My Reaction To My Stage IV Cancer Diagnosis

This year started with such promise. As with anything else, life throws us curveballs. You can never tell when they're coming, and when they do they smack you in the face. If anything, this year smacked me in the face like it was holding a brick in its hand.

Stage IV. Stage four is the worst place in a cancer patient’s life. It’s the time when the number seems like it’s over. And yet, I don’t feel like it’s over.

It was a gut punch to hear. The last bit of hope for a break was gone. Now came the crushing reality. When a cancer specialist says you can’t beat it or be cured, what’s left?

Challenge Accepted

Cancer specialists, or oncologists, are doctors of death. They specialize in treating a deadly disease and they are trained to deal with the later stage patients, the ones that are likely to die earlier than later. But are they gods?

Beating cancer from this point isn’t impossible. It’s improbable.

What else has happened that’s improbable? Let’s take a look at some improbable things we see every day.

• Donald Trump became the president
• We flew to the moon and back
• We lived long enough to see robots look like humans
• Medical cures once thought impossible
• Breaking the sound barrier
• Etc

The list goes on. There have been so many improbable things occurring in our ever-changing world that there’s no impossible, only improbable, and people defy the improbable all the time. But that’s what keeps us going, right?

Hearing something like this is like a punch in the gut. It’s not what you want to hear and it’s as scary as hell. As I looked around me and I opened up about what was happening, I realized that there were some things to hold on to.

As I am two weeks away from beginning treatments, I have hope that the treatment will help sustain my life. I’m still going strong and have many tasks to complete. But nothing’s impossible.

Taking that, looking at the rest of the world and the rest of my life, nothing will be impossible. What needs to change can be changed. It will take some work, but with persistence, discipline, and planning, it can be done.

Nobody can see the future, except for the writers of the Simpsons. They seem to get a lot right. But as I look out at this 5:30 a.m. sunrise, just because a doctor or anybody else says, it’s not likely, I know that’s as much up to me as it is anybody.

That’s the message, isn’t it? We write our own stories and we control our fates as much as those that are there to help us along the way. This is going to make whatever the future of my life holds into one interesting story.

That's the challenge. Not only for me but for everybody. At the end of our days, we can all hope for an interesting story.

How does one hold out hope when they're faced with something so devastating, so scary? What else would we do? We all have to make a choice when faced with challenges, whether it's cancer, a personal crisis, a job loss, or the loss of someone we love.

We can fold up our cards. That's one choice, but it's not a good one.

Or we can choose to write our own story, no matter what someone else says. Because nobody can see the future in absolutes. Even a doctor.

When the doctor told me that I was in stage IV and that it wasn't beatable, I felt miserable. That lasted five minutes. Then, I felt like proving her wrong.

Challenge Accepted!