In November of 2021, I heard the words no one ever thinks they’ll hear, especially not at the age of 27: You have cells that have metastasized.
In other words: You have cancer.
Here’s where I could tell you this story in two ways. The first would be to dramatize the moment, the part where I cry, my wife cries, my parents cry. The moment I was told I have 6-8 months to live. All of those things happened, of course, because I’m human, and I don’t much like being told I have 6-8 months to live. But that’s also not how I’d like to tell this story.
I have a life motto, you see, and as a lifelong golfer, a decently accomplished one, that’s to swing hard and make birdies. Even on a 450-yard par 4 with a dog-leg right, trees hugging the right edge of the fairway and water just around the bend, I’m pulling out the driver and swinging hard. I’m making birdies. But golf’s not a perfect metaphor for life. In golf, you have 17 other holes. You can choose to play a few safe. That is, in fact, the smart thing to do.
Here, I was given no choice. I don’t have 17 other holes. There is no option to play it safe. My options are two: Swing hard or die.
And so I’m swinging.
I’ve had multiple surgeries of 12-plus hours. Chemo for five days a week spanning many months. Radiation for when the cancer snaked down to my hip. By a minor miracle, the cancer’s spread had slowed, almost to a halt. My body needed a break, and my oncologist gave me the green light to enjoy life.
I had swung hard. I made my first birdie.
Then I made another.
I enjoyed life, all right, just as the doctor prescribed, and on October 14, 2022, my first child was born. It’s been said that life is a series of peaks and valleys. Two months after I reached the emotional peak, the highest of highs, of holding your own child, I hit another valley: The cancer had spread to my shoulder. The pain was severe enough that I could no longer hold my son.
Chemo and radiation began immediately. Chemo every other week for 12 rounds – if I survived long enough to make it to No. 12. It was a less aggressive type of chemo, one that, my doctor said, likely wouldn’t do much more than simply hold off the cancer, buy some time. I saw another doctor…and then another. All echoed the same statement: The cancer’s spread was inexorable, and would eventually hit my organs, a death sentence. Meanwhile, the chemo was, in a somewhat literal sense, also killing me. Each session, I grew weaker and weaker.
My wife and I agreed that we’d seek alternative medicine, discovering something called hyperthermia,insulin potentiated chemo therapy and ozone treatment, finding a center in Arizona that specializes in exactly that. I’m just three weeks in, so perhaps it’s placebo, perhaps not, but I feel different. Better. It seems to be working. Our bank account also feels different. The expenses are astronomical, around $7K per week. I’m on disability, and my wife had to take a leave of absence to take care of our son while we’re in Arizona, thousands of miles away from our home in Maryland. Because this treatment is non-traditional, insurance doesn’t cover it. It was a risk we knew we had to take; with traditional treatments, the options were either death or death. That’s not swinging hard. That’s not making birdies. So we went, as we say, cure chasin’.
Maybe we’ve found one.
Maybe we’ve swung just hard enough. And maybe we’re staring at life’s most satisfying birdie putt,
and I think I’ve got the read.
