The Loneliest Part of Cancer Was Not the Treatment

The treatment plan was not easy, but I could look at dates and break down the steps to complete the road ahead. A thing to count down to generally helps. You brace, you get through it, you cross it off one day at a time. The intensity had a shape and a perceived deadline.

The loneliest part came after, when the checkpoints ran out and there was nothing left to do but think and process what the hell was actually going on. That is when the reality of it hit, and that is when everyone around me seemed to decide I was fine.

My 24th birthday was about one month after I was diagnosed, and the party was one of the most isolating experiences of my life. A room full of people who love me, and I have never felt further away from anyone. I’ll never forget forcing a lame ass smile as everyone sang happy birthday, as if I wasn’t concerned that I might not have another one. It was not their fault. Not one of them (thankfully) could understand the reality of where I was. I found myself looking for reasons to sit alone, because sitting alone was easier than managing everyone else’s comfort while quietly drowning in my own head. At least when I was alone, I did not have to protect anyone from the truth of how I was doing.

That was the exhausting part nobody tells you about. The mask. I wore one at work, where I kept showing up through treatment. I wore one around friends, trying to be normal and social so I could have a life outside of cancer. If I had been the parent of a kid going through this, I would have worn one there too, God knows. I got very good at responding “I’m doing well all things considered.”

The loneliness had specific hot spots. Waiting rooms. Rooms full of people talking about dumb shit like last night’s Yankees game, as if I was supposed to give a crap about that. And, strangely, the subway home from treatment. Something about sitting on that train with a hospital wristband still on my arm, slugging it back into normal life like nothing had happened, hit harder than anything that happened in the actual hospital.

People said things. Well-meaning, most of them, and some of them unforgettable for the wrong reasons. My personal favorite: “well, if you had to pick a cancer to get, thyroid’s the one to pick.” A little effort would have told them that some subtypes are imminently fatal, and that a man my age getting it at all is rare enough that there was barely data to tell me what my odds even were. But that is the thing about those lines. They are not really for you. They are for the person saying them, so they can set the fear down and move on. I remember thinking that I wish I had that option.

What I needed was embarrassingly small. I needed someone to ask how I was doing and genuinely want the real answer, not the “bumpy road but I’ll be fine” version everyone was interested in hearing. And I could not bring myself to ask for even that. It was too sad to me that I would have to. So I said “fine,” and I waited to see who would push past it on their own.

Thank God for the ones that did. One friend was walking his own hard road at the same time, and the two of us built something deep out of trying to keep each other upright. We spoke frequently about how we will get to the end of the tunnel and become such better people as a result, and we both did. He stayed on the phone with me while I was quarantining for radiation, just to keep me company through it. I will never forget that.

My manager at the time drove all the way from Battery Park City to Columbia Hospital to visit me after my operation. He gave me a line his mother used to share with him: the fastest cars are modified. The toy Lamborghini he gave me as a representation of that is on my desk right now. That level of support was so rare, and God bless him for sustaining that while I worked at that company.

The ones who helped the most mentally, they let me finish a God damn sentence. If I said I was afraid of dying, they did not fix it. They would say something like, “that must be terrifying, I can’t even imagine,” and then they just sat there in it with me. That is the whole skill. Not advice. Not a silver lining. Not discounting my experience. The willingness to let it be as heavy as it was and not run from the weight. While it sounds simple, it is very hard to actually do. I am grateful for those who did.

There is one more piece, and it is the hardest to admit. Part of getting better was letting go of an addiction to my own suffering. Inside my extended network, being the sick one had made me an awful kind of ‘celebrity,’ and there was a pull to that I had to fight my way out of. So on top of everyone assuming I was okay, I had this private work no one could see: actually getting the hell away from cancer, even the parts of it that had quietly started to feel like identity. This might have been the scariest and most challenging part of post-treatment.

I am telling you all of this because if you are in it right now, I want you to know the after can be the loneliest stretch, and that does not mean something is wrong with you. And if you love someone who is going through this, you do not need the perfect thing to say. You need to ask the real question, and then let them finish their thoughts.

That is the whole reason this foundation exists, and why we do not disappear when treatment ends. No one should face this on an island, least of all in the part where everyone else has already gone home.

If that is you, please reach out.