"What Do We Say to the God of Death? Not Today."

Real talk for a second here.  I have cancer, in case you didn't know.  And hearing those dreaded, cliched words, "you have cancer," was tough to say the least.

I've watched family members die from cancer.  The initial shock of the diagnosis lead to a few dark days that were initially filled with thoughts of anger, fear, pain, suffering, and yes even my own death.  In the essence of full disclosure the second day of my diagnosis I purchased and ingested a 30 pack of fine, high-quality Pabst-Blue Ribbon.  I'm not proud of it, but I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I didn't do it, that's just not my style.

Through force of will, I pulled myself out of the funk.  And, as I am so inclined to do, I became obsessed with learning as much as I could about what exactly was going on.  As I've written before, I learned that Lance Armstrong had the same exact type of cancer, and he's still ticking (even with the assistance of performance enhancing drugs).  Then I came across the morbidity statistics.  At it's very best, I was looking at a 98% 5 year survival rate.  In reality that number is probably closer to 100%, and that's pretty damn good odds.  At the very worst, well I'd be dead.

Leading up to the start of treatment I realized that I had a choice.  Statistics are important, they provide us a way of understanding the world that is fairly translatable in most conversations and settings.  But, particularly in the field of cancer research, statistics are constantly in flux and the numbers currently available are usually about 5 years behind current research, simply due to the nature of data collection and reporting in cancer studies.

My life is ultimately mine.  I suppose if I truly wanted to tempt the fates, I could have denied chemotherapy and just watched to see if the masses that had spread to my lymph nodes would get any larger (spoiler alert, they did but still remained just over a millimeter in size even after 3 months of observation by my oncologist.)

My best shot at a life free of at least cancer, was chemotherapy.  I chose chemotherapy because it works.  The treatment for testicular cancer (normally 3xBEP) is incredibly effective, backed up by research, and temporary.  It sucks, believe me, between the time I've lost sitting in a chair, sleeping, and feeling fatigued almost constantly for the last 3 months I understand that I really have lost a small period of my life.

But, I've resolved to somehow pick those three months up and make sure that they weren't used up, to save my life, in vain.  I want to create something, to change the world, to try to leave the earthly plane just a little bit better than I found it.  I guess I always have, its a pretty common life goal.  But, my life means so much more to me now that I had that brief opportunity to stare death, and my own mortality, in the face and say, "not today."