"the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"


i was having a conversation with my step-brother several weeks ago, and we were waxing spiritual.

i was awaiting my first surgical procedure, the mediastinoscopy. as you may recall, the purpose of that procedure was two-fold. a) to go in and remove, if possible, the spots in my high lung area that glowed on my p.e.t. scan of january 31st. b) once removed, test those spots to see if they were related to what we would ultimately learn to be a recurrence in the area where my right kidney once was found.

my first piece of good news, post jan. 31, was discovering those spots in my chest were benign.

at the time of my lunch with ken, though, i had no way of knowing that. i was still processing the idea of, not only my cancer being back, but this time it having spread to a different part of my body.

what did that mean for me?

could i beat it?

was it beatable?

how long would i have 'til i died?

what does it mean if i do?

do i believe in god?

surely, i do, right?

if i do, is he gonna come and get me after the cancer takes me away?

surely, he will, right?

so, ken was in town and we got together for lunch. before we met, i told him i'd been wishing to talk with people smarter than me, people who believed in god like i want to think i believe in god and ask them how i find a comfortable place after being faced again with my mortality.

so, we talked. it was a good conversation and, in it, he shared some of his feelings on faith that i had never really heard him articulate before. it was nice.

listen, man. i get it. i get i am never going to be 100 percent comfortable with the idea of what comes next. i do wish i could be closer than i am right now. at this very moment. at this moment moving forward.

which brings us to the next series of discussions i'll be facilitating for six weeks or so at the church.

something ken said to me the day of our lunch has stuck in my craw. we got on the subject of pastors and he shared an observation on them that i couldn't agree with any more. in general, he opined, "pastors have it pretty great. they are glorified salespersons that don't have to deliver on their pitch in this lifetime."

now, to some of us, the remark could be taken as an unfair criticism, which let me be quick to say is not how it was intended. most pastors take their calling seriously. my current pastor speaks of the responsibility he feels towards his congregation often.

to me, though, the comment strikes me as a completely valid talking point. and, as such, i feel like we do pastors and their sermons a disservice if we don't find avenues to talk about them amongst our friends and and our family and others who shared the experience with us. if we do not, if we choose not to invest in the message outside of sunday morning worship, they are no different than a sham-wow commercial, a distraction during our respective weeks that marks and passes time. no more. no less.

beginning this sunday evening, april 15th, humc will again offer an opportunity to (over-) analyze what we hear from the pulpit earlier that morning.

during that time, we'll talk about what we've heard, why we've heard it and, why, if at all, we should apply the context of the message to our week to follow. hopefully, we'll come away with not only a greater appreciation of the work that was put in to deliver it, but also a better understanding of how a very invisible god may or may not be working in our lives.

having had cancer would surely be a lot easier if i could convince myself that my eternity was secure. up until now, i haven't been able to make it to that point, and, really, it scares the ever-living shit out of me.

i hope, though, that opportunities like limbo and like the sermon post-mortems and like the every now and again conversations at lunchtime at o'charley's can provide some security. for me. and for those around me during those happenstances.

i hope that you might be interested in joining us over the next several sunday nights at 6:30.

if not, we'll miss you and we'll wish you were there, because, really, why wouldn't you be?

i hate cancer and what it continues to do to me. for real.

but i do love god.

surely, i do, right?

a picture of health


the blog's never been dark for two months.

then again, i've never had recurrent cancer, so, really, whatareyougonnado?

i am almost ashamed of my last post, having celebrated a preliminary "clean bill of health", only to have been notified several days later than something inside of me was actually not clean at all.

having given it some serious thought over the last couple of months, i tend to agree with a friend's assessment of the situation when she said to me, "wow. i would want to give that radiologist a hug." her sentiment struck me as odd the first time i heard it, but she was right. to my doctor's trained eye, he didn't see anything upon immediate review of my scan that showed cause for concern. when he passed the images along, though, to the people in his office that are paid to find things he may have missed, they didn't miss. they saw "a change". they saw something was different.

the idea of what might have happened had another year passed and we had not addressed the situation now is haunting. haunting in the same manner that it is now haunting to read my post from january 24th. on january 24th, i thought things were just fine. they just weren't.

since january 24th, i've now had two more surgeries.

the first was a procedure called a mediastinoscopy. you see, it wasn't just that i found out i had recurrent cancer. it was that i found out that, this time around, it may have moved away from the original tumor. fuck. me. i will forever wear a scar (not pictured above) at the bottom of my neck at which point the cardio-thoracic surgeon entered into my body to pull stuff out of my lung area to check and see if it was, in fact, cancer. thankfully, it was not.

the second procedure happened a week ago thursday. this surgery was called a hand-assisted, partial nephrectomy. the idea? one, to remove a mass that my doctor had been monitoring attached to my lone, remaining left kidney. two, to remove the recurrent mass in the renal area left void after my right kidney was removed in 2009.

the battle scars from that surgery are pictured above. it looks like i lost a gun fight but still lived to tell about it. in reality, i hope time allows these scars to tell a story of a fight that i ended up winning, one that began again in earnest around the 1st of february.

as i've told many of my friends, the most difficult part of the last two months is feeling like i've had to press the reset button on my race to health. i am no longer two and a half years removed from having cancer in my body. i am now only less than two weeks out. the follow-up scans will come sooner and more frequently again.

the scab has again been removed from my "complexities of paralyzing anxiety" wound.

i am now faced with a follow up program of some form of chemotherapy (loyal readers will remember that i always felt like i got off light the first go-round by not having to perform this step...not this time.).

normal, again, for me, has changed.

that being said, i still need normal to include this place. i've missed it. so many other things have happened that deserve to be remembered and commented on here. i've just been scared to come back.

what if i say something else that will prove to be premature or naive or laughable given the context of the present catching up with what i thought was the past and what little i know of the future?

in the end, i suppose it doesn't matter. if this gift to my girls is to be, in any way, authentic, they have to live with me through the bad times as well as the good. we had a nice couple years stretch worth of good.

good news has followed the surgeries of the last two months.

hopefully, more will be to come.

on january 24th, i had convinced myself that i was the picture of health. running 25 miles a week. doing my rocky training montage at home on the days i didn't run. healthier than ever (for me) eating habits. perfect bmi.

cancer, it seemed, had other ideas.

now, the picture i see in the mirror is a little more scary and tells an altogether different story.

but the fact remains that the final chapter is not written. my prayer is it won't be, still, for a long, long time.

i've missed you. and you. and you. and "you".

welcome back.