There is an old saying: “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I don’t believe that. I think the things that try to kill you make you angry and sad.

-Jax Teller, Sons of Anarchy

I’ve been thinking about this quote a lot lately. When it was on, I was absolutely a Sons of Anarchy fanboy because it would drop gems like this into intro or exit monologues from the main character of the show as he wrote a journal for his kids to read one day. Like most long running shows it went off the rails eventually and the ending left a lot to be desired. It was good when it was good, though. Not unlike a marriage, I suppose.

Now that I am walking around and have some semblance of independence and have staved off any further weight loss, people love to comment “wow you look so much better” and while I’m sure there is a truth to that, I’m getting really tired of hearing it. I am not better in a lot of ways, and there are other stressors in my life that have compounded with treatment and recovery to make me broken and sad. When people ask me, “how are you feeling?” all I can manage to conjure up in response is, “still on this side of the dirt.”

I don’t want to be short with anyone, especially if they are showing genuine concern, but I have so much fatigue from talking about my health with people that I am at a loss of what else to say. My PET scan is in two weeks, maybe I still have cancer, maybe I don’t, I’m trying to act as if I’m fully in recovery but the fact is I may not be done with all this, not yet. I don’t want to acknowledge that though, at least not in casual conversation.

When you are a hostage in your own body like this, there are a lot of parallels to being in a broken marriage. Unfortunately this is also something I’m well versed in, so I can confidently make that comparison. There is an element of despair that cannot be cured by anything other than removing the cause, as radical and disruptive as that process might be to your life. It takes courage to take that step. I’m really, really tired of having courage. No one is coming to save me, though, and that’s the cold hard truth of being a man. This isn’t meant to take away from the friends and family who have made heroic contributions to support me and ensure I’m as comfortable as I can be- I’m eternally grateful for the massive outpouring of support I received. However, it starts and ends with me; ultimately I am doing this alone, like most of the other things in my life. No one else can do this for me, take my place, or fight these battles on my behalf. There’s no miracle shot, pill, or professional that takes away from having to do the work.

This thing is trying to kill me, and it made me broken and sad. And the only way out… is through.

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Last week I had two significant medical events I’ll discuss on the front end of this entry: behavioral health and audiology. Starting with the most significant thing to happen to me since I got the PEG tube out: I was finally issued my hearing aids. I say finally because they like to wait a while until after treatment is done so that chemo can do all its damage before they attempt to assess and address it. Because my hearing loss is asymmetric there (I lost virtually all of my high frequency hearing in my right ear and only a little bit in my left), there as a concern from the ENT that perhaps there was something nefarious growing in my ear, so after an MRI confirmed that it was just an odd chemo-ism, I proceeded with getting the hearing aids.

They aren’t nearly as invasive as I’d imagined, but there are little ticks I’m learning to manage. I thought, for instance, it would make being in the car much more bearable because I could turn my music down or listen to something while the kids watched the tablet on our long drives (they are bluetooth capable), but that is definitely not the case. I like driving with the windows down, even on the highway, and I found out that is absolutely not something you want to do with hearing aids in: the wind is deafening. I really only see these things helping me in day to day life when I’m around people in normal indoor settings. Everything I like to do involves profuse sweat, physicality, or noise, and you have to remove them for basically all of those things. They want you wearing them for a minimum of six hours a day so your brain gets used to them but that is harder to do than you’d think when you are me. 

I will say though that I’m glad I have them, as children and women were almost impossible to understand if they sat to my right, and I know they will come in handy once I’m back in the office and trying to figure out what the fuck people are saying.

That segues into work, or lack thereof, and what I’m comfortable sharing about the appointment with my therapist.

The therapist I see works at an annex of the Army hospital which is dominated by mental health services. These run the gamut from group therapy, to standard mental health clinics, to speciality clinics. I go to a specialty clinic that only sees patients like me: cancer, terminal illness, etc. – not for Privates that are homesick, or women experiencing post-pardum, but people with life threatening or chronic medical conditions.

At one point he was in the Army as a medical officer, but that was long ago, so his reaction to what I’m about to tell you was strange to me until I remembered he was a medical officer and that’s basically a different Army than the one I serve in.

I told him I was experiencing a tremendous amount of guilt for not being at work and contributing. He looked at me like I just told him the Earth was flat. Now, I know I’d be next to useless at work, but that’s not the point. Between the appointments, naps, chemo brain, and being gone for over five months there is no way I’d benefit the Army at all, and I’d only be putting myself at risk. This is all very common sense, but when you buy into the culture that surrounds Army leadership of selfless service and sacrifice, that guilt comes on strong when you deliberately take time to take care of yourself.

He assured me I was doing nothing wrong by, you know, recovering from cancer and that he, and the rest of my medical team, would have significant concerns about a setback if I went in against their advice. I know all of this, but the guilt persists. This is only half the story of what is going on in my head, though, the other half is apathy that’s compounded by an increasingly hostile coparent. I know that’s jumping from one very complex topic to another, but in how I’ve been processing everything that has and is happening to me, they are linked.

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My daughter recently had her 8th birthday; the first I haven’t been present for since she was born (which I missed being stuck in Jordan/Syria). Those that know me best understand she is the absolute light of my life, really the reason I bother getting out of bed in the morning; without her I’m not even sure if there is a “me” in this future. So this was a tough one, especially with how this year has shaken out for me.

Her mother, who for no discernable reason other than being hostile and difficult for the sake of it, has become increasingly difficult to deal with in the last few months. Not answering the phone when I call to FaceTime with the kids, not giving a reason or suggesting a better time, cutting calls short to take calls from her boyfriend, and only letting my speak to them when it’s close to their bedtime- the worst part of the day to try and video chat with two children in a house as chaotic as hers can be. So I knew in my bones that she would make a call on my daughter’s birthday as difficult as she could, and then paint me as the bad guy when I inevitably called her out on this pattern of behavior.

I pre-emptively text her the day-of to ask when the best time to call would be, to which I, somewhat surprisingly, got a text back, “after I get home from work.” I know this time to be around 1800-1830, so once 1930 rolled around I was starting to feel myself getting sleepy and decided to call instead of waiting. She picked up and gave it to my daughter, who I had just enough time to sing happy birthday to before her boyfriend’s call cut in and she said, “I’ll call you back in thirty minutes.”

I. Was. Furious.

In my best “this is for the screenshot if I have to submit this conversation into evidence” language, I let her have it about this pattern of behavior. Without rehashing the conversion, which was not her exonerating herself but basically telling me to fuck off in so many words, suffice to say she summarized her position as her boyfriend of six months takes equal or greater priority to the father of her two youngest children. Now, in fairness, my daughter says very nice things about him but the simple fact is that he’s not only not her dad, but his past record is not a glowing endorsement of future success. He will never take priority over me in any way shape or form either legally or emotionally and that’s a hill any reasonable father would be glad to defend and die on.

They tried calling back 90 and 120 minutes later than initially promised, but by that time I’d racked out because that’s what time my body said “lights out” that particular day.

One thing she couldn’t do without causing an absolute shitstorm, however, was keep them from me physically. The following Saturday was our agreed to exchange for the summer vacation visitation.

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Between hoping that my ex was wrongfully deported by ICE that week, and our exchange day, I had another CT up in Seattle at the university hospital. This actually killed two birds with one stone, one, it was ordered for the post-PET consultation with my radiation oncology team at the cancer center so it would compliment that nicely, but second they ran the contrast agent through my chest port and that kicked that appointment back another month. (You have to get your port flushed every twelve weeks to keep it in good working order, so any time it gets accessed for a medical reason, that counts, and port maintenance gets kicked back a corresponding twelve weeks.)

The civilian hospitals that handle the radiation half of my care all use the “MyChart” system. It’s a fantastic app, as far as healthcare is concerned, as it really is a “one stop shop” for records, billing, appointment, information, and chatting with providers. The military has a similar system, but of course it’s a pain in the ass to use because it’s behind a CAC (government ID card with a chip in it you stick in a computer for securely accessing some unclassified networks) wall and there’s no app I know of to access it. So as soon as my CT had been read by the radiologist, the results were posted in my app. This is both scary and helpful. Scary because with as much medical terminology as I’ve learned in the last six months, I still don’t understand a lot of the terms they use in their notes, and helpful because it is expectation management. 

The short version is, “all systems nominal, continue with PET, pay special attention to some shit in his lungs that may or may not be more cancer.” This is the ol’ Dr GPT version, but a provider has yet to contact me so I’m assuming there’s not an emergent issue that was identified and that I’m not in any mortal danger at this time. That’s… progress? I think? I’m Ron Burgundy?

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Ever since I started the “Recovery” section of this blog, I’ve used the span of several days to write these entries. I have the strong urge to go back and delete, edit, or refine prior writing but have generally opted to leave them as I am in the case of this one. These are snapshots in time, and as much as I want to present this refined version of myself, my thoughts, and emotions, I think it’s more beneficial to those going through their own cancer journey or their loved ones to see these things as they happen in time and space, so it stays even if it makes me look like a shithead at that particular moment.

Me and the ex met this past weekend at a county aquatic facility in Oregon where she’d planned our daughter’s “birthday party” which was significant because we were supposed to meet earlier by a few days because of how I authored our parenting plan (which she agreed to, but frequently misquotes and gets mad at the contents of , when pointed out to her) but she’d given me a few extra days on the front end of the summer and I wasn’t going to be a stickler over a few days especially if a party was going to be involved. Well, I arrived, fully expecting a hostile crowd of acolytes and family members and the only people that showed up were the ex’s sisters, mother, and her sister’s baby daddy’s family. Quite a turnout for my little girl’s big day that so much fuss was made over the exchange date. It ended up being fine. No tension, no drama, and my kids were over the moon over seeing me and spending time with me there. The car ride back was one of the happiest I’ve had in recent memory, although extremely physically tough. It took some atrocious gas station coffee to get us back in one piece because my body wanted to sleep for a year by the time we’d returned home.

It’s just us this week (the next few weeks some family members are flying out to spell me for some of the more important things that I can’t take the kids to), and while single parenting while juggling recovery tasks is not without its own challenges, they are the reason I’m still alive on this Earth. After all, what was the point of everything I’ve been going through if I quit now just because a three year old need to be told to shit in the toilet instead of his pants?

The views and opinions presented herein are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Army.