Cancer Episode and the Silver Lining

Here is the chapter of my life when everything was turning upside down, for the best, even though it originated from the worse possible news, ever.

I woke up in a hospital room, post-surgery, and the sun was shining bright into the room. From a day that started out with anxiety, it was quietly being replaced with a sense of relief. It is a good day after all. As I am slowly coming back to life, I realized the effects of anesthesiology was very present in my body, which was a first for me. I felt drunk and high as a kite all at the same time. As a 27-year old dude, I was familiar with the concept but this was next level. An automatic party turns on as I realized a few of my friends were already there to cheer me up from this ordeal. One of them brought me a gigantic stuffed bear to keep me company. That thing was HUGE. The atmosphere was joyful in the room. The tumour was removed and everything went back to their original sizes. It was awesome to have them there. I felt relieved and happy. The nurses were kind. Like I was saying, it is a good day after all.

It goes on like this for an hour or 2, people come and go in the hospital room, asking for the latest news or what the doctor had said. People are very curious. The big-C word scares everybody, so the quest for knowledge & updates is palpable. I don’t think I ever received that much attention from so many people in such a short time. I felt like a rock star, even though I have not done anything, besides having the super power of reducing the average number of balls per person in any given room full of people for the rest of my life. Yes, that thought crossed my mind. Regardless, I think people have a thing for bad news. Thank god, it is not me in there they might be thinking. You can feel that this is what they are saying to themselves, even though they would never say that out loud. People can’t help themselves but compare, which is fine. Their presence & love was genuine and I felt like I can go through anything.

A nurse comes in and gave me the latest. She said the operation went well and there was nothing unusual to report about it. They sent the tumour for analysis and we will get more news about this next week. By that point, I have already surrendered to the medical staff. I was not questioning anything. I just had a ‘do what I am told’ attitude, which was the best I could find to go through this with ease somehow. I had already accepted my fate of a potential death. Anything above that baseline was cause for celebration! As much as I appreciated the company I had in the room, it occurred to me that I would not want to stay on that bed for long. I am a typical hyper active kinda guy, and I had work to do. Then the nurse said something along the lines of: if you can stand up and walk to the bathroom, you can get out of here. Really? That sounded like a challenge to me. Remember, I am still high from the anesthesia but I had an audience in the room wondering if I can pull this off. I roll out of the bed and I can barely stand up. After a few seconds wobbling around, I was finally able to start walking towards the bathroom and then I made my way back to the bed, without incident. I looked at the nurse, and said: so, what do you think? Is it satisfactory enough for you? Sure enough, she let me go. That turned out to be a very bad decision.

So, my aunt and uncle picked me up and brought me to their place to recuperate. I was not doing much that afternoon, as expected. The phone rang and there was the doctor who conducted the operation a few hours earlier and he sounded pissed off, but he was laughing at the same time. There was some kind of a mix of pride & reprimand. He said: I have been doing Urology for 30 years and I have never seen a patient getting out of the hospital so quickly after a surgery! It felt good to be part of the history book to be honest. This doctor will remember me for quite some time then. I felt special. Nonetheless, that was a bad decision to start moving so soon post-surgery. An infection made its way where they operated and it started to be very painful. Day by day, it was getting worse. My birthday was slowly coming up and coincidentally we had to schedule for another surgery to fix the infection. It would happen on September 8, 1999. This is when it started to be more challenging. Post-surgery, that time around, I was not allowed to go anywhere. I think the doctor had me on a 24h watch, don’t let this dude escape-type list. I stayed in the hospital for 2 weeks or so. I had my lesson.

Can we examine you, with a group of students?

This is when things started to become interesting though. The word has gone around with regards to my cancer and the subsequent infection, and now, since I remained in the hospital for a longer time, that gave the opportunity for many doctors, and their respective teams of students, to come and investigate the various issues I had been dealing with. The funny part about this is that doctors would come and see me in my room and they would ask questions that sounded like this:

“Alex, I am doctor so and so, I hope by now you are aware that your cancer is very rare and on top of that it had complications, and as a result, it presents an enormous opportunity for us to learn more about this type of cancer, and we would love to know, if possible, we would be very grateful if we could bring a group of students to examine you further. It is part of the science project each student must complete before the end of the semester.”

I mean, their approach was so polite & thoughtful, it was impossible to say no. It never crossed my mind to disagree. There we went with the revolving door of doctors, nurses and students, examining my thing on a daily basis. After a few days of this, I realized I would be showing my dick to a lot of people. I think I was averaging 20 to 50 people per day. It became so normal that every time someone came in the room, I automatically lift my blue robe to let them do their thing, even for unrelated requests like blood tests, which amused me. I enjoyed it and I became very used to it. The silver lining of having cancer was gradually making its way in and I felt grateful to be able to contribute positively to the evolution of science in some small way.

They later told me, Alex, listen, we have received the results of the biopsy of the tumour and as it turned out, your cancer is very vey rare. Of all the testicular cancers, yours is within the top 3% of a specific type and not only that, you are within 1% of that top 3%. It only happens once in Canada every few years or so. There will be lots of doctors and students examining you, because we are not even sure what we want to do with you. So, we created a group of doctors and we are discussing together our most unique and challenging cases and yours is the most interesting we have at the moment. We are not sure about what next steps will be but we will let you know soon. You see? This is special. And you wonder why I call this project I’m Feeling Lucky!

The Silver Lining

There is something magical when something like this happens to you, assuming you don’t die from it, obviously. I think a lot of people are talking about this topic these days, which is the importance of pain in your life and the role it plays. How would you know what to work on, if you don’t experience pain that basically indicates where to look? We should be thankful for pain. We should be grateful to being thrown curve balls because those are springboards. I was lucky enough to have that experience and that gave me a spark that I did not have before. There has been quite a fire burning since then, I am telling you. For sure, when it happens, it is awful, why me? You can’t see the silver lining, but there is one. You have to look for it. It is a blessing in disguise. People talk about this crap all the time. It sounds so cliché, but it true. For me, having cancer was a catalyst for change. It indicated an urgent need to make drastic decisions, because the clock is ticking and tomorrow is not a sure thing for anybody. We all know about this, but where is the sense of urgency? I learned that lesson the hard way perhaps, and it did hit the spot. I am very glad it happened to me at such a young age.

I have seen so many people in my life that I have gone through things, but somehow it was not painful enough for them to start questioning their own lives and start making new sets of decisions. I find it sad to be honest. They appear certain about what they are doing, even though it comes across as ‘I know what I like and I like what I know’ and their ego keeps them in status quo. There has never been a crisis to bring them out of their comfort zone, and shake them through their core to motivate them to stand up for themselves and clean their slate of everything that is not working for them, or to chase a dream, whatever it is. That is the best analogy of what I did. I removed everything and everyone from my plate completely and then I restarted the process from the ground up, adding bits and pieces in my plate, one by one and only after careful review. Having cancer is the best thing that ever happened to me.

I was unsuspecting of what would be coming next though.

The Big One

A few weeks go by, I started working again with the boys, working on the aventurecanada.com website and internet marketing strategies. I continued reading on internet marketing and started implementing the rudiments of SEO, link building, directory submissions, website submissions to search engines. In 1999, the concept of submitting your website to hundreds of search engines was standard practice. There were tools to help get the job done automatically, but we could also do it manually. There was of course the Yahoo! Directory & DMOZ (aka. The Open Directory Project) that were great sources of traffic at the time and we were discovering ways to make sure the website would be found based on targeted search terms based on website name, website content, company name, domain name, and its specific location within the directories themselves. The basis of SEO was definitely making its way around the necessity to start thinking in terms of keywords, relative density & complementarity, as well as gaining an understanding of the algorithms we were up against for each search engine. I was slowly getting into it. It felt pretty cool to craft decent page titles, meta descriptions and understanding all these on-page SEO factors but also the role of link building in driving traffic through referrals. I fell in love with that stuff because we could see the impact it had in search engine results pages (SERPS) and overall traffic levels relatively quickly. By that time, I really felt like I had my life back. I started running again and was actively involved in numerous activities.

The phone rang one of these days when I felt that the cancer ordeal was more or less behind me. Doctor said, I need to see you to present you the next steps. Next Steps? What next steps? For some reason, she wanted to make this meeting face to face. So, here we go, back to the hospital and sit down with the doc. She looked very serious and said the following:

Due to the rarity of your cancer, we got together with the group of specialized doctors and discuss your case in a great level of details. As a following cancer treatment, we are not sure if we would be recommending radiotherapy or chemotherapy, so we decided that we would operate you and clean you up manually instead. We will remove all remaining cancer cells we could find by opening you up. This is a very serious surgery that will last for 10-12 hours. We will give you an epidural. And this time though, you will be unrecognizable when you wake up. You will be a wreck. You will have something like 10 machines connecting to you and you will feel like a zombie. You won’t be able to swallow. There will be a tube all the way down your throat that will be very irritating. You won’t be able to eat for a week at least. I am telling you. You are not going to like this but this is the best course of action. You will have to learn to walk again and the remission will be calculated in months this time. It won’t be easy, so get yourself mentally ready.

Tabarnak. I could not believe this. Again, a week go by as I am preparing myself for that important surgery. I remember I woke up that morning thinking, maybe, this is the last time I ever wake up. I may die today on that operation room. It happens. This is the weirdest feeling you can get as I made my way to the hospital, feeling completely helpless. It felt like going to the slaughterhouse. This time I was nervous as fuck, excuse my french. There were not enough tranquilizers in the hospital to keep me calm. They eventually figured it out and brought me in the operation room. Man, this room is huge. It is even bigger than last time. There are machines everywhere. A bunch of guys came in to immobilize me, while they inject something down my spine. They are telling me this is called an epidural. Whatever. Can you just make sure I don’t die today? That would be great. Doctor comes in. She is in a good mood. Well, that is reassuring. She says, don’t worry, I have done a lot of those surgeries before. With any luck, I might even be able to preserve the ejaculation. Preserving what? Yes, we will have to cut a bunch of stuff down there. It is not sure yet how much you will be able to ejaculate after this surgery, but I will do my best. Your best? Please, good luck today doctor. Anesthetist came in and here we go again. This time, I am not looking forward to waking up.