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After the Fight: The Long Quiet Battle to Rebuild
There’s cancer and then there’s everything after
When I was diagnosed with stage three colon cancer in 2024, I was very pragmatic about it. What do I have to do? What is the next step? Give me the instructions and I will follow them to a tee. I had no time for this. My partner was battling leukemia and finding a tumor the size of a peach in my colon three weeks before his bone-marrow transplant was about as pleasant a surprise as being seated next to your ex on your honeymoon flight to some paradisiacal beach. That kind of airline run-in hasn’t happened to me—and God knows a tumor is way worse—but I imagine the exclamation is the same: What the fuck?!
It has been 18 months of fighting and healing and resisting and surrendering and riding the seemingly nonsensical waves of “our numbers.” His go up and down, bouncing between undetectable and detectable. Mine have steadied at remission. And so in January we started the next chapter: a new apartment, a new neighborhood, a new outlook on these precious lives and human bodies.
Was it premature? Probably a little bit. We weren’t — and aren’t — out of the woods yet. That cloud still hovers over, and it travels with us no matter the zip code. But we were intent on bringing back some sort of rhythm, of getting out of “emergency mode.”…
