Three Years Ago Today

“It’s not good.”

Those were the words I uttered to my wife, Jillian, three years ago today on a Friday morning as I greeted her back in the waiting room after what I thought would be a routine colonoscopy.

Just minutes earlier, as I awoke in the recovery room, my doctor told me that he found a few polyps, which he removed. He paused, “and a significant mass.”

I don’t remember the rest of what he said. I remember the word “mass,” and wondering just how significant “significant” was.

Turns out, it was pretty damn significant.

That mass — which actually wasn't all that large — turned out to be Stage 3B colorectal cancer.

Within a week, Jillian and I were sitting in front of an oncology team who laid out the plan in the careful language doctors use when they're trying not to alarm you and trying not to lie to you at the same time: radiation, chemotherapy pills, pause to check things out, bi-weekly chemotherapy infusions, and then we’ll see how that worked.

Thankfully, it did.

I’ve spent thirty years at nonprofits that serve people in crisis. I have sat across the table from families getting news that reorders their entire life in a single sentence. I thought I understood what that felt like from the outside. I didn’t. There is a specific kind of disorientation that comes from being on the other side of that table, and no amount of professional proximity to other people’s worst days prepares you for your own.

What I had, that I don’t take for granted, was a body and mind I’d already spent years training. I didn’t start competing in triathlons until I was in my 40’s — long after most people who do this sport ever start — but by the time I got that diagnosis, I’d built a decade of 5 a.m. mornings, of showing up when I didn’t feel like it, of trusting a training plan even when I couldn’t see the finish line from where I was standing. I didn’t know it yet, but that discipline was about to become the only thing standing between me and despair.

Chemo doesn’t respond to willpower. Cancer doesn’t care that you limped your way through an Ironman competition. But the daily habit of doing the hard, unglamorous transferred. It had to. I didn’t have anything else that would.

I’m not going to pretend the next several months made sense in real time. They didn’t. There were scans I was certain would be bad and weren’t, and days I felt fine that turned out to be the calm before chemo side effects kicked-in. Anyone who tells you a cancer diagnosis unfolds in a straight line is sleepwalking through the truth or or guilty of revisionism.

What I can tell you, three years out, is that I'm still here to write this and I’m grateful to have no evidence of disease. If you're reading this because you're somewhere in your own version of that waiting room, I'm not going to tell you it gets easy. It may not be good. But it's probably going to be okay.