Patient Experience

Four Months, Four Years, Four Lessons: Notes on Survivorship

“My surgeons’ skills have added time to my life, more time with my wife, more time with my kids. Thank you to my entire medical team.”

Adam, October 13, 2016

I published my first blog post to this site in early October, 2016. That post came right around four months after hospital discharge (the “Four Months” in the title of this post). I checked into the surgery floor at IU Health Methodist Hospital with Whitney early in the morning, May 26, 2016. Four years ago, to this day, May 26, 2020 (“Four Years” in the title).

In my first personal blog post, I wrote the words you see quoted above. I include those words here to signal my continued gratitude for my team. These thanks are well placed, as our family recognizes this significant day in our calendar.

Today marks four years after my craniotomy and surgical removal of a seven centimeter primary brain tumor from my right parietal lobe, an area of the brain responsible for five major functions, including sensation, motor control, and spatial reasoning.

Today we met (virtually) with my neuro-oncologist to hear the results of my recent MRI scan completed Saturday (May 23, 2020). This is a scan we will not soon forget. Masked, we entered the hospital Emergency Department because the general radiology entrance is closed on the weekends. (Radiology shares a back hallway with the ED for trauma-related imaging.) The security checkpoint includes a metal detector that reminds us of the complex social conditions that surround the lives of some people cared for at the county hospital. We also wondered what further precautions would shape the encounter during a time of covid-19 related restrictions.

Worth mentioning, also, after an area of slight concern appeared on our prior MRI in February, our oncologist recommended adding an imaging technique called perfusion to this recent scan. The perfusion technique lengthens the duration of the procedure by several minutes and includes placement of an IV and additional injection (beyond the routine contrast dye) to study blood flow.

Here we were, then: After four years, something like 25-30 scans, despite our typical anxiety (scanxiety) that accompanies each routine MRI, we faced new circumstances, if only slight disruptions: Whitney’s recent course of illness after testing covid positive, the masks we donned, the secure entrance, distancing from others in the registration line, the new imaging technique, the empty hospital absent of visitors, and the pervading concern that maybe we were catching new tumor growth in its nascency.

Our visit this morning revealed news of a positive outcome: The scan shows no new growth, and our doc chalked up the concerning area to late-effect radiation damage. We might relax our concern for the near-term, and we look to August for our next routine MRI.

I do not want to let this day pass without offering something constructive after 48 months living with a disease that kills many in half that time (“Four Lessons”). These are not definitive, action-guiding principles for life. They are simpler. They are variations on a theme that I shared during a talk at Stanford Medicine X in 2019, refined and updated for my presentation at the End Well Symposium at the end of last year, and shaped by the contours of my personal manuscript that hopefully finds its way to print over the next year. These are lessons from living, while dying.

Consider your quality of life today. When faced with a decision in the operating room to pursue aggressive surgery at the risk of left-sided paralysis or take a conservative approach that would protect my motor function but leave tumor remaining in the margins of the surgical area in my brain, my surgeon instructed that I, “Make a decision based on your quality of life today, not what you think it may be in the future.” This turns out to be good advice for living in general, not only in the operating room. Each of us has an uncertain future. It is good to plan for the future, mitigate against harms and obstacles, and yet all any of us have for sure is the present moment. Arrange your life so that it aligns with your desired quality of life today, not an imagined future.

Face fear with familiarity. Focusing on the present and allowing the future to unfold is frightening because it asks first that we allow the uncertain and unknown into our lives. I suggest that we face fear with familiarity. What information is available to us today? What is within our control today? What is the immediate source of our negative emotions and intrusive thoughts? Becoming familiar with those things we may attend to in the present helps us acknowledge our fears, not to escape or dismiss them, but to become familiar with the inner workings of our brains that are wired to alert us to danger, even when that threat isn’t right in front of us. Familiarity is the antidote to fear, and I am reticent even to express this sentiment because fear is not intrinsically bad. Allow yourself to fully experience that breadth of human emotion, but center yourself with the focus on what is present and at-hand.

Consider what to say to a cancer patient. When I instruct others to consider quality of life today and leave the future uncertain and unknown, I am flirting with everyone’s favorite thing to say to cancer patients, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow.” This phrase and the war metaphors that are prevalent in disease rhetoric are two facets of the illness experience that I’ve objected to in blog posts, tweets, and op-eds. They are more than unhelpful; they are harmful. Taking the latter first, the problem with framing cancer as a fight or battle minimizes the potential for wholeness and wellbeing that are available when an illness is embraced into our life narratives. A war leaves casualties, winners, and losers. Surviving is not a victory and death is not a failure to fight. Instead, maturity and growth through illness are possible, whether treatment leaves us with no evidence of disease or end-stage progression. Wars and battles leave little room for growth and acceptance, what scholars call existential maturity.

This advice specifically, and the next, are sensitive to the context of the patient and their preferences. I know many patients who frame their own experience as a fight, and that is their metaphor to claim. For me, in my most insightful moments, I’ve felt more the sage than the soldier. Illness leaves us with wisdom, not war.

Rethinking thoughts and prayers. This is a tricky one. We each are licensed to our beliefs, and all of us should extend as much charitable interpretation as possible to the words that others speak to us. I remind myself often that others express their very best intentions, and those intentions supersede the literal words they use. Though I’ll say this, it is very common for folks to cope with another’s serious illness by fitting that person’s illness into a Divine plan. I cannot get on board with this. It does not fit my conception of The Divine to imagine that I was singled out, given a potentially life-limiting disease, and by those circumstances, forced our kids to face the loss of a parent, so that God could teach a lesson through my experience. For God, whatever God is, surely there is a better way to teach lessons than clamp me to a table and open my skull. When encouraging someone facing illness, center your religious beliefs in what brings you comfort as the friend and observer, but be careful not to thrust your beliefs onto the person experiencing the illness. I recognize that your show of support for me is expressed through your carefully considered prayer and meditation for my healing, but healing may not be a cure. The healing may be my acceptance that no cure is available.

As you move forward, navigating these uncertain times of public health crisis, you may consider these lessons that I’ve practiced these four years: Align your decisions to your desired quality of life today. Live presently and familiarize yourself with those things that you fear. Consider healing, wellbeing, wholeness, and personal growth that may come through experiencing illness. And extend charity to others while respecting their beliefs.

On Survivorship, from the Survivors

“Why does mommy have to work all the time?” Our three year old, Gideon, asked through broken sobs when I greeted him at his crib one recent morning.

“I’m sorry, buddy, we all miss her, don’t we,” I replied, my own eyes blurry and breath shortened, choking back tears of my own.

Later this same day, or the day after, rinsing dishes following breakfast I began sobbing.

“Are you sick, daddy?” Gideon asked.

“Yeah, bud, daddy is sick,” I say.

“Are you going to throw up?”

“No,” I chuckle.

Scenes like this play out frequently, swapping the subjects and settings, themes are similar.

Our family is slogging through a waste-deep sludge of survivorship, and like quick sand, we seem to sink more each day. The new experiences of active cancer care are behind us. The quick wins and short-lived milestones are long past. Setting our eyes to the horizon reveals more angst than anticipation.

We lug the bags of survivor’s guilt behind us, recognizing we have these moments together, moments that many families did not.

We lug the bags of insecurity, too, second guessing our decisions to work, to keep busy, to be productive, to send the kids off to daycare so that I may sit in an empty house to write in an effort to satisfy a life project–papers, books, or posts–at the cost to my family of lost wages and absent parenting.

Whitney experiences terrible guilt leaving the house each morning. I feel terrible guilt that she has to.

I sat across the coffee shop table from a close friend last week, a rare trip out of the house. I shared with him the idea I was trying to make sense of: when I search for meaning and purpose, in light of my predicament–uncertain life expectancy, a desire to live fully today, a desire to aid Whitney with financial stability, a desire to achieve future aims–I am motivated to say something helpful to others about what it is to grieve the loss of future possibilities that will likely never come to be.

“I’ve never thought about this before,” said my friend, “but now that you say it, it seems so obvious! You’re experiencing things we all experience in our lives, but your experience is more […] compressed.”

I nodded.

I’ve alerted myself to this insight also. Several months following my diagnosis, when I was wrestling with acceptance of a terrible disease and what it amounted to for my life and the life of my family I expressed something similar, “my life is like everyone else’s,” I said, “but the volume has been turned up.” I was trying to get at this notion that each of us gives some thought to our relationships, to goals and priorities, to what legacy we build, and to thinking of our own mortality. For me, these occasional considerations are amplified. Or, as my friend put it, “compressed.” They become daily, high-pressure considerations and decision points.

“A lot of people work through the decisions you’re making, and they take 20 or so years to do it.” This was the response from a friend, a palliative care physician, when I rattled off the horizon of possibilities for my future direction, possibilities that narrow more each day. “But of course, you don’t have 20 years, do you?”

I am a member of a loving brain tumor community including patients, care partners, loved ones, researchers, and clinicians. Struggling with survivorship, I set out to write this post–in fact, much of what you just finished reading was my first pass–in hopes it would meet others where they are, in their own struggles as a spouse, child, sibling, parent or guardian, also slogging through survivorship. Then I realized, we are a community, and if the sign posts I’ve been reading are correct to signal I speak in ways that amplify the experience of others, how might we all learn together from our shared yet unique experiences.

I posed the following question vis-a-vis Twitter (in the following quote, I spelled out the hashtag acronyms, with brackets):

Drafting a blog post today about #survivorship. What issues do you find most challenging to navigate after the dust settles from the shock of diagnosis? #btsm [brain tumor social media] #btsmqol [brain tumor social media quality of life] #ptexp [patient experience]”

The community responded with thoughtful, vulnerable, and honest replies. My mood immediately lightened as I experienced the embrace of a community that stands shoulder to shoulder with each other as we experience our disease from our unique perspectives. In the following paragraphs, I report on many of the replies I received to my prompt. As a note of caution, I quote responsibly, but I also present these replies thematically through the lens of my own worldview. As we say on Twitter, retweets are not endorsements, and opinions are mine only!

I consider it an important observation that an inability to work and provide for one’s family is one of the most noted difficulties when navigating a brain tumor diagnosis. I ask rhetorically what does it suggest about our culture that in the face of serious illness it is employment and income with which we find our selves concerned? In my life I’ve sacrificed time on personal projects in order to fit in working hours to earn income. This is a perennial issue for me. My good friend @JBHarp82 put things most bluntly. She replies, “Guilt:feeling like a burden on others at times when unable to do things ie: not working full time to contribute financially as before.” Another reply suggests the painful loss of productivity, “it’s disheartening that while I don’t feel less intelligent, I am much less productive” (@mcintose)

It seems addressing, defining, measuring, and evaluating value and productivity are possible gaps for people living in a period of survivorship. How might our goals of care better close this gap?

Our social life is impacted, and this theme shows up in many replies, “Dealing with family/friends who say, ‘you’ve changed'” writes @PatientAdvocac4. A more direct critique comes from @Lahla42928400, “…being careful about who I let in- too many assholes out there…” Before you find that remark too harsh, here it is in softer language, Again, @JBHarp, “Loneliness:everyone comes out of the woodwork offering support but once the initial shock wears off & surgery/initial treatments & restrictions are lifted, you don’t hear from anyone anymore it seems.”

Our friends play such a vital role in helping to process our experiences, and we need those friends to match our tenor. @Emi_Livingston gave voice to this concern, “dealing with people who are still in the ‘shock’ phase, and/or who focus on the negative when we want to embrace what’s normal and focus on moving forward actively.”

How might we better revise our cultural and social norms to encourage friends of those with serious illness to remain engaged through all stages of care, not only the most acute and interventional stages following disease onset and diagnosis?

The anxiety of survivorship comes up again and again: worries about the next MRI (@JBHarp82), “Waiting for shoe to drop recurrence (already thinking of next one and just beating this time,” wrote @RipsRant. With a reminder that patients are not only tuned to their disease, @inewsham offers this insight, “Hearing about others whose cancer has returned and trying to keep those fears at bay.” For example, the death of Senator John McCain rippled through the brain tumor community regardless of political, demographic, and socioeconomic lines, I do not only speak for myself when I say we collectively mourned for the Senator that day.

Another theme to emerge is the drive toward acceptance of the “new normal.” “You’re all brave amazing people,” cheers @ChloeDrew8. She continued, “The new ‘normal’/facing life so differently to before is not to be underestimated.” The tremendous resilience and effort toward acceptance is visceral in this comment from @NancyNHuang, “I’m 2 years out and can pass for normal, but have come to realize that I will never fully recover. That is hard.” Or imagine this experience reported by @Project2Program, “After two surgeries, double radiation treatments, clinical trials, multiple chemo treatments and recovery from adverse events our biggest challenge in terms of #QOL [quality of life] is fatigue.” Striking a chord with balancing factors, @Sabine_NJ writes, “now:parenting; balance between living life (traveling) and family life.”

How might our care teams come alongside the persons under their care to pursue aims in light of the “new normal”? What we call the new normal is this period many call survivorship, and the challenges exceed those I mentioned in this post, which were: value and productivity, social life, anxiety, and ultimately accepting a new phase of one’s life, one that is like everyone else’s, maybe, but amplified and compressed.

How might we all better learn from the experiences of the seriously ill?

I was not able to include all of the many replies to my prompt. I thank all who ‘liked’ and ‘retweeted’ the question. To follow all the incredible members of our community, please navigate to Twitter and search hashtag #BTSM

Surviving to bear witness

Sunday, June 10, 2018 marks two years after Whitney and I were transported in a wheelchair accessible van from an inpatient acute rehab facility to the IU Health neuroscience center. We sat in my neuro oncologist’s office and received news of my glioblastoma diagnosis. A kind, compassionate nurse who would become more than a member of our care team, but also a dear friend, held each of our hands.

I am unsure of what to say on the day of this important milestone, but I am compelled to offer a few words–really, the task of this blog.

I published my first post to this blog in October 2016. The staff physiatrist discharged me from inpatient rehab four months prior, and I received the GBM diagnosis only weeks before that discharge. In October 2016, I recently completed a six-week daily chemo and radiotherapy protocol, and I began the ‘maintenance’ chemotherapy cycle: five days, high-dose chemo, followed by 23 days off, and repeat.

I struggled to settle into a rhythm and direction for this blog.

Early posts revealed a thinking-out-loud style of scientific explanation, connections with philosophy, and personal narrative about a young man, husband, dad, brother, and son, internalizing a devastating cancer diagnosis. I wrote many posts with an aim in mind that never fully materialized. Posts proved too scientific for casual readers, too flimsy for academics, and too personal for many friends. I continued to write, striking a chord with some here and there. Often the reader thanked me for keeping everyone up to date, among other encouraging remarks, noting my positive attitude, vulnerability, and bravery. On the latter, I call up Abraham Verghese writing the Forward to Paul Kalanithi’s, When Breath Becomes Air. Verghese (roughly) remarks, “how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way.”

If there is bravery to recognize, it is rooted in my vulnerability.

In July 2017, nearly one year after our trip to the neuroscience center, news broke of Senator John McCain’s diagnosis. I was first notified in a tweet (a “mention”) by an academic colleague. I wept. I wept for the Senator and his family, for me, and for my family. I wrote an open letter to McCain to be published in medical journalism outlet, STAT News. The letter received an overwhelming response from people affected in one way or another by GBM, including newly diagnosed patients, others living with the disease, care partners of those with the disease, and relatives of people with GBM who died.

Article comments, increased blog traffic, and a full inbox signaled that my commitment to continued writing and posting found an audience. That audience, my audience, includes those closely impacted by this disease. Comments and emails expressed an important and instructive theme: people seek to tell their stories and impetus to do so may be triggered when people share a common suffering. GBM is diagnosed in three people per 100,000. This qualifies GBM as rare. Compare GBM incidence to breast cancer, which is diagnosed in one person per every eight. Nearly 300,000 people are diagnosed annually with breast cancer, contrasted with 14,000 cases of glioblastoma.

Consider the disparity in incidence rate.

I note these statistics only to emphasize the reality that if you’re looking for a resource to discuss your illness experience, the peer population is disproportionately small contrasted with the horror of the disease, for those with rare diseases such as GBM.

It is an honor to receive and reply to emails from people impacted by GBM. Many of these patients and care partners are now friends. Sadly, I have heard from loved ones about the death of people I emailed with frequently. It is a sample size of a population dying in the thousands each year; nonetheless, these are deeply personal losses. I am humbled to consider that in the final weeks, maybe days, before death, I was in active dialogue with a (now) late friend. I thank the loved ones who exhibited vulnerability, hence bravery, to open an inbox, to read email conversation threads, and to inform an unknown person on the other end of an optical fiber cable their loved one is now gone.

After living with this disease for two years, I extend my deepest gratitude to those who follow my journey. Thank you. We mark this milestone together.

To the patients and care partners who look to me for next steps in their own journey, or to reflect in the rear view mirror to recall and process their own experiences, I mention the broad range of experiences shared across a rare disease population, but notice each is unique to the individual.

Telling our stories to each other, to our social circles of influence, and to our clinicians is an effective way to locate our agency, that is, to discover those outcomes for which we may exercise control, amidst a disease and circumstance for which an abundance of variables exist outside of our control. Expressing our experiences through storytelling is an effective means of establishing a supportive network who endure the journey alongside us, and yes, to celebrate our milestones.

It is a fitting conclusion to say a few things about where I am today. The reality is when given a life-limiting diagnosis like GBM, everything changes, yet, surprisingly maybe, nothing changes. I am still uncertain of which alternative is favored: for all to be different or a return to the familiar.

Frustratingly, maybe, but not uncommon in spaces between such tension, the answer lies in the middle.

Many think, mistakenly, by my judgment, that a life-limiting diagnosis affords an opportunity to sort out priorities and pursue “what matters most.” For many, physical impairment, cognitive deficit, decreased life expectancy, and financial toxicity limit the pursuit of new or revised priorities and mythologized bucket lists.

What is different is the perspective that must be adopted. You still must do the laundry, but you fold the shirts with acute knowledge of your own mortality.

Two years following my diagnosis, the Adam that existed pre-diagnosis is dissimilar from the Adam, now two years on. Though, these historically competing personal identities are far from strangers. I continue to enjoy coffee with former faculty and friends, I recently submitted with a friend and colleague a co-authored chapter to an academic press, I try, and often fall short, to balance my responsibilities to my wife and family with my own aims and personal projects. I returned to work. I maintain responsibility for house chores that I am capable of completing. These activities are familiar and routine.

After an especially busy travel season, where I was in Chicago, D.C. twice, and San Fransisco within a six or seven week period, my wife reminded me that while I aim to leave a legacy in the world, my greatest contribution to the future is a commitment to be present with the family; with our boys. This tension exposes the dual nature of illness: to serve ourselves before we cannot, or to serve others while we can.

There is little success to be found in chronic and advanced illness. There is no victory, fighting, nor conquering. I find these frameworks for illness harmful. So also, there is no succumbing to disease nor losing the battle. There is life. There is death. What there is, is enduring. Enduring is another name for survivorship. We survive to bear witness. Bearing witness is vulnerability, and it is vulnerability we recognize as bravery. Survivors are constrained to record their experiences. To leave behind something permanent from the ephemeral.

If there is something Whitney and I have sought to teach others, lessons we learned ourselves, it is we live to bear witness to endure each day. Our endurance is strengthened when we commit ourselves to being on the journey with others. Thank you for hearing our story and for telling us yours.

Enduring. With vulnerability. With bravery. Together.

June 10, 2016; June 10, 2018.

xoxo.

What We Gain Through Shared Language

And he’s on the table and gone to code/ And I do not think that anyone knows/ What they’re doing here” -“Jumper,” Third Eye Blind

My mom delivered me in a hospital with no staff anesthesiologist, and her care was provided by a general practitioner, not an OB. The story goes that when the doctor asked what my name would be, “Adam,” the doctor repeated a “poem” he knew called,”Fleas”: “Adam had ’em.” That was Putnam County Hospital.

I was raised in Arizona for many important developmental years, from four years old until 12. A pastor’s kid (“PK”). After some time in Phoenix, our family moved to a small rental home in an affluent Scottsdale community, near the new church build my dad was leading, with tremendous support from mom. I was never much struck by this disparity between our 1,500 square feet and our neighbors’ 3,000. The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to wealth is not by ordination.

My childhood best friend owned lazer tag vests, guns, and even the LT base. He had a Commodore 64 and Nintendo. So long as I managed to be a good friend and an entertaining guest, there wasn’t much need for me to have those things, too. (There’s something of neoliberalism to speak to here, but I’m not a political scientist.)

We moved back home to Indiana in the middle of my sixth grade year. That was a tough move.

In 1996, I started high school. I was too young to catch Nirvana’s Nevermind a few years earlier. Girls were using pencil erasers to create negative space on the covers of their Mead notebooks in the form of the flying W, representing Weezer, and Green Day would be my bus companion on the way home–where my route would take me by Whitney’s house (my now wife), but we were only passing acquaintances then. Besides, she had an older brother with a car.

I was bullied on that bus. I started skateboarding home. Skating traded in emotional bruises for physical.

By 1996 my Green Day interest fueled a deeper dive into whatever punk rock was accessible in the Midwest: Rancid, Anti-Flag, NOFX, and the skate punk, Lagwagon, Pennywise, the Descendants, and Screeching Weasel.

In 1998, many of us fell for Third Eye Blind. “Jumper” was one of those radio singles that, along with tracks from Foo Fighters, seemed to transcend high school niche communities.

This morning I washed breakfast dishes, and without prompting, I started singing, “I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.” Isaac, perceptive, always listening, was strolling around humming and piecing those words together. I called him over, and we listened to a few 3eb tracks. Throughout life we wrap ourselves in lies to our own detriment (“Cut ties, with all the lies, that we’ve been living in.”) This is poignantly so in high school, and so the lyrics of that song unified an adolescent spirit.

***

I am active in medical eduction (#MedEd), on the periphery, anyway. I promote medical humanities, narrative medicine, or empathetic witnessing–there isn’t enough scholarship available yet to draw clear boundaries around sub-specialties, and this is probably good.

Being a patient advocate is an uphill road. There are receptive institutions, and receptivity increases more each lecture and conference, but fighting imposter syndrome is a struggle–what right do I have to teach these doctors? A senior resident has nearly a decade combined of undergraduate pre-med and med school training, not to mention 24 hour rotations through major departments, running codes, delivering babies, identifying pill-seeking behaviors, establishing relationships with patients while maintaining objective distance, and coming up with poems about newborns.

I have had glioblastoma for 22months. What right do I have to give a Grand Rounds? (Note: I haven’t given a Grand Rounds, so someone invite me!) I reflected with a friend recently on my strategy to engage a clinical audience. I talked about how hard I work to cultivate a medical vocabulary: to translate my experience into the physician’s vernacular. When discussing my diagnosis, I emphasize “histologic vs molecular pathology and classification of tumors.” I do not adjust my medications, I “engage in monitoring and medication self-titration.” I only rarely talk about “scans,” instead, “diagnostic imaging.”

The idea is this: to gain credibility in the healthcare space, I demonstrate my aptitude with jargon to earn my seat at your table. This is not only the patient’s burden, medical hierarchy itself is a power structure, where those with training, experience, and knowledge sit atop those with lesser of these.

The error I commit when accepting the encumbrance of fitting my language to yours is that we are somehow peers, and I must demonstrate thus to be respected, and only those who earn respect are listened to. That may be a problem of the dominator hierarchy rife in medicine, but, and I’m now coming to realize, this isn’t my problem to solve. Indeed, it is not a problem by which I am directly impacted, medical miscommunication and poor handling of complex cases, notwithstanding.

Stakeholders in a diverse project with shared aims need not be peers to be colleagues.

I do not speak the language of medicine. I speak the language of humanities. When the doctor in training was dissecting cadavers, I was reconstructing medieval arguments for god’s existence. Starkly contrasting research, one would think, but when viewed like this, mapping the body (med students) and understanding what our greatest thinkers have claimed about the purported deity that ostensibly designed it thus (philosophy students), the lines are blurred.

I aim to be competent in the language of medicine, but no longer to earn the respect of my practitioner audience, but to best understand the disease that plagues my body. The practitioner audience may learn my language, too, not to publish papers in professional philosophy, but to best understand the life-world of people under their care.

Doctors, we are not peers, but that does not entail we are not colleagues. We, each of us, seek to improve the lives of others, and in that pursuit, we have many shared aims. That is what we gain through shared language. Let’s move forward together, as colleagues. It takes expertise on both ends of the stethoscope to chart our future path.

After all, “Everyone has got a reason to put the past away.”

Measure What Matters

At the funeral, in the foyer of the church, amidst the sea of grieving strangers, herding their way into the receiving line, he said to me, “I wish my dad would hug me. I’m not sure he’s even said ‘I love you.’”

Don’t be misled; the funeral isn’t for his old man. Time remains to reconcile the regrets. To offer a hug and say, “I love you.”

I recall shoe gazing and nodding in furrowed-brow and puzzled empathy.

“I hug my kids,” I thought, two of them then, three now, “all the damned time.” Later that same day I was blowing raspberries on my middle’s exposed belly while those earlier words—“wish he’d hug me,” paced a groove in my mind. My boys likely wish I hugged a little less. I suspect their aversion will increase, with their ages, culminating with outright avoidance come middle school. The baby, though, “Little Adam,” he still goes for three big squeezes and a smooch at bedtime.

This is the stuff funerals are for, prioritizing, reflecting, like an off-cycle New Year’s resolution. We die so that the living can figure out what they’re supposed to be doing. I suppose this is why it’s uncomfortable to attend funerals.

A financial advisor, an acquaintance, posted to Facebook, “What counts as rich? Not rich with friends or family, but assets, holdings, a salary. I want a number,” the post concluded (my emphasis). Comments followed (though, not mine). The only sense in which I am rich is the former.

The problem, I suppose, with measuring wealth in relationships, is presupposed by the financial advisor: it is not quantitatively evaluable. What we measure is what matters. A quantity of relationships is not the desired end, otherwise Facebook would be good for us, instead, it is the quality we ought to measure, yet no quality scale exists for relationships.

It is evaluation that resonates with me. As a person living with an advanced illness, measurement and evaluation are central to my life. Occupational and physical therapists evaluate strength, balance, coordination, and range of motion, radiologists employ imaging protocols to measure changes in my brain that are indicative of disease response to treatment or progression, my neuro-oncologist evaluates the physical symptoms of disease, looking to maximize therapeutic efficacy and mitigate side effects. Ultimately my wife and I revise the probability of my continued survival given a set of variables informed by many of these inputs I described. In a technical sense, this is conditional probability. In real life, it is nail biting. Each time I cannot remember a name, forget a word, lose my balance, complain of light-headedness, or trip on the turned-up corner of the threshold rug is cause to scrutinize the event. Will we look back on this moment, as the first sign of my cognitive decline?

Folks like to say things like the following to comfort me—though I suspect it is more to comfort them, in the face of my seemingly random and devastating diagnosis, “I could get hit by a bus tomorrow. None of us know when we will die.”

Fair, but unless each time you cross the street you think to yourself, “Will this be the time that I am struck dead by a bus?” then you are drawing a false equivalency between the uncertain timelines for our passing. This sort of thinking, the sort of thinking where every misstep raises a flag, produces anxiety, and if you do not think so, here is a recent article published in STAT News (link) that reports one in five cancer patients develop PTSD within six months of their diagnosis.

The quantity and quality distinction is especially salient in these cases. Quantity of life is the lesser half of the diagnosis-prognosis relationship, that is, quantity of life, how long you live, is the deadbeat who “married up” to quality, yet quantity gets all the attention. As the financial advisor crudely stated in the Facebook post, “I want a number!”

Our chief metric for drug approval and the measurement the newly diagnosed latch onto is overall median survival. Indeed, I have appealed to this number several times to convey the seriousness of my diagnosis. Mainly to fire back at the “hit by a bus” crowd. I’ll think, “Sure, but is your bus coming in 15-18 months, with little braking and steering innovation in 20 years?”

I wonder lately, why the hit-by-a-bus crowd has been bothering me so much, and that thought is closely related to my reticence to openly share the (relatively) good news of a stable MRI scan. You’d have thought I would like to hit all the social media channels with news of a stable scan—stable meaning the areas of enhancement on the MRI images, indicative of tumor, are “stable,” have not progressed, when contrasted with the previous scan, eight weeks prior. If you follow me on social media, you recall I paraphrased the impression of my recent radiology report with the following words, “You aren’t better, you just aren’t worse.”

The truth of it is this: if I celebrate my good scans, if I hint that I am outliving the survival curve, then a culture that is steeped in quantity of life is placated, paying little mind to quality. We are a culture of whatever-it-takes life saving measures, poor advanced care planning, and doctors who view death as failure, thereby obstructing the end of life care that is of equal import to beginning of life care. I am a proponent of family planning, replete with a commitment to pro-choice policies, so too am I proponent of end of life planning, which includes thoughtful analysis, design, and implementation of policies, procedures, and protocols that prize patient and family choices in the end of life decision making process.

I am wealthy in my relationships. My kids won’t wonder about hugs. I am not rich in the numbers, but the immeasurable, the intangible, the quality of my life is on my mind. And my retort to the financial advisors: quality is priceless.

Glioblastology

Writer, speaker, philosopher, living with brain cancer