Looking in the mirror one morning, just after waking, I told myself, right then and there: “You are not a statistic. You are not a group. You are one person and you are strong. If anyone can beat this, it’s you.”
That was the moment I decided to fight. To be clear, the decision to fight doesn’t make the fear go away. It doesn’t stop the grief, the identity crisis, the 2 AM spirals, or the strange guilt that comes with surviving when others don’t. You just carry all of it forward and keep moving.
Cancer is a physical war. But the mental one runs parallel — and some days, it hits harder.
The Diagnosis Shock
Being diagnosed with stage 4 cancer flooded me with the same dread and hopelessness I’d felt when my younger brother died. Different events, same internal earthquake. The same endless questions crashed in all at once:
What did I do to cause this? Why me, especially when I’ve always been so vigilant about my health? What could I have done differently? Why didn’t I get a colonoscopy sooner? Should I just give up and let it take me, or should I fight?
The details change, but the echo is the same: a storm of guilt, fear, and what-ifs crashing all at once. Trauma is a strange thing in how it’s processed. On the surface there are different levels and flavors, but the subconscious doesn’t operate that way — it often feels the same. A punch to the nose is still a punch, no matter who throws it.
Grief Doesn’t Wait Its Turn
My brother’s death had already taught me what loss feels like — the suffocating weight of it, the way it reshapes every room you walk into. I thought I had been forced to face the full weight of mortality once and for all. I told myself nothing in life could ever hit me harder than that.
Boy, was I wrong.
Cancer isn’t the same kind of trauma, but it’s no less potent. And grief doesn’t politely wait for you to finish dealing with one catastrophe before delivering the next. With my brother, the questions were: How could this happen? Could I have helped? Did I do something — or fail to do something — that pushed him toward it?
With cancer, the questions wore different clothes but spoke the same language inside my chest. That echo taught me something I didn’t want to learn: grief and fear may wear different masks, but they speak the same language. Survival doesn’t mean erasing grief or silencing fear. It means carrying them forward without letting them drown you.
Losing Who You Were
Before all this, keeping up appearances was just part of daily life — grooming, exercise, staying in shape. It was effortless, almost automatic. That shapes how you live. You become conscious of your appearance, always adjusting. That kind of awareness builds into your identity.
Cancer stripped it away almost overnight.
After the TCR treatment, my muscle mass seemed to melt away in weeks. My hair came out in clumps until I was left pale and round as a cue ball. I went from daily contacts to glasses because convenience suddenly outweighed vanity. And modesty? Gone. The first time you shuffle down a hallway in a hospital gown, backside exposed, you burn with embarrassment. After a few rounds, it barely registers.
Staying alive became more important than staying attractive. But that shift doesn’t happen cleanly. There’s a mourning period for the version of yourself that existed before cancer. Nobody talks about that. You grieve a person who’s technically still alive — the old you.
The Night That Almost Broke Me
One night at NIH is burned into my memory forever. I was in a fever-fueled dream state — something between sleep and waking. The room leaked into the dream: blinking monitors, distant hallway noise, the faint blue glow of the bed controls folding into the scene.
Then the feeling hit: restrained. Paralyzed by something I couldn’t see or name. I was shouting inside my own head to wake up, to move, to do anything — and my body wouldn’t respond.
In the dream I was trapped in a loop. Same sequence, over and over. Dark. Cold. Pure terror. I sensed entities around me — threatening, watching — but they stayed just out of focus, like shadows with intent. I ran. I hid behind a berm, convinced I was finally out of sight.
And then it reset. Again. And again. What felt like a thousand times.
At some point a thought settled in with terrible calm: I’m in hell. Or purgatory. Or some kind of time loop I’ll suffer in forever. And with that came a second thought, even worse: This is my existence now. I have to accept it.
I kept pushing against it anyway — pushing and pushing — until finally, I caught a glimpse of the outside world. With my body half-paralyzed and drenched in sweat, I forced myself awake.
The rest of the night I lay there with the fever still raging, aching all over, my head pounding. Too afraid to drift back to sleep, even for a moment. In those hours, staring into the dark, I replayed my entire life.
What Actually Helped
I won’t tell you to meditate and journal your way through this. Maybe that works for some people. Here’s what worked for me:
Deciding, not hoping. That mirror moment wasn’t positive thinking. It was a decision. I chose life, not death, and I would fight at all costs. Hope is fragile. A decision is structural. I live by that moment to this day.
Moving my body. Even in the depths of treatment, when every cell screamed to stay in bed, movement mattered. My personal goal was modest — about a mile a day. On days I couldn’t muster that, I went as far as I could. Every step became a small declaration: I’m still here. I’m still moving. At the NIH, I told myself, “No matter how bad I feel, I have to get up and walk.” Physical activity — walking, yard work, anything — helps burn off the adrenaline that anxiety generates.
Nature as medicine. In the middle of being swallowed by the system — scans, infusions, pain meds, procedures — I realized survival couldn’t rest on medicine alone. Doctors and drugs were one side of the fight, but my mind needed its own anchor. Stepping outside the chaos, breathing air that hadn’t been filtered through machines — that became essential, not optional.
Letting people in. When my wife and I caught COVID in the middle of chemo, my immune system was already wrecked. We were so weak we could barely cook or clean. My mom started showing up with bags of homemade food. It was her way of saying everything without a single word. I stood there with tears in my eyes realizing how much she cared about me, and this food was an extension of that.
Preparing for both outcomes. It’s strange to be in your forties and live in two realities at once. On one hand, I could clearly see my future self — healthy, cured, moving forward. On the other, I had to prepare for the possibility of my own demise. I paid off the house, cleared the cars, updated our will and powers of attorney. Strangely, those tasks brought comfort. For all the chaos I couldn’t control, I could at least provide stability for my wife if I wasn’t there.
You’re Not Weak for Struggling
If you’re in the middle of this right now — the depression, the fear, the identity loss, the 3 AM thoughts — You need to hear this: it doesn’t mean you’re not handling it well. It means you’re human, facing something that would break most people’s threat-detection systems.
A storm of guilt, fear, and what-ifs is the normal response to an abnormal situation. The weight never leaves. But you can still keep moving under it, one step, one day, one choice at a time.
I chose to use this experience — no matter how difficult it got — as an opportunity and not a curse. Not because I’m brave. Because the alternative was worse.
Keep reading:
→ Scanxiety: How to Survive the Wait for Scan Results
→ Treatment Ended — Now What? The Weird Limbo Nobody Prepares You For
→ A Note to Caregivers: You’re Allowed to Be Exhausted
The CRC Roadmap 
Leave a comment