Cancer at 26: The Pain and Promise of The Light Going Out

There is a single, perfect word to describe this experience. Nightmare.

The surreality of the sudden danger, the breakneck pace of unnerving revelations… It has literally felt like a bad dream. Except, I couldn’t wake up. 

The diagnosis struck my ears like a prison sentence. Like it forbode the end of so many things, maybe the end of me altogether. The horrors of the situation, known and unknown, were overwhelming. I will never forget what that room looked like.

7 days later, I was being cut open for surgery. Since the moment I woke up from that blissful anesthetic nap, I have been carving my way through the bramble of recovery.

The physical wounds heal with a little oxycontin and a lot of patience. That’s simple enough. The mental wounds take a little more TLC than that.

You heard it here first folks… Testicular cancer is a real bummer. Nobody wants to lose a ball. Not even if it’s just over the fence into a mean neighbor’s yard, or stolen at recess.  

So the thought of this? Yeah, it was challenging to reconcile. The advent of my surgery unveiled to me a profundity and depth to sadness I never knew before.

Currently, having experienced how surprisingly normal the one-ball lifestyle is (whole new meaning to ‘ball is life’), I feel gladly distant from that panicked despair. But that’s me with the power of retrospect. Me at the time? That guy was pretty upset.

In the nadir of my post-op depression, I found myself desperate for inspiration. I wanted an answer, a guide, anything I could grab onto to begin an upward climb. Anything that could make it feel like I had some agency in the mess.

Then I remembered a story. An old story, about Theodore Roosevelt.

In 1884, well before he became our 26th president, Teddy was a prolific local politician in New York. He married his college sweetheart, Alice, and was just crazy about her. He journaled, “my happiness now is almost too great. I am living in dreamland.” 

The young couple was about to have their first child and shared a city home with the Roosevelt family. It was just at that crest of joy, when a tragedy began to unfold. 

Or actually, 2 of them.

Alice was struck with kidney disease. She managed to give birth to their baby daughter, but the cost was too great. Alice was fading fast.

In that bedroom, in his own arms, the love of Teddy’s life was dying.

In another bedroom, only a few somber steps away, his mother was dying, too. 

Teddy’s mother had raised him through his own health struggles as a boy. Now, she was succumbing to typhoid fever. And she was fading even faster than Alice. 

Room to room he went, back and forth, for as many hours as they had left on Earth. Teddy’s “dreamland” was long gone. He was trapped in an arena of a nightmare’s design.

His mother passed first, in the early morning. By the afternoon, his dear wife was gone too.

It was exactly 4 years after Alice had agreed to marry him. It was Valentine’s Day. 

At the end of that day, like he did on every other, Teddy wrote in his journal. He was a famously detailed, impassioned author, but for this entry, he had only 8 words to say.  

“The light has gone out of my life.” 

On February 14th 1884, Teddy Roosevelt was 25 years old.

Today, I am 26 years old.

As I was tumbling in the chaos of my disease, of all things, this is the story that shuffled to the front page of my mind.

First reaction? Kind of a weird pull. 

My presidential knowledge goes about as deep as the script for National Treasure (and the sequel, ofc), so I’ll have to chalk it up as a lost tape of podcast knowledge. 

More legitimately, I think that story came to mind for two reasons. The pain of it speaks to me, and the promise of it whispers to me.

I mean, you read what he wrote… Teddy Roosevelt was fucking finished. He had been cursed by such a destructive, unpredictable turn of fate, a single sentence was the most complex reaction his battered brain could muster. Even to an audience of only himself.  

What Roosevelt said is not that sagacious. The most impressive thing about it is that he didn’t swear at all. Couldn’t have been me.  

It’s the fact he couldn’t say anything more. That’s the part that’s revelatory. And it’s the part I most understand.  

When something that bad happens right in front of your eyes, it can be hard to even acknowledge it. Let alone confront it. Let alone conquer it. I think it’s a problem of dissociation, the result of a defense mechanism, really. 

When that person in the white coat told me it was cancer, I think they did well in their unenviable role. They asked if I had questions, let me know what the next step was, etc.

They said a whole bunch of words to me, but I can only really recall 3 from that scene. And I know they didn’t come from a doctor.

Too much pain. 

I probably said it out loud, but I’m certain I thought it. Over, and over. I was hysterical. The damning reality didn’t want to register in my mind, like a computer crashing.  

I’m no stranger to medicine. I’ve had a pulsing headache every minute of my life for the last 11 years and counting, a disorder without a cure, defined by chronic pain. I’ve survived that and more fun, but in that moment, when cancer was about to be thrown on top of the pile, too? 

It is hard to summon language to describe something you’re not even fathoming. I suppose “too much pain” was just the best my battered brain could do.

But a problem is always the hardest when you first find out about it, right?

I think the graceful wisdom of time sprouts solutions eternal for those who can practice the patience and thoughtfulness to accept them.

Teddy knew what I’m talking about. After his personal Valentine’s Day massacre, he basically fucked off to the Dakota territory for over 2 years! You think the Dakotas are boring and baron now? Imagine them pre-plumbing. 

The pain and paralysis of Teddy’s tale speaks to me loud and clear because I can empathize with those emotions. But the conclusion of his awful anecdote offers me a second message.

Although, it’s quieter. A whispered thesis from behind a curtain, sort of like a secret.

The secret is… Teddy is a liar.

Well, kinda. The thing is, “the light has gone out of my life” is the talk of a man with one foot on a tall bridge and one foot off of it. Not a man who went on to do all sorts of objectively great shit, like Rough Ridin’ Teddy did.

Of course, he wasn’t lying at the time. He really felt that way. He truly believed that all the light there would ever be had left him, once and for all.

But he was wrong. He proved himself wrong. 

The guy legitimized the NYPD, kicked ass up and down Cuba (there was a war, it’s cool), ascended to the presidency, shredded despotic industrial monopolies, invented the whole concept of national parks, plus a thousand other remarkable things. 

All of it… after the light had gone out.

I thought that this cancer would bring me too much pain to handle. When it started, and for too long after, I believed that. 

But I was wrong. Turns out, I’m a liar too. 

It’s not too much pain. Not for the person that I am, and not for the people that uplift me. 

Forgive the brag, but man, my support system is a goddamn all-star team. These miraculous friends, who’ve always been immensely kind to me, have somehow found ways to be even more selflessly compassionate. Just because they knew I was struggling. Just because they care.

If I was still any sort of practicing Catholic, I’d have them all nominated for sainthood.

It’s wild to me that I even have a single friend of such high quality. It’s really wild to me that I have a whole battalion of them. But I won’t say that I don’t believe it.

Because I do believe it. They make me believe. In them, in myself, and in all the things that can happen for someone after they think the light has gone out of their life.

Presently, my prognosis is good, and my doctors are even better. Whatever my tests and scans reveal in the coming months and years, I know I’ll be equipped to handle it.

There is an excellent, gigantic likelihood that I’ll never accomplish anything as significant as a single footnote in the life of the 4th most popular president in American history. If you can find odds on that, I suggest you take the bet. With your mortgage.

The only aspect of that life and that story I aspire to directly apply to myself is the spirit of his jagged journey forward. He didn’t give up.

I won’t either.