Cancer saved my life #4

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.