Week three of round four, and my body knows it before I do.
Arsenic and ATRA back in the bloodstream, the nerves pulled tight like a guitar string tuned past pitch. I’m wired. Irritable. Raw.
Then everything stops.
October 10th. I had to put Maybe down.
Our twelve-year-old Yorkie, named after the Arrested Development character because we thought I thought I was clever in 2013. She’d been with us through everything: moves, divorce, lazy Sundays. Slept on or as close to your face as you could possibly tolerate.
She taught me about love. The kind that doesn’t demand, doesn’t posture, doesn’t need you to be better than you are. The kind that just shows up.
My kids were on their way home from Mexico.
Cancer doesn’t pause for grief. You’re supposed to just hold it together.
I didn’t.
The next day, I took my son, my oldest daughter, and her friend to get coffee. I’d already grabbed something and didn’t like it, so I swung through Dutch Bros. I ordered, waited, then held out the old cup.
“Could you toss this for me?”
The girl smiled. “Sorry, we can’t take anything back through the window.”
Something in me snapped.
“You have no problem taking my dirty money through the window!!”
Then I poured it out right there, in front of her, in front of my kids, in front of whatever part of me was still trying to be decent.
Steam rose. Silence. Then the poor kid whispered, “This is wild.”
She wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t righteous anger. It was chemical warfare in a paper cup. It was humiliating. It was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, except Hyde was hopped up on retinoic acid at peak concentration.
At my next appointment, I asked for more Ativan. Lorazepam. The benzodiazepine that had been the only thing keeping my nervous system from full revolt. I might’ve referenced “Valium Mommy” one too many times. My nurse gave me the kind of look that means we need to talk. She sent me to the social worker.
So I sat down with a stranger and told her the Dutch Bros story. Not because I was proud of it. Because I needed someone to know that I wasn’t okay, that I knew I wasn’t okay. I knew better, but my body was a chemistry experiment I couldn’t control.
She didn’t flinch. Just nodded and said, “Let’s talk to your doctor about adjusting your ATRA.”
They cut my dose from 100mg to 50 mg per day. It helped.
A mercy through a meltdown.
Meanwhile, Riley has been adjusting well. The new dog. The chaos dog.
Turns out my joke about her being part Belgian Malinois wasn’t a joke. DNA came back: forty-four percent Malinois, twenty-seven Golden Retriever, with a dash of Husky and Malamute for flavor.
She isn’t a comfort dog. She’s a drill sergeant. A cuddle champion, she bites my butt out of bed and drags me outside because feelings aren’t the mission. Movement is.
Maybe taught me love. Riley’s teaching me discipline.
Right now, I need both.
Between treatments, I finished The Count of Monte Cristo. My jiu-jitsu buddy was reading, so we compared notes. Edmond Dantès starts as a man, becomes a ghost, then something like a saint. I underlined the same passage he did:
“There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, Morrel, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of living.”
Before cancer, I thought I knew what hard was. I’d trained jiu-jitsu with cracked ribs, meal-prepped like a monk, kept my head down and my goals in sight. But this is a different kind of hard. The kind that doesn’t yield to effort or control. The kind that demands surrender.
The comparison between who I was and who I am now is brutal.
But Dantès is right, you don’t get to appreciate the light without the dark. You don’t get joy without intimacy with grief.
I’ve felt what it is to die, not physically, but emotionally, spiritually.
Pieces of me dissolved under the weight of chemicals and loss. And somehow, that stripping away made the small things holy.
I’m off ATRA now. The fog is thinning. My brain feels like it’s coming back online.
I still lose my temper sometimes. I still scare myself.
But I come back faster. I repair. That’s the work my kids are watching. Not a perfect man, but a man who returns.
No Quarter.
~Tyler
I’m Tapping In
I’m fighting literally to raise money for cancer-related charities through Tap Cancer Out on February 28th, one year since diagnosis.
If you train, sign up to roll.
If you can support, sponsor me here
If you’re cheering from the sidelines, that counts too.
Goal: $2,000. Every dollar helps choke out the thing that tried to take me off the mat.
When keepin' it real goes RIGHT.
Looking forward to lunch Thursday.