My cancer year, one decade later

ft. anecdotes about what it's like to get cancer in your 20s, the challenges and changes that came from it

EDITOR’S NOTE: Lemme blow the dust off this newsletter!! Because it's been well over a year since writing one. My bad. But I’ve been feeling like getting this off my chest so enjoy!

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Yesterday I received emergency incision and curettage surgery on my left eye.

Six needles filled with numbing solution went in my eyelid, then the knife to get out a chalazion. It was easily the top two most painful experiences of life, and I was in-and-out the operating room in 10 minutes.

Of course, neither OHIP nor my private health insurance would cover this (apparently cosmetic) procedure. Goodbye $900!

Last May I was in Tokyo and an eye stye showed. It went away and came back five-or-seven times since then. It now permanently made a home on my face, so much so that my girlfriend and I would sing that “I’m a mfin’ stye boy..”

Well I didn’t really think the specialist would do anything. But of course within five minutes he basically said it had to go. So to the operating room we went. And the nurses were upfront. “This is going to hurt.”

It was terrible. Don’t be like me. If you notice a stye, clean it thoroughly best you can immediately.

The surgery and subsequent day living without my left eye has been a fitting and funny commemoration to today, the 10 year anniversary of living without my left nut.

God’s sense of humour remains undefeated (why cry when you can laugh?)

10 years

Today is 10 years since receiving the worst news in my life from my doctor.

I was 24. I got my first Full-Time Journalism Job™ at BNN Bloomberg, running graphics, covering the stock market, and mic’ing up Kevin O’Leary, who stubbornly refused my daily greetings, an oddly inspiring commitment to prickery.

I just moved in to a sweet apartment on Ossington Ave that was full of cockroaches but only $800 a month, and I could easily subway and bike from work. I was freelancing too, writing about music for Vice Canada and Exclaim! for tiny payouts. Things were great.

Well, except for one thing.

Ball so hard

Here’s the part where I talk about my balls.

My girlfriend was the first person to tell me I need to go to the doctor.

Basically, we had noticed that one felt harder than the other. Not bigger / different / painful. Nothing otherwise. Just simply… harder. Being a real man, this was something I would handwave away (how, as a man, do you expect me to go receive medical attention???)

I did this for months.

Finally, she broke through when she showed me a story about a prospective pro hockey player who almost died due to testicular cancer that successfully frightened me. I went to the doctor’s.

After a brief meeting and physical, I began embarrassingly discussing my testicle problem, and Dr. Woodsford checked it out.

He suggested I book an appointment at the hospital’s Imaging Centre to get an ultrasound, marking my appointment request as 'priority.'

I ended up going to the Ultrasound a week later, on a Thursday.

The waiting room was crowded with literally just pregnant women and me. It was a little unsettling.

Before long the radiologist, a recent graduate, a slender, soft-spoken young guy, my age, called me in.

When scanning my left testicle, our chatter ceased as the machine’s noises turned muffled. Less blood flow meant trouble.

He paused to consult a senior radiologist, returning shortly to tell me I could leave.

I of course knew what was coming then, even if my parents started to say things like “Well don’t just to conclusions.”

June 26th

The next day at work, I received a call from Dr. Woodsford's office. The receptionist said they have my ultrasound results and to come in to discuss them the next day, a Friday, June 26.

That morning I took another day off work (two in a row, “strike two” my executive producer said) to go get the news from my family doctor.

Getting told you have cancer was so much like the Breaking Bad episode, I swear. I could hear and recount exactly the conversation.

“Eric, I’m sorry, but it’s looking like you have testicular cancer,” and yet, I removed myself from the moment. It was dream-like.

I felt tears coming but held them down for both our sake, drifting in and out of being able to hear him. The gist of what Dr. Woodsford was telling me was treatment, which essentially began with immediate removal of my left testicle. That was a very devastating reality. He said I needed to see a specialist as soon as I could to talk about what the next steps were.

We had an appointment booked the following day.

My brother Chris tried to joke about it to ease the tension, and I struggled through phone calls informing family who were en route to a funeral I was missing.

The knife

The morning of the surgery (four days later) we arrived at the hospital at 8:30am and I ran into my childhood family Dr. Harrop in the main lobby Tim Horton’s. The only major health scare in my life until that point was when I was 12, I had pneumonia and missed nearly 6 weeks of school, and saw her quite frequently. She recognized me and my dad immediately and asked what I was there for?

“Radical orchiectomy.”

She asked who was my surgeon. I told her.

“Dr. Thomas Short.”

Oh, he’s the best, she said. She hugged me, and told me not to worry. To this day, I have no idea how, or why she was in that hospital, on that morning, and ran into me.

God’s sense of humour remains undefeated.

The surgery happened finally hours later, after many tests and preparations.

Before that I spent full days at the hospital. I even wrote my review for Meek Mill’s Dreams Worth More Than Money for Exclaim! while getting one of 40 or 50 tests / needles / things done on me. By that point, so many people saw me naked it didn’t even phase me at all (take that, shameful Polish-Catholic upbringing!!)

I woke up two hours later, my Dad beside me, and cried like a baby. It was a mixture of relief and fear for all the uncertainty that was next.

Our Cancer Year

The immediate desire to return to a sense of normalcy became quickly impossible.

Weekly CT scans and appointments at Toronto’s Princess Margaret, the best cancer hospital in the world happened all summer. A summer spent trying to have fun, stay healthy, enjoy every moment was marred by feelings of fear (What if it’s morphing into lymphoma? What if I’m dying?) and anxiety, and an inability to manage the stress.

I did my best to hold onto my job at BNN Bloomberg, committed to keeping the news to myself and my boss only.

But, of course, they would not renew my contract at the end of September, despite repeated promises that this experience would not be held against me.

This springloaded me into the other realization that the warning’s my dad gave me years earlier, when he was begging me to go become an engineer like him, or do something like business school, were confirmed. I saw it. The older media people above me looked at me like competition. They talked about my frequent absences. They pointed at their broken sense of paying dues like badges of honour. And, generally speaking, these media people just all seemed like petulant, pessimistic rubes.

The decision, while in part made for me, became the new priority. I had to pivot careers.

From busting my ass to get into Canada’s best journalism university, to interning, freelance writing, becoming the first person in my family to graduate university and hustling my way into a coveted role at one of Canada’s national news networks, all for it not work out.

I moved home, and started taking an online coding bootcamp in HTML/CSS/JS. I passed it, and concluded at the end that the only fate worse than a career in network tv journalism was a career spent staring at Visual Studio Code (I tried to learn to code, I really did. Sorry).

A small business that built things out of shipping containers gave me a marketing job, and within two weeks, I helped get them press for their work with Nike, Miley Cyrus, learnt how to implement a CRM (HubSpot!) for a small business, and self-taught my way into being a marketer for a small business, earning clips, business and robust digital makreting chops along the way.

Then, too, I became an evening news writer for my all-time favourite magazine, The FADER, shortly after, and scraped enough money together to go to Europe for the first time in my life. I was 25. Almost one year in, living under the shadow of a cancer diagnosis.

The oncologist appointments, now at three month intervals instead of weekly, gave me the go-ahead. And off I went, for three months, to Europe at 25. I went on my first plane ride just three years prior. No signs of cancer, but in Canada, you aren’t technically “cured” until nearly ten years of remission.

New way of looking at things

There are many stories I’m glossing over from The Cancer Year, btw. The heartfelt ways friends and family showed up for me, creating space to hear my experience, come with me to CT scans, help to find the funny in it.

And, to be clear, I really did get cancer on “easy mode.” No chemo. No hair loss. Just a surgery and experience I absolutely kept iron clad to myself and close friends. I was determined not to have people feel sorry for me.

But struggle came as a result of the experience. I could no longer tolerate the bullshit.

It started at work.

I realized I didn’t want to put the microphone on Mr. Wonderful, to get looked at for having to go to the hospital on Wednesdays, to toil away at a job barely above minimum wage with no health benefits.

So into marketing I went.

I began to Just Do Things at work.

After a year at the shipping container building business, my first Real Tech Job™ at a startup, saw me implement outbound PR system that got our (bootstrapped B2B SaaS) product on above-the-fold stories for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and more. I got tons of amazing experience, I moved out again, into the apartment I am now still in, more than eight years later.

And I realized that during the cancer year I gained a realization of what “bottom” really was.

I lived in it for a whole summer, barely able to function outside the walls of the hospital and keep it together.

It permanently altered the X-axis of how bad and good things were.

Now, all of the sudden, nothing was ever so catastrophic as summer, 2015.

The COVID19 era brough a specific kind of fear, but even that to me wasn’t as bad as the Cancer Year. My onco advised me in early April 2020 not to go outside because there was a “small chance you’re immunocompromised.” And later, that year, after complaining about headaches, a visit to the bottom briefly returned.

Head game

After my semi-yearly CT scan / blood work / test day, my oncologist asked the usual “anything else wrong” questioning. I had mentioned that I was getting headaches unlike anything I’ve ever felt.

Well he basically insinuated that there was a small chance it could be brain cancer, and the next day I had my first MRI of my head. It was November 2020.

By now I was humming along as a social strategist at an independent Toronto ad agency, getting a front seat look at how to pivot small businesses to Shopify / paid ads / “click and collect” initiatives, and growing professionally a ton.

This brush, again, with mortality, after a year of isolation, was a lot. COVID was where my career really started to take off, and I was determined to not let this, whatever it was, be a setback for what I built since the Cancer Year. A newly debt free existence. A roommate free apartment, all to myself. Growing skills in marketing. All second to this new, sudden and total confrontation with the prospect of having a tumour growing on my brain, the thing I used to perceive it.

You cannot adequate imagine what something like this does to you until you go through it, but it is an experience I would not dare to wish on anyone.

Unlike the first brush, the news of the cancer didn’t come in one day, but a week. I was relieved: I knew bad news comes quick and good news comes when it comes.

Turns out it was just migraines. No head ass tumour.

I did get this cool video of the MRI photos though, definitive proof that I do, in fact, have a brain. (Yes, that’s me).

Health

I have been so blessed to be overall healthy. Throughout the whole cancer experience, in total, I paid $18 once, for painkillers. It didn’t hurt at all for me. And it totally eradicated whatever fear I had of needles forever until yesterday, when I had to get one in my eyeball (I’ve been writing this one-eye’d, remember?)

The kinship I feel whenever I meet someone touched by cancer is so special. I see just how lucky my experience was. I owe a big, big deal to my ex Lorelei for pushing me to go to the doctor. And I try my best to correct that behaviour in friends I see. I get it, I do. But if I waited even weeks more, my onco told me, the growth would have been big enough to justify much more drastic medical measures than what I ended up going through.

I was 24. Quit smoking, was running marathons, was vegetarian. I was healthy then. It still happened to me. I now do my best to keep living healthy as I can and plan to take care of my self throughout.

Because it’s true. You can have a million things to worry about until you’re sick. Then you only have one thing to worry about.

This encounter with my own mortality permanently reshaped my understanding of what ‘rock bottom’ truly means. Compared to cancer, every setback in my life as an entrepreneur, pitch rejections, client churn on holidays, friend/colleague letdowns, is significant, but never catastrophic.

Cancer was the catalyst for the authenticity, transparency, and resilience that define how I choose to show up and work today.

It is tough to wrap my head around where I was 10 years ago and where I am now. A lot of my dreams came true, but many I’m still hard at work on. Through it all, I’m so proud of what I’ve been able to carry behind the scenes, but it wasn’t easy.

Sometimes I’d compare myself to my peers and ask why I didn’t get where they are so quickly, even if the answer was in front of me. I refused to be held back by the hand I was dealt, and only until a few years ago would I dare tell people I was a cancer survivor.

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I wanted to write this for a long time, because this experience, which happens to be on Men’s Mental Health month, was honestly more of a mental conquering than a physical one. Self image, feeling somehow less than, held back by a year in career / health purgatory, it all added up in the toll I would run every time I saw a peer doing better than me.

Now, much past it, I realize the foolishness of comparing your journey. There’s a great running quote: “Run your own race.”

Your path is yours, and every twist and turn, though horrible and tough to understand at the time, on a long enough timeline, become quite obviously necessary forks in the road. I am so lucky and happy to be alive, to be me, faults / failures / shortcomings and all.

It took a long time to get there. Still arriving.

I took my patch off while editing.

Thank you for reading. I promise a real post about how work is going is coming soon!