(This is part four of a series. You can read part one here, part two here, part three here, and the free book that started it all here.) My first official treatment was the real dose of the experimental procedure. They rolled out the red carpet for it, too. The nurse spent hours readying the room prior to my arrival. …
The Seattle Journal 3
(This is part three of a series. You can read part one here, part two here, and the book that started it all — which is free, by the way — here.) How could I forget to tell you about the tentacular chest dongles? Before we went up to Seattle, I was told that I needed something put in me …
The Seattle Journal 2
Note: This is Part Two of probably a three-part story. You can read Part One here, and the book that started it all here. Not long before we headed up to Seattle, my wife, Sarah and her mother, Pam, organized an emergency family meeting. Our whole lives were about to turn upside down, so they figured we should get everyone …
The Seattle Journal
At the beginning of 2014 I was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Near the end of January I started chemo therapy, and four months later the cancer was completely gone. However, about four months after that it was back. And that’s where this story begins. (To read more about those initial months, though, be sure to check out my …
A Wonderful World
Sometimes it’s easy to forget how beautiful the world around us is. In fact, many of us have. We are often so consumed with hate one for another, or fear for the future, or stress about work and family and life. We are so overwhelmed with the tragic, grungy particulars screaming for our attention that we completely miss the gorgeous, …
Going Home
World-weary and travel-worn, we turned our dusty black sedan down the long gravel driveway. At the end ahead of us, waiting, was an old, Swiss-style house, all peaks and doors and sweeping curves and decks. Parking on the slab of concrete, we turned off the car and climbed into the dusky air. One of the two French double doors opened …
In Our Ruins
When I was very young, my grandfather died in a car accident. Well, that’s not entirely true. He actually survived the car accident. But he did not survive the medical care that followed. There was some talk, to my understanding, that there were grounds for a medical malpractice suit. However, I know for a fact there was a great deal …
We Are Reborn
“This must be what it feels like when you begin to die.” That thought hit me one day when I was sitting alone in my room in the hospital. It wasn’t a melancholy thought: it wasn’t despairing. It was more of a stop-breathing, “whoa” moment. Because it was true. I had just finished a week-long stint of a lethal chemo …
Advent
There are two times a year when mankind as a collective group acknowledges the thinness between our world and another. When we admit there might be more than the eye can behold and the fingers can touch. When we all bask and bathe in Wonder. Those two times are Halloween and Christmas. And of these two, the first cannot hold …
Advent: I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
The snow falls in soft whispers as you crunch down the sidewalk. Cars trundle down the road beside you, windshield wipers swishing, swishing as the drivers clench their steering wheels with white knuckles. Breath hisses in ribbons from your mouth, curling up to the blanket of clouds draped high above. A sound drifts up to tickle your ears from off …