How did you know you had cancer?
Finding footing in life's many unknowns and the art of inflatable outdoor movies
Last week I wrote about the best thing to come out of my cancer experience, so I figured this week we would start with the beginning. Good Marrow is a reader-supported newsletter and is fueled by your eyeballs. If you enjoy reading, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to get each post delivered direct to your inbox.
The most common question I’m asked whenever I talk about my cancer is: “How did you know you had it?” And the answer is always as embarrassing as it is obvious. “I didn’t.” It is a question that makes a lot of sense, an instinctual framing of curiosity and proactive self-defense; people want to know what the warning signs were, they want to know what they should be on the lookout for.
But my actual experience was a frustrating descent, each step further into sickness pushed back by my own insistence that I would get better. Thinking it was initially a cold, I muscled through daily runs, hellbent on getting in shape for a dating scene I would never see, finding that a hill that should have been getting easier was somehow getting harder and harder to climb. So I rested and rationalized, telling myself that it had evolved into a flu-from-hell, even as it continued to plague me for weeks and eventually months.
Soon I was sweating through my sheets every night— a telltale sign I too easily wrote off. Once, when my brother and friend dropped by unannounced, I passed out in the doorway, a growing sensation of dizziness beginning to strip me of my balance. But I blamed it on low blood pressure and the embarrassing history of fainting that we have as a family. The symptoms piled up but the knowns overshadowed the unknowns— I was a twenty-five year-old young man with a robust health history. Surely this would pass.
Then on Halloween night, my body put on its own horror show for me. Locked in my out-of-town friend’s apartment so I could quarantine away from my roommate and his visiting girlfriend, my body quaked. I rolled up into a blanket burrito on the floor, shivering and sweating as Netflix played endless episodes of Anthony Bourdain eating exquisite thing after exquisite thing. Then, in a grotesque turn, I myself tasted something strange and pulled myself to the bathroom to find my gums weeping blood.
It felt like I was in a Cronenberg film, the mystery of my body’s strange degradation soundtracked by the delighted cheers and screams of a rare Los Angeles rain catching Halloween partygoers by surprise.
But the next day I felt better. It felt like something had passed. My fortitude had been rewarded. I could confidently say I was on the up and up.
But over the weeks I never quite got better and in hindsight I look embarrassingly dense. I racked up box after box of cold medicine. And when I finally forced myself to go to urgent care, they swabbed me for strep, but with no fever in sight, I was sent home with a z-pak. I called my cousin who was an audiologist to ask about the dizziness, thinking it might have something to do with my inner ear. She provided her best suggestions but nothing stuck.
I googled but connected no dots, each day passing without any answer in sight. I was lost in a haze, aimlessly existing in an exhausting loop, asking myself— what was wrong with me?
Nine years earlier, my high school career was coming to a close and a less-dire but similarly life-altering question was coming to a boil. College was on the horizon and so was the rest of my life, engendering the question, “what do you want to do when you grow up?”
I had no idea. My mind conjured up kindergarten cut-outs of employment possibilities— Stethoscope Doctor, Briefcase Lawyer, Engineer with Wrench, “Business” Guy, Thumbs Up Astronaut— And I could not see myself in any of them.
I had only ever had one genuine interest in my teenage years— and that was movies. It was a love that I had found on my own, not having been shoehorned into it by social engineering or “looks good on a college application” nudging. I spent entire summers making goofy movies with friends, supplementing our outdoor shenanigans with my own endless consumption of junk food and DVD’s in our dark basement.
I didn’t know that a career in “movies” was a thing until I said it out loud. To my surprise, my parents were supportive (though they always were), my dad going down a rabbit hole of potential film schools that I would end up getting rejected from. But just like that, the next five or ten years of my life were charted. I had no practical idea how to carve a career out of “movies”, but I was given a new guiding star and the (insane, unrealistic) hopes of beating some unknowable odds.
The aimlessness that I felt pondering my collegiate direction returned with an existential bent as my sickness descended, compounded by the increasing unknowns of my life. I was suddenly single, living with a new, old friend as a roommate, and had a screenwriting career that was evaporating along with the money that I had made from the handful of jobs that my also-evaporating agent and manager had gotten me.
Personally, professionally, and healthily— I had no idea what was happening.
I didn’t know where my life was going and I didn’t know what to do. In another life, this could have been a fun time to figure myself out. To try something new or challenge myself to abandon old habits. But making a living through writing had always been a dream and I stubbornly didn’t want to wake up. Which is how I wound up setting up outdoor movie screenings for kids’ birthday parties.
My new roommate, Justin, a fantastic composer, had done the hard work of finding a day job at a local audio-video company. Himself keen to cables and microphones, when I stumbled into his life he graciously offered to get me hired too.
I did not really know what I was doing. The sense of existential displacement only carried over to my hourly-wage time spent unplugging and re-plugging various acronyms— wondering if I should be using XLR, CAT-5, RCA, HDMI, AUX, USB, or USB-C.
Thankfully Justin got most of the fancy jobs, which left me with the real bread and butter for the company— children’s birthday parties. Two or three times a week, I would pack my car full of speakers, projector, a fan, and a giant plastic tub that could fit an inflatable screen— and I would go set it all up so a bunch of kids could watch Finding Dory under the stars.
As the sickness ebbed and flowed, and after satisfying the whims of whatever couple were putting on the event and eating the tacos they would sometimes offer, I would go sit in my car, in the dark, on a street somewhere up in the hills, and change my sweat-slicked shirt.
Adrift in the unknown, I asked my body for any small sign that things were going to get better. But even I couldn’t help but chuckle at the irony of my childhood dream finally coming true— manifesting as a rapidly inflating nylon screen and too many extension cords as I “made movies” in somebody’s back yard.
My Game of Life had hit an intermission or a bump in the road or some blind spot I had not predicted for my mid-20’s. I had graduated from schools and moved away from home and now my life had sprawled out into the unregulated shapelessness of adulthood. The only remaining ingrained sign posts were those markers of home ownership, marriage, and children— accomplishments that felt habitual as a kid but which adulthood eventually revealed to be optional, malleable, or impossible— and with no requirements for completion.
There are some people that really enjoy the unknown. There can be a sense of adventure to it, the not knowing containing more possibility than if a course is tightly plotted. As you might tell, I am not really one of those people— but I love the romanticism of it. It fueled the moments where I knew where I was going, the possibility in the belief that I could get there. When I told my parents I wanted to carve out a career in “the movies” (lol in hindsight), it became a known unknown— no idea how, but maybe some way.
This feeling eventually re-emerged upon hearing the word “leukemia”. After passing out in the bathroom one day and coming to surrounded by EMT’s, Justin threw me in the back of his car and got me to the hospital. The moments leading up to diagnosis are its own story in miniature, but I believed I was finally on the road to recovery.
That would not be true.
But I will never forget the sense of relief that flooded over me after the initial shock wore off. Cancer held much power, but for the first time in many weeks, my path forward was no longer unknown. Part of it was wrapped up in a semblance of control, the word “leukemia” finally able to be googled and explained and quantified or predicted. For me, it meant that I had direction again.
All of my life’s many disconnected or unimportant attachments fell away. I was still broke and felt like death, but in a very practical sense— I had been told what I was going to be doing for the next days, weeks, and possibly years until it was over— a clarity I had not had in a long while.
I know for most people, cancer can have the inverse effect. That it is a bomb dropped in to create chaos in an ordered life— and I give much deference to those who view it solely and completely as a curse and a plague and a thief.
For me, cancer distilled an odd sense of purpose out of survival. And I’ve found purpose to be a unique glue that holds life’s many intangibles together. In the many unknowns of life, to purposefully want to survive was a quietly eye-opening experience for something that I took for granted. The specter of death gave me an appreciation for our default setting— the desire to be alive being the plotline that undergirds us all.
I really don’t mean to oversell it. It would be naive and a disservice to the pangs of survivor’s guilt to try and prop up what is, at its core, some of the worst news you can get. Most cancer patients and survivors echo the same refrain that they would not wish it on anyone—and I wholeheartedly agree.
But enough have come before that we know there to be some path ahead, and finally, after what may be weeks of anxiously massaging a lump or waiting for scans or swallowing panic over strange symptoms; I found tangible relief when something unknown became terribly known.
Despite what I’ve written, I do struggle to give cancer the full mantle of “purpose”, but the fact that it reoriented my life was a strange realization that I guiltily came to quite quickly. It came at a low place in my life and gave me a strange sense of direction. Selfishly, it meant that I wouldn’t have to set up anymore outdoor movies anytime soon.
But before they strapped me to my first IV pole, the new hospital I was sent to let me take a shower. It was my first shower after three days of being pumped full of blood while doctors tried to define what was wrong with me. I can remember it clearly— a shower curtain that filtered the white light into an amber hue, surprisingly strong water pressure, a little too hot in a good way…
I stood there for a long time, finding clarity in the steam, the sound and sensation of water falling and draining letting me find slippery footing in the rituals of a regular life. I didn’t know exactly what would happen next, but I found myself overwhelmingly relieved that I finally knew where I was going.
Sensory Activation: Things I Was Into This Week
Starting this newsletter has been an online exercise in writing about stuff that’s pretty offline— thoughts and feelings, personal experiences, people close to me— and its been an interesting internal battle to write, delete, and rewrite what may or may not cross my own line of what I do and do not want to share.
’s below article came across my Notes feed and provided a pretty clear-eyed take on what all of this digital bloodletting can amount to. And while it can feel good (sometimes even courageous) to open up about all of our personal issues online— besides the real world repercussions of oversharing, there is a direct line that can be drawn between the dopamine pursuit of likes, views, and followers and the profit margins of all of these social media platforms (Substack itself takes 10% of everything).
I think there are certainly benefits to being more open and sharing, and I’ll readily acknowledge that sometimes it is easier to shout or whisper or confess to a seemingly anonymous audience (before the comments roll in)— but Freya’s cautionary post is a good one. I’m probably too old, and certainly aged-out of the TikTok crowd (who are apparently posting their mental health prescriptions online?), but as someone recently entering the public arena as “cancer guy”, it made for a good gut check.
Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed what you read, please Like, Comment, or Share— it helps boost visibility of the newsletter and is a nice acknowledgement from the void. You can also reply to any email to reach me. Most of all, I love to hear from whoever is reading.
Definitely yes to cancer creating an odd sense of purpose and meaning out of survival, and a strange sense of direction although this did not occur to me until after. Like Karen, it feels good to hear someone else say it. I'm trying to work out what this translates to long term.
Thanks for writing this. Now I don't feel like such a freak when I mention the ways cancer has enriched my life.