(Warning: This is another long entry. There’s a lot to unpack here, so bare with me. Some of it is related to cancer, but skippable if that’s solely what you’re here for.)

I’m lost, but I know where I’m going.

This is a continuation of the last entry because things happen in here that pre- and post- date the hunt, but did not fit with that narrative, at least not cohesively, and I thought it important to tell that story as a whole instead of jumbling the absolute mess this entry is going to be. This one is going to be heavy, and you have time to bail now if that’s not the space you’re in right now to be reading it. Sorry, but you’ve been warned.

============

Fuck it, We Ball

The day after I dropped the kids back off with their mom I went to a drop-in skate (a scrimmage, for those that aren’t wholly familiar with hockey) to see what I was made of on the ice against live competition. 

I did this once in July and it was a train wreck. I was extremely winded, and didn’t even make it a whole hour before skating to the locker room, going home, and sleeping for ten hours. My goal was to make it at least an hour of the 1:15 session. When I showed up I ran into a bunch of old teammates and friendly faces that were happy to see me out there and giving it a shot. There were some less than stellar moments, but overall I managed to keep my feet under me against far more skilled players.

I knew at some point I’d be able to play again, but I didn’t expect it to be this soon; I made it to the hour mark thanks to some deep benches and short shifts. I burned through my water at remarkable speed but I expected that. Shifts at drop ins tend to be longer because there are no set lines, just a rotation from the bench, so I could take short (45 second) shifts and rest without guilt knowing some gomer was going to take a four minute shift without a second thought.

Fast forward two weeks.

Originally I’d killed and buried the idea of playing in the league at all this season: the cost outweighed the benefits; I could never make enough games to make it worth it. Then the fuckers did it. They released the October league schedule and of course, right on cue, it was actually a makable schedule for me with weeknight and late Sunday games. It took very little encouragement for my old team to start cheerleading me into playing another season, so the night before the first game I could make I signed up.

The primary rink my league plays games in is less than ten minutes from my house, so it’s not a major logistical movement to get there. I can leave 30 minutes before a game and still have time to get dressed and ready if I don’t waste any time. The locker rooms on one half of the building are comically small though and we were using that sheet of ice (there are two under one roof) so I decided to give myself some cushion and work my way into the room. Some of my old teammates, now on a different team, were playing and they waved at me as I walked down the corridor beside the glass to the rooms. It felt good to be back among friendly faces doing something I love to do.

My team was composed mostly of new faces this season. Some of the “OGs” were there and were very happy to see me on this side of the dirt, and some of the new people had only heard of me as “the cancer guy.” Either way, I was ecstatic to be there, and a little apprehensive about what the night would bring.

I’m a defenseman. If you’re not familiar with hockey, it’s basically what it sounds like. When my team is on the offense, I am supposed to prevent the opposition from breaking the puck out by camping on the blue line or being deeper than the deepest cherry-picking dickhead that is hanging out in the neutral zone looking for a cheap breakaway goal. This can involve a “footrace” of sorts where we find out who is faster and confident enough to stop once at terminal velocity, so as you might imagine I was a little worried about having too many footraces in the game from a stamina standpoint.

Fortunately the team we were playing was roughly our skill level, and the match was tilted evenly enough where I didn’t find myself in a sprint often enough to put a significant dent into my overall fatigue level in-game, and only once did I rotate myself to the end of the bench for extra rest (in league games we have pre-determined lines, I was in the first line of defensive pairing, a “starter” if you will).

I made a couple bonehead plays, and a couple of really good ones, but on the whole I was having a blast- even when I was doing really stupid shit on the ice like accidentally screening my goalie or leaving someone from the other team alone on the ‘back door’ (the back door is the side of the net that the goalie is not actively defending).

We ended up winning 5-3 after holding onto our lead, and we bumped fists with everyone on the ice before retiring to the locker room. I was given “defensive player of the game” despite the fact that I think I was -2 or -3 but hey I’ll take a sympathy ballot over nothing, and now I have this Mjolnir hammer that’s colored like a Rainier Beer can in my hockey bag until next week.

============

Let’s go back to Part 1 where I mentioned… her… because she plays a pretty big part in this entry. We’ll call her Sarah for the purposes of this blog out of the interest of her privacy (and mine). Me and Sarah have known each other for a while, and were always strictly platonic friends. We’d started speaking more toward the end of the summer about the trials and tribulations of life, relationships, my recovery, and anything else you can think of.

I was in the process of trying to set her up with Thomas when, while trying to sell the idea to him over the course of the hunt, I’d realized that I had actually had strong feelings for her right in front of my face that I’d previously not acknowledged. I’d never thought of her that way before, but it was like the Titanic hitting an iceberg– slowly each compartment of my mind began to spill over with her likeness until I was drowning in turmoil over it.

Those of you who have fallen hard for someone who was previously a close friend, but you’d never seen as anything but, know that it hits you like a sledgehammer: the stress of the weight of the decision to act… or not. It’s like a stone on your chest that gets heavier with every passing moment.

For two weeks I’d wrestled with the consequences of telling her. I tried to talk myself out of it, I tried to convince myself that she’d never go for it. After all, I am largely still a broken person– medically speaking– and nobody my age wants to jump into the middle of this renovation project, right? Fatigue, brain fog, drymouth, dietary restrictions, random lightheadedness– I’m a mess! Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, the baby-mama drama is enough around these parts to push anyone away. Right…?

Well. Maybe not… at least, not as far as God is concerned. Or my psychologist at behavioral health, or my cognitive therapist…

============

Woo Woo Shit: Revisited

So, for the first time publicly, I’m going to make a huge confession that is probably going to shock the people that have known me well for years: I am making an effort to get right with God. My recent posts have hinted at this a little bit, but I’d made a promise to myself before treatment that if I made it out from the other side of this thing that I was to “get correct with the lord” as it were.

Over the Labor Day holiday I finally decided to call the only person I’d trusted at the time to help me dip my toes into this world: my uncle.  It was known to me he was getting more involved with the Catholic church recently and it seemed logical to bounce all this off of him and ask his thoughts on how I was to get started down this path.  Religion was largely foreign to me– my parents never raised me in it despite being raised in Catholicism themselves; I had no foundation to build on.

After talking to him for about an hour, I was completely relieved: he did not try to recruit me, and even told me to make sure I approached this with care. He recommended a Bible podcast and answered all the questions he felt qualified to answer, and I was on my way.

Shortly thereafter I made contact with the Army chaplain that blessed my throat as mentioned early in this story, and we sat down for lunch one day to discuss how I should move forward. Like my uncle, he agreed that it wasn’t prudent to just whole-ass jump right into it. It would take lots of study and even then, there were still some big milestones I might not ever choose to pursue (within the Catholic faith).

Me and the chaplain discussed how to reconcile logic, reason, the scientific method, and faith– there was no way I’d be able to approach it any other way. I am a firm believer in science, always have been, always will be, but the gap between what science tries to explain and what is unknown is still too wide for me to just buy into the big bang. Why and how??? “Trust me bro” is basically what science says, which has at least equal footing with the idea that there is a divine spirit engineering this gong show.  

Deciding to believe in God is how I’ve chosen to rationalize so much of this unknown. Without going too much into it in this entry, he has very much made himself known to me in very plain, very obvious ways lately. I struggle more and more with believing in coincidence, and the further I drift from that, the closer I drift toward the belief that maybe, just maybe, he has big plans for me. Or, at the very least, some sort of plan– to be determined, I’m sure my guardian angel will hold an IPR with the Saints sometime soon to iron out the next quarter of FY26.

More to follow on this development in a future entry, but that’s where my head is at right now (my atheist/agnostic friends would probably argue my head is firmly up my ass right now, which, ok, fine, but new year new me– you’ll get over it; I’m still gonna send you unhinged shit on Instagram).

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.