What My First Two Weeks With Cancer Taught Me About It, Me and Us.
By: Eric Zerkel
Tags: Survival, Inspiration, Love, Cancer, Mwc Death

What My First Two Weeks With Cancer Taught Me About It, Me and Us. Eric Zerkel May 17·10 min read

On a Tuesday I shoved my face into the crook of my wife’s shoulder and cried. It was infantile. It was feral. It was a Newtonian reaction to the word cancer.

I have cancer.

I have cancer.

I have cancer.

It tastes alkaline in my mouth, like the moment they injected the CT dye in my veins. I try spitting it out at others, but it seems they can’t taste it and it’s still stuck to the back of my throat. I keep chewing it over like cud, hoping that I can grind it down to something palatable, like doing so will change the fact it’s actually in my veins.

I swallow hard and gag on it. Saliva rushes back in and fills my mouth.

And suddenly I’m 16 and tackling the running back in the backfield, and as I do, his helmet connects with the underside of my chin. The adrenaline pulls me back to the huddle. The coach looks at me wide-eyed and pulls me to the sideline.

“Zerkel, get over here, you’re all busted up.”

“I am?”

Then I see the red dots growing in number on my thigh pad and on my knee pad and on my cleat. I reach up and touch my chin and feel a sting. I bring my fingers down in front of my chest and see the dirt caked onto them clumping and calving like flour when the yolk hits. Only then do I recognize the ferric taste in my mouth.

*****

On a Monday three weeks earlier I cried after getting my first COVID vaccine. It was spontaneous, an earthen dam giving way to the force of all we’d gone through because of this fucking virus. My wife and I had only just been married. We had plans to sample the world together, to drink champagne and make fast friends in faraway places. That needle in my arm reminded me that a world of opportunity was still possible for us. So I let it all flow. It felt so good.

There’s irony in spending an entire year trying not to die from an invisible foe only to find out at the end of that battle that a different one could be, probably is, no definitely has been, slowly growing inside of me all along. Life can be cruel.

It’s impossible to write this and not acknowledge that I had spent most of my pre-cancer time worried about the minutiae of the now. It all feels irrelevant now. Every cliche about time and savoring it feels right. It’s disappointing I can’t think of something more eloquent than the Etsy version of a reaction to trauma, but it turns out it’s hearty and true. The truth is it’s hard to parse out the feelings of a sudden trauma, so we return to the mean and end up with something that feels diluted to the uninitiated, but potent to those who know. I’m learning there’s comfort in shared understanding and experience, no matter the flavor, so I lean into it now. It’s warm, and like a Kentucky hug, burns down into your core. I think it’s why we’re all here together on this rock, to suffer and try to survive together, to know that pain is universal and that we’re not alone.

I’m 32. I’ve been healthy my entire adult life. And then one day I woke up and discovered I wasn’t. It sounds simple when I say it like that.

But there’s a lot of this so far in the margins:

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about and working on my appearance. Five days a week spent sweating so I wouldn’t lose all my confidence pulling up a pair of jeans. Then one day I was naked, my hips the color of an unspoiled night sky, an aurora traversing the skin in between. I was holding 100 CCs of my own blood in a plastic grenade connected to a hole in my groin by a clear plastic tube. My wife was pushing a styrofoam cup against me so I could relieve myself without soaking the pair of gauze underwear I assumed held it all together.

I soaked them anyway.

*********

Cancer is also regret metastasizing. I feel incomplete and my body is.

So I never wrote that book I was going to get around to.

So I never said I love you enough.

So I never found my purpose.

So I never found contentment.

So there was much too much negative and not enough positive.

It all boils down to there’s never enough time.

I’ve always believed that the final script of anyone’s life is outlined in just a few decisions and the rest of the plot is spent dealing with the consequences of them.

These decisions create dams that force you to flow in some new, dramatic direction. They can wipe out everything or create something new.

But this feels different. It’s not a choice. It’s the wall of water rushing at me and all I can do is stand there and wonder if I’ll drown in it or emerge from the torrent broken and bruised, but rebuilt into a version of myself that never could’ve existed before. I feel myself changing while the water rushes over my toes, but I might never get to see the final form.

*******

Everything you’ve promised yourself about being in control of your health is a lie. We control the paint color and wax the exterior. Something else controls the rest.

There’s this complex machine with all these moving parts underneath that doesn’t let you know it’s missing a vital cog until it’s too late. Or in the case of cancer, a faulty chip that tells the machine to build new components to attack itself.

All I can control is showing up at the appointment. I enter the door with my odds and then I’m poked and prodded and sliced and injected and so I cross my fingers and pray that we’ve jostled the machine enough to right itself.

There’s a lot of waiting in between, so I spend a lot of time hoping my odds improve but mostly obsess over what happens if they don’t.

Sometimes they do. Sometimes they get worse. The only thing I can do is show up again, stick another coin in and pull the lever.

********

The truth is I don’t even remember her face and I didn’t ask her name. I was too busy looking away from the IV she was sticking in my arm, and then there was a ritual to this, scanning my abdomen for tumors.

A job is a job, even if it always ends in the recalibration of someone’s odds. I didn’t want to remind her of that, but I was scared and when I’m scared I start scrounging for morsels of hope.

“I had a good 15 year run without needles. The covid vaccine changed that, but that was so much more hopeful than this. Now I’ve been jabbed 5 times this week and found out I’ve cancer.”

“Sorry, I know you probably deal with a lot of this,” I said. “I don’t mean to put this on you. It’s just been a lot.”

The silence filled the room. She affixed the IV to my arm with a bit of tape.

“This is probably TMI,” she said.“But COVID killed my entire family except for me and my sister.”

“I feel so much for you right now,” I said. And then I cried. Because I did. Her pain was hefty and I carried it only briefly. That she’d ran the race I had only started running so many times and lost so many times broke me.

“And I feel for you,” she said, and placed her hand on my shoulder. “We all have our obstacles. We all have our challenges, but it never really make sense why it happens.”

“You just have to take this one day at a time and stay focused and you’ll get through it.”

”Trust me,” she said, and then walked back to the control room, leaving me alone with that.

The CT scan came back clean. The cancer hadn’t spread there. The odds seemed to have improved.

So I took it a day at a time. The next day was the surgery that could right me. A part of me would be removed, and with it, a part of me that had only just become, but didn’t belong. It felt like progress and control.

I woke up shaking and in pain. Something didn’t feel right, but then what part of surgery does?

Once the fog cleared my head I was cleared from my bed and then I was in the passenger seat of my wife’s car writhing with each pothole and curve in the road.

There’s this disconnect between pain and the knowledge of its origins that’s unsettling. People spend years studying it just to understand what it could be a sign of. You just feel it and will do anything to make it go away.

It’s literally your body telling you something isn’t right here, but mankind has learned how to mettle in the process of health and so it’s not that simple anymore.

Some pain is expected. Other pain is an omen. There’s no great way to tell the difference in the absence of some catalyst because it all feels like pain.

These bodies of ours are also great punching bags. Absorb enough blows and they start taking on the shape of a fist.

So that’s why it took more than 24 hours, two phone calls with a doctor and my scrotum swelling to the size of a grapefruit to convince me that this pain was abnormal.

I’d been bleeding since the last surgery and that blood was following the path of my orchiectomy like it was a riverbed and my empty scrotum a great alluvial plain.

In retrospect, there’s a comedy to how the next bit of this shook out. Humanity’s appetite for rules and order and bureaucracy, even in the face of an emergency, created that. My wife was made to park the car in the proper garage while I sat in a wheelchair in a queue holding my purple, ballooning scrotum behind someone looking for a follow-up about hemorrhoids. After each person cleared the queue the security guard would walk in and push me up in line. She nearly had to digitally sign consent for me, too.

Pain has a way of weaving its way into your consciousness, and once it takes root, spreads like kudzu, choking out everything else around it so that there is only it and the memory of it.

So at that moment, there was really only pain and the desperate attempt to free myself of it. Oh, and fear, fear of what would happen if I couldn’t, if they couldn’t.

I woke up in a bed covered in five heated blankets. A man across from me was getting a breathing tube inserted in his trach. I looked to my right and saw a man with a hole in the side of his head.

I’ve never felt more comfortable.

****

There’s a conditional depth to love I didn’t understand until now.

I’d never known what it meant to feel loved before I married my wife three years ago. It was just all magnetism and energy then. It was pure and privileged, it was beautiful and naive.

Here’s a snippet from my vows to her that day.

Everything about us has been so effortless that I know on a morning many years from now I will wake up, see the first glimmers of the morning light up your face and finally wonder, where has the time gone? That’s the beauty of this thing we have. That time does not feel like a constraint, but an opportunity, an unexpected gift for us.

But then there’s cancer and pain, and so time does seem shackled. Only that’s not quite right. There was always a beginning and an end to this story, but the naivety of youth afforded me the opportunity to ignore that this might be more of a novella than a novel.

We still get to fill the pages, and these ones are yellowed and crimped at the edges.

Here are a few so far:

There’s my wife holding me in the car when I first heard it might be cancer, screaming “I don’t want to die” and her countering with “you won’t.”

There she is forcing me to cheer in the office when I got the clean CT scan back.

There she is again holding me in the hallway when we found out the cancer is the more invasive kind after all.

There’s her, breaking COVID hospital protocol and sleeping curled up like a chick in an egg on a cracked, faux-leather chair next to my bedside in the hospital, holding my hand until I fall asleep from the pain.

There’s her hand in mine again, this time on an air mattress on our living room floor. She’s helping me breathe through a panic attack after I came home from the E.R. and feared I could go back again.

There’s her wiping my ass because I couldn’t physically do it for myself.

There’s her reading me another case study about how someone survived this because I’m blue.

I never feel like I deserve her and she’ll always make me feel like I do. That’s the beauty of this thing we have. That time does not feel like a constraint, but an opportunity, an unexpected gift for us.

****

I think the last year has taught me more about how to feel and deal with grief than the 31 years prior.

It taught me that there’s no wrong way to reach out and support someone.

It taught me to shrug off the awkward what if’s and focus on the what can I dos.

The answer is that by trying you have already done enough. It doesn’t take a grand gesture, just a few words can do the trick. There’s a collective weight to them that’s more substantive than any single gift.

So I’ve never felt more loved and cared for than I have in the last two weeks. I’ve never felt less alone.

There’s been this narrative the last several years, about the polarization of our society. We hear more about what makes us different than what makes us the same.

But feeling is a universal human condition, and sympathy and empathy bind us together in it.

There’s this great feeling of comfort I have now through that, that comes from not feeling alone, even in the face of death.

To die alone is to truly die, but you never really die if you leave your mark on others and they on you. I never want to lose sight of that throughout this.

All we really have is each other and we’re more alike at our core. That’s the first lesson I’ve learned from this cancer, and I’m not as afraid anymore.