Writing about Life

So at this point I had just been admitted back in the hospital, not for chemo this time but to recover from chemo. When I started this journey I never thought that I would be going into the hospital to recover from chemo. I actually spent more time in the hospital over my cancer treatments recovering from chemo then I did receiving it, and I was on 7 day at a time treatments. That is crazy to me, was this shit THAT poisonous that it made a 22 year old healthy young man bedridden in the matter of a couple weeks? What does this tell you? There were times that I wondered, “we have all this technology and amazing feats as mankind, yet the best way to treat cancer, a super common issue, is to poison people to near death?, something doesn’t add up.” You don’t really think of these things in depth at the time, I thought it was a severe waste of energy to think the “why me, what if” because what’s done is done. I felt like I was extremely good at looking ahead not behind me, maybe it was the life or death trauma my brain and body were going through. When a antelope is in the process of getting chased down by a lion, it’s not thinking “maybe I should have turned at that last tree?”, it is running it’s absolute dick off trying not to get eaten alive by a pride of lions. Well, humans have that same thing in our brains, we are, metaphorically, running our asses off trying to survive, some of those useless thoughts we have day to day don’t take priority. We have the same brain designed for survival as we did thousands of years ago, our lives just look different now because we drive cars, live in temperature controlled boxes, have abundant food we don’t need to fight over, and there is next to no danger. We still go into survival mode and overreact to situations, because of our survival brains. Sometimes it embarrassing to note how we react to getting cut off on the freeway, someone yelling at us, or being hurt by someone we love. Our brains react similarly when we get sick, I remember over reacting to small things in the hospital thinking the nurses were fucking with my survival. I wanted to know every single thing that was going into my body, why, how, and at what time. There were times I even wrote out my schedule and would page them when I was late getting something. There was one time a new nurse walked into my room with a needle in her hand and asked me to lift my shirt, as I did I asked “what is that?”, not responding to me she jammed that needle into my stomach and emptied the orange liquid in the syringe into me, it hurt a lot. She immediately turned and walked out, as she did, she said “a vitamin”. I was sooo fuckin angry, I wanted that nurse to fall off a cliff and die, if I had any strength I would have followed her and demanded she apologise and NEVER do that to anyone ever again. I would have explained to her how scary and intimidating it is to come into a hospital and start getting poisoned to near death with no idea what was happening and no break from any of it, and her treating patients like that only amplified how scared we are and how untrustworthy she’s making her and her fellow staff members look. An obvious overreaction on my part internally but that’s the way your brain works, don’t fuck with someones survival or you will see the true animals human beings really are. That was the first and last time I ever saw that nurse, and the one and only time I was treated like a lab rat.

I tried washing the hair off my body in the shower that morning that I woke up to a pillow of hair, clumps of hair were coming out and sticking to my body, making matters much worse for clean up. I paged my nurses and asked “what do I do with this?”, they told me they have a electric razor on the cancer ward for this very occasion. Your hair actually falls out in patches when you’re on chemo, it fell out completely over the course of two or so weeks. After one of my nurses shaved my head, most of the nurses on shift that day came in to support me and tell me it’s just part of the process and it always grows back. That’s the way majority of the nurses were during my whole journey, very supportive, kind, caring, and sensitive. Nurses have to be very turned on people, it’s a huge energy giving job, I don’t mean even just physically, they have to give nurturing and kindness to other peoples souls that feel like they have no hope. When you are in a situation like that, a cancer ward, and you are a nurse, you are lifting people up, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, it’s very consuming. They should have areas in hospitals where nurses go to get re-charged, sensory deprivation tanks, meditation, quiet rooms, yoga, reading areas, etc. Just to slow down and give your mind permission to wander and tell you whatever it feels it needs to. In order to give that much to people you need to re-charge, you can’t give give give, it doesn’t work like that. Some people don’t even realise it, we as humans aren’t meant to be either givers or takers, we need both, we need balance. We all go through stages where we live in one area or the other for a longer period of time but that’s our cycles, that’s life. During chemo I felt like a huge taker of people’s energy, I absorbed energy, I needed to or I would have died, not from cancer, but from deep isolation. I had people around, I’m not talking about that, but from our source energy, our souls. There’s a certain time or place you get to when your soul decides to let go, It is out of everyone’s hands, including your body’s. I’ve been on that edge of that cliff, it’s not that scary…… once you let go of control. It’s scary as fuck until then. We are taught to fear death because of a heaven or hell, we think, “was I a good enough of a person?, did I do enough to earn heaven?, I don’t want to burn in hell”. Those were all my thoughts when I started approaching that cliff, it was a long hard battle of thoughts inside. On top of it all I was high as fuck on opiates, which was a good thing , it allowed me to dissect my thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. I had never done any illegal drugs before this so it was all very new to me, it changed the way I think and I felt I was able to analyse things better. Did I see Jesus coming in the clouds and tell me it’s OK to come to him? no I didn’t, it’s much much bigger then that. It was the moment my whole belief system shattered, I grew up believing and getting taught that you go to church and be a good person. You accept Jesus in your heart and you surrender to him, It was all a lie. The fear mongering had worked its magic though, I had been terrified to die.

There is no better time to question your religious beliefs then when you are knocking on deaths door. This isn’t meant to offend anyone, it’s MY journey. I started having visions of how ridiculous Christianity is and what I believed to be true, this wasn’t easy for me at the time. Imagine things in your life you know for certain are true and your belief, now think of an event of something that shows you you are wrong, it’s not a easy thing to go through. It’s very hard to explain, it was like lucid dreams and visions, sometimes I felt awake and sometimes I knew I was sleeping. Don’t get me wrong mostly all religions have the exact same message, that’s not the ridiculous part. The parts I was seeing was the Bible getting translated and edited many times over many centuries to custom fit certain peoples, leaders/rulers, and empires ideals. I couldn’t help thinking religion had been created for control. Worshipping Jesus, Mary, someone named God in heaven, all the saints, and apostles, all based on a ancient book that has some seriously disturbing stories and events in it. I thought laying there, “this can’t be what life is about”, what if earth is your heaven or hell and you just go lights out at death? I felt used, did God just create us all so he could just have his little ant farm and watch us fuck each other up, but he has a grand plan right? He knew and knows everything that’s going to happen though right? I was angry, I felt like I spent 22 years of my life believing in some bullshit ideology that was indoctrinated into me when I was young. I could follow the basic message of all religions and be perfectly fine and a have a good life. Why did I need to read this fairy tale novel, called the Bible, and go to a certain building on Sundays and “worship” a spirit? All this was racing through my head over the course of a week. What I do know for sure is that, not one single human being who has ever lived knows what happens or where we go when we die. Why do religions spend so much time thinking and educating people on what happens at death? Why do they travel the world spreading their word to save people from eternity in hell? Everything, including our lives we live felt setup for death, why do we spend so much time on a topic no one has any clue about? The human brain is not capable of comprehending having a soul separated from our bodies, being separated from Earth, or eternity, so why do we let it consume us? That is the moment I let go of control, death is out of my hands and what happens to me, my soul, my spirit is also out of my hands, so I was free to not fear death anymore. It was an amazing feeling.

It’s honestly pretty amazing as humans, we can look back on memories and experiences, and look how we handled situations then learn from them. No matter how traumatic something is you have to look back on things in life and learn from them. Deep down learn, look at your mindset, did you blame someone at the time? Do you still blame them? Are you resentful for certain experiences in your life? It’s hard to use the word regret when every second of our lives shapes us, good or bad, every moment changes us. Don’t get me wrong, I think we all run into people that we would rather see burn in hell or situations we wish we didn’t have to experience but what is life without hardship? Look back at your life, when were times you made the most amount of progress and growth? I can with absolute certainty tell you it was from the “bad” days. I had some hard times to learn some of my most important lessons. No one learns anything from having a amazing day, and if you do its because it is with gratitude after seeing previous hardships. The old saying “how do you know what tastes sweet if you’ve never tasted sour” fits perfectly. After reviewing experiences in my life, I can sort them out in my head, then learn and see the gratitude I have for them. It is not at all easy to do but by trying to remove our emotional and egotistical responses, we can see a situation clearer, emotions blind us. That’s how I can look back on my cancer experience, with a huge amount of gratitude. Of course, emotionally, it is hard to go through those experiences. Anger, resentment, abandonment, loneliness, being afraid are all normal, but when I was able to take a breath and analyze my situation, some of those emotions were getting fuelled by my past.

I had just finished masturbating into a cup in a room in the hospital to freeze my sperm. It honestly felt kinda dirty, I thought “this isn’t how it’s supposed to go”, aren’t you supposed to fall madly in love with a lovely lady and make a conscious decision to have a baby? Are you not supposed to make love all night in the bliss and just get pregnant and be so happy? Now I had to freeze sperm because chemotherapy could make me infertile for the rest of my life. I was already re-thinking the whole children issue as it is after splitting with my wife, I definitely grew up thinking that’s just what you do, you have kids. Then when my perfectly planned out life slapped me in the face at 22 years old, I started to question things. There is no fucking operators manual for this thing we call life, you don’t plan it, sometimes it plans you and you have to keep up. So I didn’t really know what to think about the freezing sperm situation, at the time I didn’t want to do it because it’s pretty expensive but I just figured keep my options open for the future me.

I got brought back to my room to start chemo, already being in a lot of pain. I didn’t really know or understand how to do the pain management thing at the time, so I lived in a lot of pain those first few days. I would take Tylenol 3’s here and there as the nurses asked me but it definitely took me a bit to figure it out because if you didn’t keep the pain at bay it was really hard to manage. My brother Dallas and I played the shit out of some Mario Brothers and NHL 94 for the first couple days, I had 3 TV’s in my room, one for DVD’s, one for VCR, and one for my Nintendo, it was kind of awesome. The nurses came in throughout those first couple days to give me my chemo, it was just bags of fluids hooked up to me through IV, they were all different, some were over the course of several hours and some just a couple hours, one was even bright orange. In the cancer center they gave me the information on the different chemo I would be taking and a list of side effects to watch out for and that were considered normal. The list of side effects for the chemicals was a page or more long for each one, it was pretty scary, anything from severe burns on the skin, black tar shits, severe joint pain, to severe sores in your mouth. Holy shit, am I going to get all these side effects? This is going to be crazy. While one of my nurses was hooking up my first bag of chemo, I was a little nervous, I felt like I was going to be creating side effects by thinking too much. As the chemo started going in I felt no different, I was relieved, this isn’t going to be that bad… Few hours later my brother and I were still playing Nintendo and hanging out when one of my nurses came in, a big bodybuilder guy, he was informing me of my up coming routine spinal needle that I have to go for, (the spinal needles were done as a precaution from the cancer spreading to my spinal fluid and then eventually my brain) I just had to go for one needle during this first treatment but usually it would be two. I laid on the bed on my stomach as he marked my back with marker, the needle had to obviously be right on target and was marked for my low back. After I got marked up they took me down to the cancer center where my oncologist was to do the spinal needle. I got taken down there in a wheel chair (I was not allowed to walk anywhere for tests or procedures anytime I was in the hospital) where my doctor ran me through what the procedure will look like. He told me he injects a needle in to freeze the area and then another one to take out spinal fluid and put chemo in. I was fucking sweating just listening to this shit, like what? Take spinal fluid out to put chemo in? Fuck. I really had to learn to trust my doctor and the health system as a whole for that matter. Everything we discussed about chemo sounded like they were going to kill me slowly with torture, it was a process to trust them. The oncologist nurse gave me a pill and said its to calm and relax me before the procedure because you obviously have to be perfectly still while a needle is inserted into your spine…. I got brought into a procedure room and laid on a table for 20-30 minutes to allow the drug to kick in, it worked, I felt pretty chill. My doctor came in and I tried my absolute best to keep my shit together but I was terrified. I had to sit cross legged and bend over as far as possible, the first freezing needle went in, holy shit that hurt and it’s a baby. I of course did not even look at the spinal needle because I figured I would faint or die or something. I almost did faint and die when that needle went in because I did feel it go in and a little pop when it got in fully. It was cold in that room but I was wet from sweating, I had sweat coming out of every pore, but it was over relatively quickly. Then I had to lay on the table for another 30 minutes because you can get bad headaches if you don’t be still. It was honestly so relaxing laying there, I think a combination of drugs and my body realizing that traumatic experience was over, it was almost euphoric. It was a long wheel chair ride back up to the 5th floor of the hospital.

When I got back to my room it was another bag of chemo, it was non stop, like holy hell can I just have a minute to process what just happened? Of course it’s not their fault, they’re doing a job and I almost didn’t even realize how overwhelmed I was at the time. My skin and veins started burning with the next couple bags of chemo. I now honestly have a hard time expressing what this process was like, it was learn as you go, I had literally no fuckin clue what was happening from one minute to another and when I look back it was so powerful, sometimes I feel like life can’t possibly give me anything harder then it already has, of course that’s a little naive.

After 3-4 days of chemo I was sent home, I had just been given a half treatment because they had to make sure my tumour didn’t shrink too fast. Over the course of 4 days at home I felt like a had a flu with some aches and pains and my hair was still intact, I thought maybe this isn’t going to be that bad. After those 4 days at home, I got word to report back to the hospital for my first full treatment. I got admitted onto the 6th floor this time, the actual cancer ward, and started chemo immediately, my 2 older brothers and younger sister were coming and going over that week I was in there getting my first full treatment. I didn’t feel too bad besides what I thought was going to be normal, low energy, chronic pain, and burning from the chemo. We kind of made a name for ourselves early on, being as I was the youngest person up there by 100 years, we would have Nintendo battles and watch movies. One night we ordered pizza and they wouldn’t deliver to my room and non patients weren’t supposed to be wandering around the hospital after hours so we made me look as dying as possible and went down and met the pizza guy in the emergency department (if you look like you’re dying no one says shit to you). Another time my brother Dallas stayed the night and we got bored so we decided to walk all over the hospital at midnight, but he wasn’t allowed to because he wasn’t a patient, so we dressed him up in my extra hospital clothes and a toque so he looked the part. We wheeled my IV pole all over that night, the nurses just laughed and shook their heads at us most of the time.

That week in the hospital I got chemo for 7 days straight and 2 spinal needles, they were obviously horrible but I just figured I better get use to them because it’s now routine. I was starting to feel a little worse those last 2 days, even less energy, just picture if you were slowly getting poisoned to death, similar to that. I got sent home to wait for my body to recover before I started my next round of chemo. I got sent home on a Thursday morning, I had a ticket from the cancer center to go see Lance Armstrong the next morning, I was pretty excited because I briefly knew his story and that he had a rough chemo battle. It was the first time I was to see and meet someone that went through what I was going through, so I was actually really excited because I felt like I was still going about this blind. Well, my excitement was trashed when I woke up in the middle of the night, I honestly thought I was dying, I felt like I was going to puke, I used every ounce of energy to crawl to the bathroom and puked my guts out for a hour, I couldn’t even move after, I laid on the bathroom floor for a few more hours. I didn’t know what to do, do I just die? Do I call a ambulance? I didn’t want people to think I was being weak or whining so I tried my best to tough it out, which didn’t work that good. I eventually called a friend to bring me to the hospital as I waited at the bottom of the stairs. I needed help up the stairs, and to the vehicle. When I got to the hospital I just went straight to the cancer center and walked in, I got bloodwork and put on IV hydration immediately. I was severely dehydrated and my bloodwork numbers all came back near zero, I had zero immune system. They called the hospital and got them to ready a room for me to get admitted. I got sent up to the cancer ward and for the next week I barely moved, I don’t know if there’s a word to describe what that felt like, sick doesn’t really fit. I barely ate anything because I had such bad sores in my mouth and severe stomach aches. This was around the time I realized how hard this was going to be, I was in so much pain, not knowing at the time morphine wasn’t working for me. The second day I was in the hospital I woke up with a pillow full of hair, as a guy you don’t think that would really bother you but when something is taken away from you because of a sickness, I promise you it will. I thought I was pretty smart and I would just have a quick rinse in the shower and wash off the hair that fell out, well it started coming out in chunks and was sticking to me, oops I guess that was a dumbass idea. One of my nurses came in and shaved my head, they were very good at supporting me, my nurses became one of my biggest support systems, I truly loved them.

At this point in the story, I am driving from Estevan to Saskatoon to start Cancer treatments, a solid 4 hours of quiet time to myself. I was obviously scared as hell to get there, at times wishing it was a 4-day drive or to turn around and go back to an oblivious life. The lack of info up until that point made me uncertain of what was to come, I was still unsure of how everything was going to go down. Do I just show up to the Cancer Center and start taking pills? What was “chemo”? What did it look like? What does it do? How does it make you feel? All things I had no clue about. So definitely the uncertainty helped me not dwell too much on details because I didn’t know them. The majority of the drive I was tossing around thoughts between “am I going to die from this?” or “is this going to be a crazy journey I will tell my grandkids about?” One thought brought me great fear because I was scared to die for 2 reasons:

1. I was 22 years old and I having just spilt up with my wife, I felt like I was just starting my life, the life I would choose to make for myself. For the first time, I felt in control.
2. I had been brought up in a Catholic family, and my mother put us in private Christian schools where I was immersed in their belief systems, and at this point in my life when I was potentially facing death and about to meet my maker, did I actually believe in any of it?

Studying Christianity and going to church for many years, it made me very confused of what happens when we die. Am I supposed to just have blind faith and take a ancient books word for the existence of a Heaven and a Hell? How was this old book supposed to  know exactly what happens when I die, when it has been translated, edited, and has had parts removed (many times). Do I just float away from my body and meet Jesus at the pearly gates of Heaven? Then we discuss whether I can come in or not? The Bible says, Hell is unimaginable torture for all of eternity, I knew I sure didn’t want that. The very fact that there was even a focus on a hell at all is ridiculous. I would say that the threat of eternal torture was my main reason for trying so hard to believe and be a Christian. I can now see that is a horrible reason to believe in something; I can see now that I was never a believer or a Christian; I can see now that my Christian belief systems were not comforting me in this troubling time, they were actually causing me even greater fear. If I took away the idea of a Hell or Satan, would I still have the same beliefs and actions in my life? This deep questioning of my Christian beliefs did not come until later in my cancer journey, however. On that particular drive to Saskatoon, I prayed to God for my life, I wanted him to save me from this, I didn’t want to die.

Before I went to Saskatoon to start my cancer journey I got in touch with an Auntie who I had lost contact with over the years. This Auntie was an aunt who had 4 sons of her own and took my 3 other siblings & I in when I was 6. She took us all in because my mom had just left her boyfriend and couldn’t take care of us anymore. My mother recently had her 5th child at that point, with her much older boyfriend. She left him for another guy, and left her 6 month old baby with her now ex-boyfriend. I as an adult I can see that my mother had a traumatic childhood, and without any healing from that trauma, she was trying to raise 5 young children, and was doing the best that she knew how at that time.  (I have since reunited with this brother Wyatt, when he turned 19 and he is sweet as fuck). My Auntie, who lived in Saskatoon not far from the Cancer Center, had offered her basement for me to stay in while I went through cancer treatments. She said I could stay there for free, which is what I desperately needed at the time, after being cut off from my school money since I was no longer going to be a student. I got to her house and settled in and was off to the Cancer Center the next day. They made my consultation for the pediatric oncologist, because this was more commonly a childhood cancer, and I was young, and he had experience with this specific cancer. Which was a blessing for me because the pediatric oncology department at the time wasn’t very busy. I would go to my appointments and go right in, hardly ever waiting.

So back to my first visit there, I met my main oncologist Dr. Ali. He is a short middle eastern man, very friendly, and his personality was a good fit for me. My admiration for him actually helped me a lot through my journey as he provided me with tough love, he never treated me like a dying cancer patient, but like a man, a human. My first visit with him was very good, he gave me a thorough examination and then explained to me that the hospital needed a little more time waiting on my biopsy results to come in from Vancouver to know exactly which chemo protocol to take. I had had cat scans, x-rays, blood work, biopsies, and an MRI but they didn’t yet know which route on the chemo train to take because they needed this information to stage my cancer. They basically needed to know if the cancer had spread to my brain or bone marrow, which would have more or less been a death sentence. He explained that all routes would look like me being bed ridden and mostly hospitalised with extensive chemotherapy and spinal needles. YES you read that right, mother fuckin SPINAL NEEDLES!!!!!!! I hate needles, a childhood phobia of mine from being alone in a hospital when i was young with severe asthma. I would get sweaty and stressed from a prick in my arm, and now I had to get needles in my spine, which was terrifying, not to mention risky, you don’t fuck with a spine (I have chronic low back pain to this day partially from that).

Dr. Ali also asked me my relationship status, since chemo can make you infertile. He explained that I had to freeze my sperm since I was so young and especially because I was single. I always thought I wanted kids, but after my split with my wife it made me rethink it as a choice, not a requirement. I knew I didn’t want kids anytime soon, mostly because I knew I had a lot of self-work to do and I didn’t want my kids inheriting the deepest parts of my personal traumas, like I had from my parents. But it was hard to hear that my choice may be taken away from me.  I left the Cancer Center that day being relieved, and a little too confident about how my next few months would look.

2 weeks later I got the call for their plan of action, I was to show up at the hospital and prep for surgery to install a Hickman catheter in my chest, get the bone marrow biopsy, a spinal tap, and then freeze sperm before chemo started the next day. I had to get the sperm frozen before chemo, so I didn’t have some mutant Ironman babies. I got to the hospital ready to be in there for a week to 10 days. It was my first time going for actual surgery, and at first it was kind of awesome, I woke up feeling like I slept for a week, but then the pain hit me. My low back was hurting from the spinal tap, my hip was hurting from where they took the bone marrow sample, and the whole right side of my upper body was sore from the Hickman line, a 2-piece catheter that gets put in and allowed the nurses to access my veins for blood work, chemo, and saline. This was needed because the chemo can weaken your veins so bad that they turn to shit and are hard to access. I also found out that the amount I would be getting poked would have increased chances of infection. I didn’t yet realize at this time that morphine does not work as a pain killer for me, which is why I was in so much pain from surgery. I just thought it was normal.

I got sent up to the pediatric ward an hour after surgery because the cancer ward was full. It was actually very sad being on the pediatric ward because it was quiet… you know if a child is quiet then they are on a new level of sick. There weren’t very many kids up there, which I guess is a good thing. That night I couldn’t sleep, and I went to the nurses TV room and sat with them, one of them was rocking a very young child as he slept. I asked them what was wrong with that kid, and they told me that he was on chemo and was actually 5 years old, that the chemo had hindered his growth. I would have guessed that little boy as being 2 or 3. That night I remember being so grateful that I was old enough chemo wasn’t going to slow my physical development, and that I also understood that getting cancer was just something that happened to us as humans, we get sick. Some children don’t understand that and think that them being sick is a punishment or that they did something wrong, and I know because I was that kid. When I used to go to the Emergency Room and have to stay in the hospital with asthma as a young boy, I thought it was because I did something wrong. I couldn’t understand why this was happening. I was too young to get it, to get that our bodies fail us sometimes. That’s a pretty fuckin terrible thing for a child to think, and I can look back now and see this as the start of me feeling like I was so alone.

The next morning, I had to go beat off in a cup and freeze it for my potential future family, romantic I know. When I got to that department in the hospital there were 2 nurses that explained that I was to go into a private room down the hall and fill up that cup. They told me that most guys bring their wives or girlfriends- if they only knew I was just starting the discussion of divorce with my ex. I told them I was a poor cancer patient fresh out of surgery and that they are more than welcome to come give me a hand, not because they were ultra-attractive or that I was half serious, but because I like making people smile… They both giggled and politely informed me that was against protocol. So, I made my way down the hall to a locked room and used the key they gave me to open the door. It was a small room with a coffee table, a couch, and a TV across from it. There was also a cabinet full of porn, “BEST DAY EVER!!!”, I thought. I went through the cabinet finding my favorite go to’s. I spent the better part of 45 minutes trying to get into it and get a boner going, but the pain from just having surgery was a real buzz kill and they put my Hickman catheter in on my right side, and I’m righthanded…..

My ex-wife sleeping around was not told to get your sympathy, but to begin to tell you how I believe I got cancer. Since stress is now known as the biggest immune suppressant, worse than a shitty diet, stress severely fucks up our bodies. The type of cancer I got, Burkitts Lymphoma, can develop from a very low immune system as many other aliments can. AIDS patients can develop this type of cancer because their immune system is usually shit. Burkitts originated in Africa, with their high rate of AIDS and at that time, poor health care. This all ties into the massive stress cycle I was stuck in at that time. When I found out what she was doing, I was crushed. Crushed in the way that coming from an abusive childhood, I felt I had NO one. My brother Landon was the person I was closest to, but he moved away to college, and we grew apart (pre-cell phone era). I had friends, but I was shallowly social, never really opening up to anyone. My home life was so horrible, and I was so miserable there, but when I went to school it was my escape from all that, I was the funny guy, I could enjoy myself at school and work, I had 2 lives. I had surrounded myself with brick walls, like the fucking Great Wall of China, seriously. I remember writing a suicide note to my brother Landon because I couldn’t take my stepfathers abuse anymore, I thought my brother was the only person that loved me and that I “owed” an explanation to. I planned it right out to a Tee. I was going to run in front of a semi-truck. I worked at a restaurant that was right on the TransCanada Highway and I usually worked until late at night. I planned out the night I was going to hide in the ditch and wait for a semi to be coming at 110km/hr. It would be so fast and over with.  Then something just shocked me, and I thought, “this is silly, no way am I doing this, I only have to tough out a couple more years of living in this hellhole with my mother and stepfather, then I will be in charge of my own fuckin life.” There were several times in my mid-teens I couldn’t take it anymore, I planned out how to kill my stepfather, to me he was the devil, an evil bully that targeted people smaller and weaker than himself. Those plans too, ended with me looking to the future and thinking “just a couple more years of this shit and I’m out”. The hate I had for him was so monstrous and growing daily.  What helped me going later on in my cancer journey, when I was getting the worse of the chemo, I remember I kept thinking, “this isn’t as bad as living with my stepfather, I can do this”. I vividly remember laying in the hospital so sick, getting up to pee was a huge struggle and painful. I survived my childhood, this is nothing. Which actually ended up being a huge advantage to my mindset during chemo. I was very positive and looked forward because of the hell I had been through before this.

I severely struggled in school; I cheated my whole way through. I even stole my friends Ritalin a few times to finish some schoolwork because I thought I was too dumb to concentrate and learn things like the other students in my school. Ritalin was amazing, I once took one before bed and I stayed up all night reading a book and doing a book report about it. It was the day before it was due. I was glued to my desk and was hyper concentrated on my work, I finished it at 7:30 am, just as my alarm was going off to wake me for school. I still wonder what I would have been like if my mother ever had taken me to a doctor for problems in school. I can, with great certainty, say that I would have been prescribed some drugs. My mother and stepfather thought I wasn’t trying, and my teachers thought I was dumb. I wondered how I am going to get anywhere in this world when I’m this dumb. My stepfather constantly reminded me of how I will be a loser my whole life. Now I see the bigger picture and he was talking to himself and how that was a projection on me. Sometimes people drag others down, so they continue being surrounded by similar people, it threatens them to see people succeed. Much later on, I acknowledged that he did want me to be better in a way but couldn’t communicate it without his own issues coming through the words.

I failed a lot of classes; I had one teacher even tell me I had a zero chance of passing so I don’t have to continue coming to class. I, of course, kept going as to not raise awareness to my mother or stepdad about the class. A lot of the classes I didn’t fail I got mercy passes for, meaning, I was close enough, so they bump it up to a 50%. Luckily for me and my future, my ex-wife and I were dating at that time and after my 3rd warning that I was going to fail and not graduate. She started doing my homework for me, obviously my grades went up immediately. The tests, I would barely pass, but my assignments and papers were bringing my average way up. By the time of my graduation ceremony at the end of the year, I got called on stage for the “most improved student” award, there was not a person there more shocked than me. “Holy fucking shit!!” I thought as I walked on stage to get my award. My marks weren’t that high, it’s just they were so low before, my mother was so proud of me. I didn’t feel no remorse, I felt like, fuck this school, fuck these teachers, and fuck this bullshit school system that makes everyone go through these standardized tests, rewarding people with better memorization skills then others. To this day I don’t feel bad, I feel we need extensive work in how we bring up children and young people, telling a monkey he’s dumb if he can’t swim like a fish isn’t a very good way of trying to teach children. Especially not recognizing kids living severe trauma at home. Alot of people don’t realize the huge implications in telling children they’re not smart, they have ADD/ADHD, we will create what we believe, more times than not it is related to a childhood full of stress, trauma, and parents projecting their own traumas on their children, (“When the Body says no” by Dr. Gabor Mate, “The Body Keeps the Score” Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk). I’m a little embarrassed to admit that it wasn’t until years later that I realized I’m not dumb, and I don’t have a broken brain. I used to think I was just born with a dumb brain, but it’s important to note, I was TAUGHT this. I have since done some research in neurology and brain development with trauma. There are areas of our brains that are late, or fail to develop strictly from stress, child abuse, and/or trauma. I even cheated on the test that got me into college for mechanics, because I knew I would fail but once I got in, I would be fine, because I didn’t struggle learning things that interested me. It’s crazy to think that I had to cheat in school and to get into college, but I did perfectly fine in mechanics and spent almost 20 years being a mechanic and I was very good at it. The only reason I went into mechanics is because my mom was pressuring me to go straight into something after high school. The reason I chose mechanics is because I thought I was too dumb to do anything else and my marks limited my options. I had a natural draw to mechanics because I had an old snowmobile and dirt bike my uncle gave me and I enjoyed riding them, so when they broke, I wanted them fixed. Working on that stuff just seemed to be something in my life that I understood, and I could learn easily, that was a first. When I got my first car, I used to always be tinkering with it. My brother was the shittiest mechanic ever, so I was always helping him with his car too. It just seemed like my only option, and I did enjoy it too. There may even have been a sub conscious reasoning to it. My mother had a very troubled relationship with her father, and he was a mechanic, so did I naturally go that direction to get my mother’s love, acceptance, attention? Possibly.

When I met my ex, I slowly began opening up to her, and eventually gave her everything I had emotionally, (as much as a traumatized teenager could). I now can comprehend that wasn’t enough for her. It’s not her fault, she’s not a bad person, I wasn’t giving her a basic human need… true connection. I wasn’t capable of it. I didn’t know shit about how to truly connect with people. She did as any healthy human should do, seek out their needs and fulfil them, it just happened to look like “cheating”. I struggle with that term now, because who did she cheat? Me? I sure as hell don’t feel cheated now. It was a precious lesson in learning how I feel, not absorbing how everyone around me was feeling. It seemed that I was surrounded by people who were upset for me. They assumed it is hard for us as humans to see the good in a bad situation, partially because we are selfish, or wired for survival. We are constantly examining, “how does this affect me? Why is this happening to me?” These are all normal thought patterns; our brain is just trying to help us survive.  I spent my life learning to be hyper vigilant and trying to protect myself, because I felt no one else was going to, and I didn’t feel safe… ever! In a relationship that encounters cheating, you have to get rid of your ego. I had to think “what did I contribute to this?”, not be a victim and say, “how could you do this to me!”. One is very beneficial to your growth, your progression as a human and the other causes you to keep spinning your wheels in the mud. If you don’t learn you will re-live it until you do. So, I learned that hard and fast that year.

These hard truths didn’t come to me so nice and softly, they hit me more like a missile to the fuckin head. I didn’t see it coming but sure can’t miss it. Getting told you have a rare and aggressive cancer 2 months after your soul connection betrays you, was hard, scary, terrifying, life changing, and all those things. But the sun still rises tomorrow my friends. Nothing in your life, in your control, will stop the sun from rising the next day, so remember that next time you feel alone, or earth shatteringly upset, it will ground you. It helped me tremendously. I used to wake up the next morning after terrible things happened to me in my life, always being so surprised that the sun rose, and that morning came. I still to this day have people tell me that I’m sooo strong and they couldn’t do what I did, I’ll tell you something, yes you could. Give yourself some credit, we are amazing, beautiful creatures, it is our human instinct to fight for our life. You can do it.

So back to where I left off, I had just been told I have cancer and made a cheesy joke about cancelling my haircut appointment because I didn’t want to explore what I truly felt in the moment, which was a terrified little boy. I immediately and instinctively used humor to re-direct the emotions and feelings. I can honestly say I had a couple cries and within a few days the pity party was over. I’m not one for whining and wanting someone else to bare my burdens. I felt alone most of my life to that point, so I was fully prepared to go through cancer treatments alone. My diagnosing doctor told me I had an appointment with the cancer center a couple days later, which was standard practice. Those couple days in between being diagnosed, and my cancer center consultation were pretty normal, I acted as it was any old Tuesday. I went to school and hung out with a friend, normal shit. By this point in my life my biological father had just come back into my life, we weren’t very close because we didn’t even know each other. My dad and stepmom came down and went to the cancer center appointment with me. I was in very good spirits, mostly because I had so much uncertainty in the previous couple months. But now I felt alive, focused, and in charge, even though I just got cancer…

During my appointment in the Regina cancer center, I found out this wasn’t going to be no cake walk. I asked how many days at a time do I have to take off school and work? He looked at me totally puzzled, then looked at the nurse and said, ” didn’t you go over this with him?”. So, he proceeds to tell me that I’m going to spend the next 3-6 months bed ridden… bed ridden? In my head I thought “bitch please!”. I wasn’t no old man, I saw in my head the stereotype of cancer patients on TV that were skinny and fragile, but seriously man, I’m 22 and in good shape. He didn’t know the life I had already been through and survived. The doctor started asking me about my personal life and where do I live? Who would take care of me? what the fuck was he talking about? I started to think that maybe he was actually serious about this bed ridden thing. So, he recommends for me to move to Saskatoon because I have family there to help me and the Oncologist there had some experience with this rare type of cancer. I am told that I will need to move there immediately and go for a consultation at the cancer center, where they will be going deeper into my diagnosis and trying to stage it (where it has spread to) and find the proper plan of action. It was a bit overwhelming, but I was expecting that.

So, I had 2 days to go quit school, move my stuff back to my house in Estevan, and pack a bag for Saskatoon not knowing how long I would be gone. One of the really hard parts at the beginning was asking my wife to move back into our house we had bought. I knew the second I did that I had just given her everything. Which totally pissed me off because I had never had anything my whole life and I had just worked my dick off for the previous 4 years to get to that point. But what choice did I have? I had no money; I was getting just enough to live for school and the second I quit school they quit the payments. So, there I am off to Saskatoon in my sweet sky-blue Ford Escort with a bag of clothes packed, not knowing how long I’d be gone. On my 450 km drive to Saskatoon, I did go through the thought process fully acknowledging that I may never come back. I might die in Saskatoon, I might die of cancer at 22 years old, it sounded crazy, but I acknowledged the possibility. I figured it was healthy to at least know what I was getting into and the possible outcomes. I felt better than ever, cancer can’t be worse than what I’ve been through prior to that.

My Cancer journey actually has a different story that ties in with it at the start. Rewind time to November 2005. I was a married, healthy,  22 year old energetic man who was in GM mechanics school. I had got married young (christian background, why else would someone get married that young..) and I had just found out my wife had been sleeping around on me while I was away at school. (This all ties into how I got cancer)….Not just, I got drunk and “accidentally” fucked a guy, but fell in love with a 37 year old man, that also had a wife and 4 kids. My wife had drove up to where I went to school (2 hrs away from our house) to tell me she had been suspended from work for “inappropriate behavior” by one of her managers. Knowing full well what that meant as we had had a very turbulent 6 months prior to me going away for school. She had started this job just 8 months or so before and she had started to change, she was partying and hanging out with people I didn’t know, I didn’t drink at the time so I wanted no part of the partying. We had both grown up in christian households and the idea of going out partying when we should be at home being married didn’t seem appropriate. I know that is fucking ridiculous now but I was young, dumb, and brainwashed by religion. I didn’t know what getting married meant at the time, what do we do now? We didn’t want kids just yet, thank fucking God we didn’t drag little humans into our mess, we needed to grow up and mature before having kids and we knew that. I had been working at getting my Journeyman ticket in mechanics right after high school and my wife just did random jobs here and there up to that point. In the months prior to me going away for school we had became extremely disconnected and were basically roommates, we didn’t even talk much, I slept in the spare bedroom, we hadn’t had sex in months and the last few times we did it was going through the motions, like we were prostitutes. A couple weeks before I left for school I told my wife I was going to pick up my snowmobile, which was 3 hours away and was just going to stay at that friends house for the night, she just said, “OK”. I was about 40 minutes from our house when I realized I had forgot my wallet, “SHIT!”. I turned around and went to get it, when I pulled up to my house I seen a truck in the driveway that wasn’t ours. I go into the backyard, as we used that as our entrance, I seen my wife in a skimpy bikini, suntanning with her tits half out and a guy she works with sitting with her, they both were very startled, and their faces were red. She said, “this is ‘Tom’, his daughter is at a birthday party a couple blocks away and he stopped by to say hi”, I just responded, “OK”, and went in the house and grabbed my wallet and left. Human beings aren’t stupid, you can FEEL energy in situations like that, I knew something was going on deep down, but I kept it stuffed down inside, if I didn’t address it, it didn’t exist, right? I did tell my friend all about it when I got to their house before I got my snowmobile. I told them every detail and how it felt gross seeing them in the backyard, there was an instant gross feeling. Before I went to school a couple weeks later, I sat my wife down and told her we need to figure our situation out, that I couldn’t keep living like this. I told her to do some thinking and I will too and that when I come home in 2 months I wanted to sit down and discuss what our immediate future looks like, she agreed but I couldn’t help thinking that she didn’t take me seriously, like she was saying “yeah yeah, whatever”, like she couldn’t wait until I left. A few weeks into school I came home for the weekend to do some yard work before the snow came, she barely said hi when I came in and then went out with friends shortly after I got there. It’s pretty painful when your wife acts like she hates you and you don’t know why,  you don’t even have a clue what to do or how to express yourself, where do you even start? That weekend, at 2 different times I went for 2 drives by myself to cool down, I felt like if I stayed there I was going to beat the shit out of her, she was yelling at me, calling me names, putting me down, and I didn’t know how to react or express myself. It’s not that I’m a bad person or I like beating up people weaker then me but in society men get taught that dominance and violence is how you get things done, to get your ultimate point across, especially in my up bringing. I have never really been an aggressive person, so I can usually identify when my anger is getting ahead of me and I need to step away. After that weekend, on my way back to school I realized I don’t know how this can be fixed or where to start, can we even work it out? I didn’t even want to go back, this situation was so stressful to me, physically, emotionally, and mentally. I kind of felt lied to, we definitely paint a picture of happily ever after when we get married, I felt like I had fucked up, why did I get married so young? All things I was able to sort out and identify over the years to come.

I obviously felt hurt, betrayed, lied to, torn up, all the usual emotional feelings that come with feeling of being replaced. I actually was surprised to realize I was actually getting physical pain too, I had chest and stomach pains daily for the first couple weeks after finding out. It’s interesting how the human body works, our emotional pain is very much tied to our physical bodies.

The city my ex-wife and I lived in was small, and everyone seemed to know what was going on under my roof before I did. I felt like a complete fucking idiot, a fool, very embarrassed, and that everyone was laughing at me. So, what I did was I drove to this guy’s house that my wife had apparently fallen in love with. My mindset at the time was, I just didn’t want people thinking I was a total bitch, I grew up getting bullied and abused in elementary school and relentlessly by my stepfather, so this time I stood up. So, I went to his front door and 2 of his daughters answered the door, I looked at them and then saw him in the background and just said we need to talk outside” and I walked away, to his driveway. Basically, long story short I asked him what was going on with him and my wife, he said “obviously if you’re here you already know”. I told him “I want you to be a man and tell me to my face”, and that I wanted to hear it from him what was going on and why. He apologized several times, said that it was just a fling, that he didn’t care for her, and that she was falling for him and wanted him to leave his wife. I told him to tell my wife it’s over and to leave her alone if he wasn’t going to take it further. My wife had told me they’re in love and he’s leaving his wife, it was kind of left at that for the time being. Before I left his house that day, I told him if he doesn’t tell his wife what’s going on, I will. Well, I ended up calling his wife a couple weeks later and telling her what was going on between them because they kept on seeing each other secretly. She started crying and yelling at me, she got really angry, saying there’s no way that’s true. I told her I don’t go around calling peoples wives and making false accusations, I got mad at her for not believing me. I understand her now, she was in the denial stage, the one I was in months prior, I can’t fault her for that, sometimes when we hear truth we don’t want, we lash out.  Originally, after a couple weeks of seeing if we could fix and heal this speed bump in our relationship, we decided to get divorced. At the time I wanted to try and fix things, solely because of insecurity and abandonment issues I wasn’t ready to face. I don’t think she ever did want to fix it; she was doing what her family thought she should. She told me shortly after we decided to end it that she never did love me, she just loved my popularity, energy, and charisma in grade 11 and 12 when we met. I respect her for ending a relationship that didn’t serve her anymore, I don’t think it was handled properly but we rarely handle things properly when we are going through mixed feelings and tough times, no one died, and we are all better today because of it. So, I thank her in my own head to this day for doing that. It might sound fucked up, but change is good as long as you grow, and boy oh boy did I!!

So, what does this have to do with me getting cancer? When I found out about the affair, I asked her to move out and to be out of our house by the time I returned from school. A few weeks later I came back from school, and I hadn’t talked to anyone from work or from where I lived, I had assumed rumors were swirling. It is hard to even understand it at this point, as this was before mass amounts of communication even happened, everyone didn’t have cell phones, text messaging wasn’t even a thing. I had a work Christmas party to go to and I was nervous to go alone, and I didn’t know if everyone had heard what was going on in my household at that point, so I had asked my wife to come with me to the party. When we got there everyone was awkward around me and made small talk, which was unusual with me at work, so I figured everyone knew what was going on. My wife ended up getting really drunk and calling the guy she was having an affair with to come get her. My best work friend pulled me aside at the Christmas party and told me my wife was having an affair and that his brother works with her, and rumors had been going around for months and that everyone at the dealership I worked at heard about it too. Well, I guess I can stop pretending everything in my life is normal I thought. It’s pretty fucking embarrassing to go to your work Christmas party with your wife, trying to pretend your life is “fine”, then finding out everyone knows she’s been sleeping around, and asking me why I brought her there. At the same time, I felt supported by my work community because no one seemed to want her there and some people seemed disgusted with her, which made me feel great at the time. After the Christmas party incident, I took a step back from my wife, we lived separate, we didn’t talk, deep down I knew it was over because I felt better than I ever had with her out of my life.

A month later it was Christmas and I spent it with my 2 older brothers and one of my younger sisters, my only full biological siblings. We went to my grandparents for 2 days and my dads for another day, the 4 of us connected better then we ever had. It was a awesome few days, it was the first time I started stepping into my own shoes and felt free of the life I had previously created but didn’t want anymore.

After Christmas I had to go back to Estevan to work for another week before I started school again in Regina. I felt a huge weight off me after splitting with my wife, I was more joyful and happy to be alive for those 2 months, even though I was in school. A week into school my oldest brother Dallas, came down for the weekend, we were WWF style wrestling and I had found a lump in my shoulder area, when I raised my arm it was more into my armpit. I got told to get it checked out and I brushed it off, as would any 22 year old healthy, bulletproof, young man. By mid January of 2006, the lump got noticeably bigger and was causing me some discomfort & pain. After school one day, after having decided I had nothing better to do, I went go get it checked out with our free health care, what was the harm? I got told by the doctor in the walk-in clinic that I should probably go to the hospitals ER. I was kind of annoyed as I had just wanted her to tell me it was nothing to worry about. However, something deep down told me it was serious, so off I went to the ER hoping they would tell me it’s nothing.

The next couple weeks I would go on to spend probably 100 or more hours in the ER and other departments getting numerous tests and seeing different doctors. There was so much repeat info and duplicate tests. I was always alone in this, I felt alone a lot of my life and so it made me uncomfortable to have people around when I was most vulnerable. It was the way I learned, subconsciously, to deal with those situations was to push people away. I did have a blessing in disguise though, the ER doctor that was assigned to me was new from school and was very thorough. She eventually got me sent through the system and departments as they tried to figure out what was wrong with me (I had zero symptoms, just a lump). My doctor ended up calling me on a Wednesday evening and telling me I have to come see her right away. I was obviously upset, and knowing what that meant, I tried to get her to tell me over the phone so I didn’t have to face her, and again, hide my emotions as I had been doing for the last couple months.

I went into the ER department at the hospital and my doctor took me into a small private room to tell me I had a rare and aggressive form of non hodgkins lymphoma, called Burkitts lymphoma. Deep down my soul told her “I know”- but instead I asked if I should cancel my appointment for a haircut. Even though I knew deep down, it was still hard to hear a truth like that, no matter what we tell ourselves. I just didn’t know how to respond, and figured humor was my best bet, which luckily, stayed with me my entire battle with cancer. I then picked up the phone and proceeded to cry my eyes out as I told my oldest brother, and then asked him to tell our family, as I didn’t want to talk about it yet. Then I crawled into bed and covered my head with the blankets and wanted to disappear forever and never face anyone again. It was an emotional and exhausting roller coaster ride that I had been on for the last 2 months. I didn’t really know or understand at the time whether I had just been given a death sentence or curse. Not too long later I found out being diagnosed with cancer was one of my greatest gifts I have ever got…