Cancer Talk and Circular Walks

Ten years later, embracing the strangeness of publicly talking about cancer

It is 2024! Welcome to the official launch of Good Marrow. The holidays, as always, collapsed in on themselves and I needed some time to think over and prep for what this newsletter would be. Find the voice, sift through the memories, plot out the weeks… And recover from a lovely surprise birthday party.

But first, since this is largely about cancer— my bonafides. I am a three-time leukemia remission wanderer, my most fitting self-descriptor given my general distrust of the disease. It is a distrust that has largely fueled my reasoning for starting this. Too often I have believed cancer to be in my rear view mirror, content to barrel ahead with life, largely refusing to acknowledge the months in which I have disappeared into hospitals, got sick skinny, and shed my hair.

I have emerged from these benders over-served at Bar Trauma, relying on a Capricorn’s knack for task-oriented progress to sober me up and get me in line with the living. And while I cling to the hope that me and cancer have finally parted ways, I have also realized that perhaps it is time to make sense of how my life has turned out.

Before we begin, for those in the know, here is my stat line:

35M, B-cell ALL diagnosed at 25, Phi -neg, 1x stem cell cord blood transplant, 1x donor-related Haplo BMT (shout out to my cousin Pat, my lifesaver), 1x orchiectomy (third relapse was extramedullary) + radiation, and 1x CAR-T cell infusion. And because it was so miserable, 1x thrombolysis due to a PEG-Asparaginase blood clotting reaction (IYKYK). Put it on a baseball card…

Since I was first diagnosed in 2014, I have lived a dual life, becoming a harbinger of my own bad news as I have ingested and replayed a variation of the same record scratch. By the third instance the dramatic tension was lost, the joke was overplayed, the rule of thirds practically demanded a permanent outcome.

But thankfully I am still here. And now the dates, the rooms, the chemo and biopsies and immunotherapies… They have begun to blur into a creeping memory that I can’t manage to forget. To wait ten years to write about my cancer experience feels akin to living long enough to put out a Greatest Hits record.

Generally, my story goes something like this: After college I move to Los Angeles to become a screenwriter, taste success at the age of twenty-four, think that I am soon to enter Hollywood royalty, get diagnosed with leukemia the next year, induction chemo fails to reach remission, return to live with my parents in Chicago, prep for a bone marrow transplant, learn that being bi-racial (half-White, half-Chinese) means a lack of donor options so we go with a cord blood transplant. Then, during my transplant I meet a nurse who, months after discharge, when the meat had returned to my bones, I would begin to see outside the hospital and somehow, miraculously find love.

We would move back to LA together, where I would rekindle a screenwriting career, we would weather a relapse, decide to throw a handful of caution to the wind and get engaged, opt for a Haplo transplant, plan our wedding as my hair returned, then have Covid postpone our wedding one week before it was set to happen. Cap it all off with another relapse because why not, write a movie from my hospital bed while the doctors check for neurotoxicity, suck down some CAR-T cells… And finally, somehow make it to our wedding day.

As much as that makes for a heartwarming read, I have begun to realize that there is a cost, and the wear and tear of all those plot twists has begun to show. And while I used to view it as a toll indebted to the cross-border travel between the lands of sickness and health, I have realized the need to take some account for where I have been and what I have seen.

No one ever sees cancer coming for them. Pending some lifestyle choices or genetic disposition, cancer is a largely un-delightful jump scare. And if you have no personal relationship with it prior to diagnosis, your knowledge of it may be informed by the tear-jerking flicker of movie screens or televisions.

I have been lucky enough to spin a childhood dream of writing movies into a semblance of a career, having sold a handful of screenplays and learning (always slowly) how the Hollywood machine works, it deliriously churning and always uncaring. I most recently spent 148 days on strike with the WGA, walking in circles around studios.

Picketing was a strangely familiar feeling. Much of my adult life has consisted of being “between work” and walking in circles. On too many cancer floors, I have hobbled out of bed to mark time and place, each footstep a hope cast into a black hole, forces seemingly much more powerful than myself ultimately responsible for making decisions that would dictate the lived years of the rest of my life. There was a futility and strength in knowing that all I could do, and the best I could do—was walk in circles.

More hair, less steps. Less hair, more steps. Both in circles.

Walking and writing are simple exercises, both of which only cost the amount of energy needed to will ten digits into motion. Personally, I do my writing in the morning and walking in the afternoon. Roughly calculated by how long it takes to drink a large French press of coffee, I have spent years of my life creating fictions. I have tried to attach entertaining truths to psychological thrillers, dystopian sci-fi futures, and nostalgia-tinged horror films— but I have never written directly about my own life.

In writing and in health, the truth is that success has been illusory. Accomplishments and milestones are elastic, any gained ground just as likely to be a false peak. It is a marathon of hope run past a thinning crowd, a playlist chorus of affirmations and statistical odds shuffled and looped as I scan the horizon for a finish line whose goal posts now move for my benefit.

Once afflicted, there is no end to writing. And once sick, there is only continued hope to remain in motion.

I am grateful to still be in motion. To that end, remission has been a jealous lover. It hurt the most the first time they broke their promise, but it has numbed the pain for each subsequent violation. With each breakup, I have scrunched my brow tighter, hoping the growing wrinkles might will the absence of cancer into a permanent state instead of a season. But we are stuck together in misery and joy, two bandits on the run, pinkies interlocked until the end.

After cancer (however many times it takes), I was spit out, a reverse Dorothy entering Oz, the strange re-entry into the regular world suddenly full of color and possibility as exhilarating as it is bewildering. The applause and ringing of bells felt incredible and overwhelming. But after it all fades, and as I stretch the metaphor and get further down the Yellow Brick road, I have found a nagging sense of unease, of having pierced the veil, of wondering what to do and if I am going where I am supposed to.

Good Marrow is an attempt to engage with that sense of unease. It is a lot of words in search of a little peace, and a small hope that others might read and find the same, no matter the journey.

And lastly, while cancer may be our North Star, I’m going to give myself creative license to go wherever this takes me. I like to think of it as a cancer-themed claw machine—each week we’ll see what little bauble I haul out of the abyss.

Hope to see you subscribe for next week’s post. Feel free to share if you like what you’ve read or pop down to say hi in the comments.