Life in the Stupid Lane

I think this week is going to be a test of the thing I do worst of all: patience.

I’ve been an instant gratification person my entire life, which probably speaks to some other issues I should unpack once I get past this damn cancer. But that feels like a problem for Future Me. Current Me is busy obsessively checking Natera’s website for blood test results like I’m waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 to finally release.

They conveniently gave me a tracking number for the blood they took last weekend, which I’m sure has to weird out at least a few people at FedEx. Somewhere out there is a guy scanning a box labeled with biological material while I’m at home refreshing tracking updates like it’s Christmas morning.

Still, I’m weirdly grateful for both the tracking number and the people moving my blood around the country because at least it feels like progress. According to the shipping updates and my own completely unqualified detective work, Wednesday seems like a realistic timeline for news.

Until then, I’ve been trying to distract myself.

Much to the frustration of Tugboat.

Man’s best friend is apparently supposed to comfort you during difficult times. They lay beside you on the couch, rest their head on your lap, and provide unconditional love and emotional support.

Not Tugboat.

Nope.

Tugboat’s version of support is trying every morning to slip out of his collar, sprint downstairs to the coffee shop at the base of my building, and convince complete strangers that he is both starving and horribly mistreated. It’s honestly impressive how committed he is to the performance. He wanders around looking like a Victorian orphan asking for scraps while I’m upstairs paying an embarrassing amount of money for prescription dog food he refuses to appreciate.

Once he exhausts the coffee shop crowd and squeezes out enough sympathy belly rubs, he usually starts trying to visit other residents in the building. On most days, he successfully finds someone willing to let him hang out for hours. If Tugboat could speak, he would probably say these people aren’t suckers at all, but generous benefactors honored to have him serve as their emotional support muse while they work from home.

He has an ego nobody really gets to see in public, but it is massive.

There are moments where he pretends to show me affection, but I see through the scam pretty easily. He becomes very loving around 7 AM and 5 PM, which just so happen to align perfectly with meal times. Even then, his affection is conditional upon whether I’m serving portions he finds acceptable, despite the fact that he is objectively fat and currently on a diet he deeply resents.

The low-calorie food has apparently ruined his life.

He voices this opinion often.

Meanwhile, when he visits other people, I get routine updates about how amazing he is. How they took a long nap together. How he stayed close to them all day. How comforting and sweet he was.

With me? He goes into the other room, attempts to claim the entire bed, and gives me judgmental looks when I have the audacity to try and sleep in my own apartment. He’ll move just far enough away to avoid accidental touching, but the second I get up in the middle of the night — which still happens regularly while I figure out how all my new plumbing works — he opportunistically reclaims every square inch of mattress space before I can get back.

He doesn’t care why I’m awake at 2 AM.

He doesn’t care that cancer is the reason he gets sent off to extended sleepovers full of treats and attention.

And honestly, I didn’t think he cared much about what I needed at all.

At least not until last night.

My brain would not shut off. I could feel the anxiety creeping in while I waited for news about whatever comes next with all of this. The blood test. The remaining cancer questions. More treatment. No treatment. All the stuff your brain likes to weaponize against you when the lights go out and things get quiet.

And then, completely unprompted, Tugboat came over and laid down close enough to snuggle.

Which genuinely made all the difference in the world.

Right up until I realized he was farting directly on me.

I turned on the light and I swear I could actually see him smiling in his sleep while he did it.

But honestly, it made me laugh. It broke the spiral in my head. For a little while, I stopped caring about blood tests and timelines and cancer.

And it reminded me that even though Tugboat is absolutely a little jerk sometimes… he’s still a good boy who cares in his own weird way.

Sitting on the couch with the NFL Draft humming in the background should feel like a clean return to normal. A year ago, this would’ve been exactly the kind of night I’d want, nothing urgent, nothing heavy, just football, a couch, and the slow drift toward sleep.

But it doesn’t feel quite right.

If you asked most people what I’d want after everything from the past year, they’d probably say this, normal life again. And that makes sense on paper. It just doesn’t quite land that way in reality. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling, that would be way too dramatic, but there’s something off about just sliding back into the same life I had before the diagnosis, like nothing happened.

It feels incomplete.

There’s this quiet assumption that going through something big is supposed to lead to something equally big on the other side. Some kind of transformation. A dramatic shift. Like you’re supposed to come out of it with a brand new life plan and a completely different version of yourself.

And I don’t know if that’s actually true.

What I do know is that it feels like a waste of a second chance to just pick up exactly where I left off. To go right back to the same routines, the same habits, the same everything. And yet, here I am, doing exactly that, letting the TV drone on while I slowly fall asleep on the couch.

The problem is, I don’t know what “different” is supposed to look like.

It’s not like I have some burning desire to blow up my life and start over. I’m not about to sell everything, quit my job, and move to Montenegro with Tugboat to drink Aperol Spritz and paint questionable watercolors. That version of reinvention sounds fun for about a week, maybe two, and then it turns into something that feels more performative than meaningful.

So if not that, then what?

Right now, I don’t have an answer. I don’t even really know how to go about finding one. I just have this underlying sense that something should change, I just can’t tell you what, when, or how.

And patience, historically, has not exactly been my strength.

To be fair, it’s only been a few weeks since I could definitively say cancer is behind me. In the grand scheme of things, that’s nothing. Expecting clarity this quickly is probably unrealistic. Still, it’d be nice to have at least a hint of direction.

Until then, I’m trying to remind myself of something simpler.

Every day is still a gift, even if it looks exactly like the day before.

Even if it’s mundane. Even if it’s routine. Even if it’s just sitting on the couch with the draft on in the background and Tugboat snoring like he just worked a double shift.

Those things still count.

So maybe this post is less about figuring anything out and more about saying it out loud. Getting it out of my head. Because when I hear it, it does sound a little ungrateful, and I don’t think that’s what this is.

I think it’s just unfinished.

But for now, I’ll take the night for what it is. I’ll watch the rest of the draft, enjoy the soundtrack of Tugboat’s snoring, and let tomorrow show up however it’s going to show up.

I can say I’ve closed the cancer chapter of my life now. That feels like something I should pause on. Sit with it. Maybe even let it sound profound. But the truth is, the next chapter doesn’t exactly start clean. It starts at 2:30 in the morning, half asleep, trying to figure out if what just happened is gas… or a problem that requires a full shower, fresh clothes, and an immediate load of laundry.

This is the part nobody really writes about. Somewhere along the way, having my colon removed turned basic bodily functions into a nightly guessing game. And when you guess wrong, there’s no snooze button. There’s just the cold reality of being awake, annoyed, and very aware that you are not getting that hour of sleep back.

At one point, I briefly considered solving the problem by just throwing away every pair of boxer briefs involved. Maybe even investing in an incinerator. But that feels like a financially irresponsible response to a medical situation, so for now, laundry it is.

It’s frustrating. It’s inconvenient. It’s humbling in ways I wasn’t prepared for. And yet—somehow—it’s still better than the bag. So I remind myself of that. A lot. Because the bigger picture is that I’m healing. Slowly, but undeniably. Every day gets a little closer to normal, whatever that word even means now. This is what I prayed for. What a lot of people prayed for.

And now that I’m here, I didn’t expect this part: I’m as frustrated as I am grateful. Not because I’m not getting better—but because I am. Because “getting back to normal” comes with this quiet realization that I could very easily slide right back into the same life I had before. Same habits. Same routines. Same patterns. And that feels… like a missed opportunity.

You go through something like this, and you assume there will be clarity on the other side. Some obvious next step. A direction. A calling. Something. But mostly, it’s just you. Same as before. Just with a slightly different operating system and a much more complicated relationship with sleep.

A while back, I heard someone ask: If the version of you ten years from now could talk to you today, what would they say? I’ve always liked that question. You’d think that version of you would know. They’d have perspective. They’d point you somewhere. But if I’m being honest, I don’t hear some clear, life-altering instruction.

I hear Rusty. “Just aim to be 1% better in any one thing, and you’ll be good.” That was his thing. Simple. No drama. No overthinking. Rusty passed away last Tuesday.

And I can’t help but think if I had called him after my last surgery—told him I didn’t know what to do next, told him I felt like I was wasting whatever this second chance is—that’s exactly what he would’ve said. No big speech. No deep philosophy. Just: be a little better tomorrow.

I’ll be telling that story at his wake this Saturday. In front of a room full of people I’ve never met, trying to explain a guy who made things make sense by keeping them simple.

And maybe that’s the answer, at least for now. Not some massive life overhaul. Not some perfectly defined purpose. Just… 1% better. Maybe that honors him. Maybe that’s me listening to God. Maybe that’s exactly what the version of me ten years from now would hope I’d figure out. Or maybe it’s just the best I’ve got right now.

Either way, it feels like enough.

At this point, I’ve been up too long, spent too much time going back and forth between my bed and the bathroom, and Tugboat is officially concerned about my decision-making. So I’m calling it a night. And tomorrow, I’ll take a shot at being 1% better at something. Even if it’s just guessing right.

It’s been a week since the surgery. I needed to wait this long to write anything, because once they took the bag off and removed the chemo port, I wanted to make sure my insides actually worked — they do, sort of — before I let myself say out loud that this chapter of my life is coming to an end.

That realization first started to sink in the night I got home — last Saturday — when I sat in the shower for nearly fifty minutes, completely unbothered. No fear of the bag getting too wet and falling off. No fear of the ostomy discharging mid-shower and what that cleanup looks like after — and I’ll let you use your imagination there, but it involves a fair amount of bleach on the shower floor. For fifty minutes, I just sat there and enjoyed a shower in a way I’m not sure I ever truly had before.

It’s a strange thing, learning what you miss most when something simple is taken from you without warning.

What I don’t think I’d fully appreciated before the bag was how much of your life quietly reorganizes itself around it. What you wear — black, always black. Whether you go out, and for how long, and how far from a bathroom. Whether you let people get close enough to notice. Whether you stop at the sauna you used to love, or the restaurant with the long wait, or the friend’s house where you’d have to explain. You don’t make one big decision to shrink your life. You make about four hundred small ones, and one day you look up and realize how much smaller it got.

So yes. Fifty minutes in a shower. That’s what this year came down to, at least in the beginning.

If this were a movie, that shower would have been some kind of sweeping visual metaphor — washing away the memories of the last year, strings swelling in the background. But this isn’t a movie, and honestly, I don’t want it to be. I don’t have a clean takeaway from all of this yet. I’m not sure I’m supposed to. But I do think whatever I’m meant to carry forward will become clear with time.

What I have found myself returning to are four personal truths — things I probably already believed somewhere deep down, but that this last year somehow pressed into permanence for me. They’re going to sound like fortune cookies. Some of them probably are. I’m sure I absorbed pieces of them from people smarter than me. But that doesn’t make them any less mine.

1. You can’t live a great story and have an easy life.
2. It’s an amazing privilege to complain about the life you begged God for when you were younger.
3. Everything good in life lives on the other side of fear, embarrassment, or discomfort. Run to that side any chance you get.
4. Always drink the good bourbon when you can. There is no reason to save it for a perfect moment that will never come.

Take from those whatever you’d like — or nothing at all.

I still don’t have a clear answer to what now? — and honestly, that’s equal parts terrifying and kind of thrilling, and I’m finding I’m okay with not knowing. I figure if I hold loosely to those four ideas, whatever comes next should be some kind of adventure. For now, I’m going to enjoy all the small things I had to give up when the bag went on: wearing something other than black, getting back to the sauna, and taking as many showers as my water bill will reasonably allow.

This is where this chapter ends — mostly. There are scans ahead, and cancer could come back. But that’s true for all of us in one way or another, so there isn’t much point in borrowing that worry today.

For now, it’s on to the next adventure. Thank you for reading this long cancer chapter, its been a heck of a story so far…

It looked like a tiny corded mouse.

That’s what the thing looked like after almost a year inside me — my chemotherapy port, the thing that had made every infusion possible and made everything else harder — after every moment of embarrassment, every life adjustment large and small. Fifteen minutes and it was out. They held it up and that’s what it was. Small. Unremarkable. Anticlimactic in a way that felt almost insulting given everything it had put me through. I think I wanted some form of revenge on it. I wanted the removal to feel proportional to what it had cost me. Instead it looked like something you’d find tangled in the back of a desk drawer, and then it was gone.

I’m sitting in a Houston hotel room now, the incision point throbbing, and I’m smiling. That’s the last time it gets to hurt me. I’ll take that.

329 days ago I was sitting in this same hotel, staring out at the soft white glow of the MD Anderson marquee at the top of the hospital’s highest tower, wondering what was about to happen. I called it a seminal moment. That turned out to be accurate. Tonight feels like it could be another one, though I’m not sure yet.

Tomorrow, my surgeon — someone I’ve come to call a friend, though she might not say the same given that I am a difficult patient — will reverse my ostomy bag. Tomorrow should be, with some luck and the grace of God, my last surgery in this bullshit that has been cancer.

I’ve been pushing for both of these things for months. I wanted the port out. I wanted the reversal. There was hesitation from some people about removing the port this early — suggestions it stay in for a full year post-surgery, reasons ranging from what felt like superstition to the more obvious one nobody really wants to say out loud. I appreciated that conversation about as much as I did having the damn thing in me. While I was waiting in the procedure room I read that some people keep their ports for ten years. I don’t fully understand that, but I was grateful not to be one of them.

Here’s the part I’m still working out how to say.

For 329 days, cancer has been my entire identity. Every plan, every goal, every morning I woke up and knew exactly what I was doing and why — it was all pointed at the same thing. Get rid of it. All of it. And tomorrow, if everything goes the way it’s supposed to, that’s done.

I thought that would feel like pure relief. And part of it does. But there’s something else sitting underneath it that I didn’t expect — something closer to vertigo. Tomorrow will be the first day in almost a year that I don’t have a next thing. No port to fight to remove, no surgery to prepare for, no clear enemy. Just whatever comes after. I don’t know what that looks like yet, and that uncertainty — which is technically the good kind — is somehow harder to sit with than the certainty of the last year, even when that certainty was terrifying.

It’s a strange thing to realize you’ve gotten used to something you hated.

I’ll keep writing. There are things I’ve kept to myself this past year that probably deserve a page or two — if only for what writing them down does for me, which at this point I understand pretty well. I’ll write about the new normal, whatever that turns out to be. There is, for the record, a package of adult diapers in a CVS bag on the bed right now. My doctors told me to get them “just in case.” I expect that will make for a story.

But right now I’m going to get into this hotel bed and pick up the book I brought to Detroit a year ago — the trip I first got sick on — and never opened again after that. I’ve been carrying it around for 329 days. I think I can finish it here.

Seems like as good a place as any to start figuring out what comes next.

Yesterday I had to go back to the hospital for my post-op checkup — the appointment where I’d find out if I’d healed well enough to move on to what I hope will be the final surgery of this cancer journey. If the news was good, they would reverse my bag. It’s one of the very few things I’ve allowed myself to look forward to over the past year. Looking forward to a surgery sounds morbid, I know, but that’s where my life is right now, and I think it goes a long way toward explaining why I hate the hospital.

I don’t hate the people. Far from it — they’ve saved my life, after all. But for a long time now, I haven’t been able to see that place as anything other than somewhere pain lives. I’ve kept that to myself, mostly. Attitude matters, in life and especially in something like this, so I’ve worked hard to stay positive. And besides, the sadness that seems to permeate every taupe-colored hallway of the MD Anderson complex doesn’t need me pointing it out, no matter how bright the furniture is or how shiny the slogans on the walls.

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that I wasn’t exactly looking forward to yesterday, even with the finish line this close.

At some point during the visit, I found myself completely lost in the basement, wandering hallways I didn’t recognize, trying to find the place where I was scheduled to receive a barium enema. If you can’t understand why someone might dread a hospital visit, I’d invite you to schedule one of those for yourself and leave a Yelp review afterward. Five stars and I’d question your judgment — and suggest a different kind of hospital.

But here’s the thing about being lost and not trying very hard to be found: you start to notice things.

Maybe I’d missed them before out of self-pity. Maybe the day-to-day weight of cancer had just crowded everything else out. Or maybe I’m simply oblivious sometimes. But wandering those halls yesterday, I started to see the beauty that’s quietly everywhere in that place, if you take a moment to look past the surface.

I noticed an overworked medical resident who stopped mid-stride to help a lost stranger — just because he could see I needed it. I noticed a family tucked into a corner of the cafeteria, a parent holding an iPad so the kids could watch cartoons, doing their best to build a small, normal moment inside a place that is anything but. And then there was the barista. She was talking to the elderly woman ahead of me in line, and something made me stop and pay attention. Instead of rushing through the transaction, she was fully present — listening, really listening, to this woman who was clearly on the verge of breaking. No hollow words of comfort, no move to hurry things along. She just held her hand, and gave her a free coffee.

Small things. Simple things. But they hit me like a light coming on.

It’s remarkable how quickly something like that can pull you out of one way of seeing the world and drop you into a completely different one — a better one — almost without your permission.

I don’t know why it took me until this last visit to notice any of it. Maybe it’s because this will be my last real visit. The news yesterday was as good as it could possibly be. I healed well. The bag comes off next Thursday. The chemo port the day before. With a little luck and the grace of God, I may never have to walk those hallways again for anything more than a routine check-up.

And somehow, that’s exactly when I finally saw how beautiful that place can be. Not just the patients holding it together with everything they have, but the doctors, the staff, the people sitting quietly beside someone they love — all of it, remarkable.

I’m probably more emotional writing this tonight than I’d be on any other night. Being this close to the end will do that to you. But it felt like a story worth telling — maybe the best one to come out of yesterday.

So I’ll end with this: look for the small beauty in the places you don’t expect to find it. It might make all the difference — for you, or for someone nearby who needs it just as much.

For now, it’s late. Tugboat is snoring on the floor beside me, and I’m ready to call it a night.

Seven days and counting