Obviously, getting cancer wasn’t on my bucket list. I had other plans. Early on, I planned to live a long, healthy life. My dad was a smoker and had his first heart attack when I was young and inspired me to make better choices than he had. I became a vegetarian when I was 19, learned about intermittent fasting, and practiced it religiously all my life, mostly eliminated sugar from my diet after reading Sugar Blues by William Dufty in the mid-70s, and as the years went by, slowly eschewed all dairy products except for cheese. I rarely got sick and never missed a day of work in my life due to illness (not counting my motor scooter crash in 2008 and hernia surgery in 2015). I was secretly smug, I admit. I thought I had rigged the health game in my favor and felt a little schadenfreude when others had a cold or the flu.
Of course, there are other reasons people get cancer besides smoking and poor diets, but they weren’t on my radar. And when mine showed up, like an unwanted guest informing me he was here to ruin my life, a mixture of feelings flooded through me. I was initially surprised and incredulous – the “wait…what?…me?” stage – before sliding into the quiet, self-pity/rage stage and then finally, like a boat meeting a waterfall, plunging into numb resignation, surrendering to this new, dark reality. “Resistance is futile,” said the Borg.
My particular cancer, oropharyngeal squamous cell carcinoma is a kind of throat or tonsil disease linked to HPV (human papillomavirus) infection. HPV is the most common sexually transmitted infection and any human who has ever had sex will likely get HPV at some point in their lives unless they are vaccinated. Somewhere between 13 and 14 million Americans become infected with it each year but the majority of them will not know it or suffer any adverse consequences. A tiny percentage of men who have HPV – less than one percent – will develop cancer. Lucky me.
My cancer journey began in May when I noticed “a stuck feeling” in my throat like something was there I couldn’t clear. Then in June, it was blood in the sink when I brushed my teeth. Finally, in July, I saw my primary doc and he did the obvious. He looked in my throat and quickly identified the growth, about the size of a golf ball on my left tonsil. It never occurred to me to look there myself.
Neither of us said a whole lot after that. He didn’t come right out and tell me I had cancer, but I got the message. He said, “The chance of this being a minor, benign abscess on your tonsil is unlikely so…” and as his voice trailed off, I caught that troubled look in his eye and knew. I was left to assume what was on the other side of that bet as he asked the nurse to get me an urgent referral to a surgeon.
Later, after the surgery, when the biopsy results were clear and the surgeon confirmed it over the phone, I felt strangely grateful to him for his honesty; felt held by his compassion developed from thousands of similar calls he’d no doubt made over the decades and ready to prepare for whatever came next.
I thought I knew what I was dealing with. When I was about 14, my grandfather, a lifelong smoker who worked in a Pittsburgh steel mill his whole life, looked like a skeleton gasping for air, his translucent skin stretched across his frail bones as he lay in his hospital bed. “Lung cancer,” my smartass brother whispered in my ear. “Don’t ever get it.”
And a decade and a half later, I was with my girlfriend, her siblings, and her father gathered around her mother’s bed as she slowly sat up for the last time, drawing her final breaths, her eyes blazing with love and awe, seeing holy saints and angels lighting up the room, brilliantly happy, peacefully ecstatic and ready to go with them. That was also cancer.
Countless friends and relatives of mine and maybe yours have been chosen by the cancer gods to walk that rough road for months or years. Some beat it and some are defeated but everyone seems to agree on what it is: a terrifying specter that threatens our plans, ridicules our hopes and dreams, and freezes us with fear if we think it’s come for us. At least that is what I thought before it chose me.
Now I know it’s more a mirror than a threat. Cancer is a mirror revealing what is inside me that I didn’t know was there. It has shown me, me, at least what I am willing to see. It has shown me my fears – my fears of dying, of course – but more than that, my fears of living a life of suffering. And while it has shown me death – my death – the cessation of my life in this majestic, maddening, and marvelous menagerie we call the world, it has also shown me life as it is for me and you, here and now: precious, beautiful and eternal. It has shown me, love, both simple and profound as expressed through the startling, ordinary, and extraordinary humans I am blessed to know and love and it has shown me purpose and instructed me in its pursuit in the midst of chemo, radiation, pills, and pain.
Cancer is not bad or wrong. It is not evil or heartless. Cancer is merely a mirror that reflects what is. It is a gift that shows us truth if we are willing to hear its call. It presents as a brutal thief intent on stealing all we cherish and adore, but when we look closer, we are surprised to find compassion and care. Hidden within the monstrous terror of death, we might notice a gentle, kind alarm that says stop wanting and start appreciating; cease resisting and begin embracing; refrain from complaining and choose welcoming; stop fearing and regretting and leap into love, admiration, generosity, and trust.
I had a plan for my life and it wasn’t this. And that’s ok. Sometimes we just have to give up control of what we never controlled in the first place. Maybe this enemy is my friend. I am ready to find out.
Editor’s note: Cards and letters may be mailed to Doug Craig at 1650 Oregon St., Ste 110, Redding, CA 96001.
