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
A little prayer:
“Dear Lord, so far today I’ve done all right. I haven’t gossiped, haven’t lost my temper, haven’t been greedy, grumpy, nasty, selfish, or overindulgent. I’m really glad about that.
“But in a few minutes, God, I’m going to get out of bed, and from then on, I’m probably going to need a lot more help.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, Jan. 2000, “Ham on Wry,” by Anonymous)
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