Your story is awesome, overwhelming and beyond imagination. Your life is a book, but it’s probably not a bestseller. It’s a rough manuscript stained with coffee rings and nicotine. It’s not the clean, crisp, perfectly penned pages found in a bookstore. Instead, it is aged, torn and sloppily written.
A bestseller is a natural page turner, exciting in all the right ways and follows a fantastic formula. Our daily lives are unremarkable, our scenes make little sense, and the narrative is shit. Nothing seems to happen for any reason, the rise of action rarely leads to anything great. It’s like an underdog story without overcoming the odds, or a redemption story without redemption.
When we read back over our life book it seems like none of the characters make any sense, the bad guys always win, and the plot seems to be completely absent. Throughout our lives we grab at our hair and pull it out screaming “Why the fuck is this happening to me? When will any of it ever stop?”
It is easy to get caught up in our lives. Often, we mistake ourselves as the main character of the story, so why wouldn’t we? If we aren’t the main character, then who is? Chill drink a cup of coffee and burn your candle at both ends. Miss a night’s rest and immerse yourself in this crap life of yours. Take some time and figure out what the fuck is happening and try to do something about it. If you need to complain or cry or beat yourself up, then do it. Wallow in your misery, let it infect every spirit fiber of your being.
Take some time and get to know your pain, make it your friend. While you’re at it think about your mortality and look back on your life. How remarkable has it been? How much good have you done for others? What is your legacy? At the end of your life story will it have been written with the blood and tears of others? Will it be a terrible tale of envy and anger? Will its pages be aged, wrinkled, and bound into a bloated book? Or will you have lived a good life, a loving Life? An existence committed to the enrichment of others. A life with purpose. A purpose that was right for you, one of empathy, compassion, and critical thought. A story you wrote, a narrative you drove forward with your blood, sweat and tears? Did you learn along the way that you are not the main character? That others have feelings, make mistakes and are bumbling through this complicated existence just like you?
Take a breath. Take a big ol breath. If you are reading this, you aren’t dead. You are alive. Even if you are laying on your death bed waiting for the ticks of time to slip away there is hope. With hope there is goodness, you have time to do good, be good and help others feel good. You have time to leave your anger at the door, to invite love into your life and embrace the fate you make. The pain you feel might pass; it may never pass. It might ride you like a jockey till the end of the race. But that’s alright, I believe you will find a way. You will climb the tallest mind mountain and experience an epiphany that will forever transform your life. A life that is awesome, overwhelming and beyond imagination. One without clean, crisp, and perfectly penned pages. It will be a rough manuscript stained with coffee rings and nicotine, it will be aged, torn, and sloppily written. It will be the best tale, the greatest story, it will be the book of your life.
The Journey Begins
I was sent away with the good news, I had pneumonia. It eased my soul and helped me navigate the red waters I walked, but the treatments didn’t stop the blood from pouring from my lips. Each day seemed worse than the last, but like any other hardship we became accustomed to it. Over and over the doctor did the same treatment, he heard hoof beats and thought it was a horse. He never looked to see if it was a zebra.
Five months passed; my crimson cough became my life. It was a strangely lonely time of confusion and pain. No one likes to be around a person coughing up blood. I can’t blame them, I wouldn’t either, it’s scary. Witnessing someone spit up blood is horrific; it is a clear indication of disease and death, and people like to avoid those things.
Eventually a fearful friend had the vision to force me to get a second opinion. This is what started my journey and saved my life. It was this road that led me to a path to see a pulmonologist. Her focus and persistence ordered an assortment of scans and tests revealing a tumor in my lung. She wanted a closer look, so she arranged a bronchoscopy party, and I was the guest of honor.
It was a party like no other. The walls were a sterile white and fluorescent light set the stage for the festivities. I was nervous, anxious, cautious perhaps as I sat in an uncomfortable hospital chair. My stomach ached, filled with uncertainty and fear as I waited for them to unromantically jam something deep into my throat.
It was a party and like all good parties we needed to indulge ourselves with some liquid courage. The liquid they gave me wasn’t poured down my throat, it was sprayed down my gullet. As it began the nurse gave me a half smile, the kind opposite to comforting and said, “This is going to taste really bad.”
I opened my mouth and she sprayed.
“Oh my god!” She was right. To give you an idea of its flavor imagine chewing a mouth full of aspirin, mixed with blood and embalming fluid. This wasn’t moments of discomfort. It was twenty minutes of pure agony. Twenty minutes and the flavor never subsided.
When my gag reflex eased away, they continued their romance. I crawled onto the medical table and then they started sticking me with things and injecting me with stuff. A few moments later I found myself falling into a deep, twilight sleep.
I remember waking in a fit of tears, not sure what was or where things were.
Later I returned to discover the results of the bronchoscopy. I learned I had an almond sized tumor in my lung. My doctor said it was benign, and all this could be solved with an easy, noninvasive surgery. They’d poke some holes in me, use some fancy robots, and cut out a small portion of my lung. Worst case scenario I’d be in tip top shape in two or three days.
It wasn’t that easy, the journey never is, nothing is easy.
To have these robots poked into my side, I needed to see a fancy surgeon. One specialized in friendly thoracic cuts, so she sent me to a thoracic surgeon. I called the doctor’s office, got an appointment, and went in to hear what he had to say.
I waited in an old, worn and aesthetically out of date office. It was a long wait, so I spent a lot of time looking around at things, there was a lot of archaic equipment in the room. It was a creepy place to say the least. Once he entered the room my heart raced, the reality of what was to be, began to become real. This surgery was going to happen. I swallowed and listened as he began to speak.
What I thought was going to be a conversation about a sleeve resection, became something worse. My tumor went from benign… to malignant. It went from no cancer… to stage one cancer. From a few days of recovery to several months. It went from the removal of a small piece… to the loss of my entire lung.
He said the C word… Cancer. When that happened, my world twisted, turned, and wrapped in on itself. I was flooded with feels and it was terrifying, mind numbing and overwhelming. The world ceased to be as time seemed to stop.
I drove home angry and afraid. My world turned upside down and my pieces were falling out. I was so angry I wanted to shout. Slowly I eased into what had to be done, I was in a lot of pain and could hardly breathe, so I succumbed to my destiny, because I wanted to be cancer free.