JANUARY

Soon after being diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer a friend of mine gave me some advice I didn’t know I needed. He told me that after his own diagnosis of prostate cancer he’d asked a colleague of his — with the same sort of cancer and a similar dire prognosis — how he’d been able to start a brand-new intellectual project; how had he been able to find that kind of focus? And the friend told him: because he’d decided to give only 10% of his life to cancer; he’d decided to keep the other 90% of his life for himself. That metric gave me hope as I lay in my hospital bed, then on my couch, recovering from spine surgery, contemplating chemotherapy and radiation, processing my new reality of being a cancer patient.

More than a year in, I began to wonder if that 9/1 ratio was realistic for me. I wanted it to be. But metastatic breast cancer means, as my oncologist told me the first time I met her, being in treatment for the rest of my life. Accepting that truth implies giving up arbitrary ratios. This friend of mine with prostate cancer never had to face down a port in his chest and chemotherapy infusions every three weeks, scans every three months: everyday and inevitable pain both physical and psychic from the treatment, weakness, deterioration, let me not elaborate. I have to learn to incorporate. What is inexorable.

Which makes me despair. Who am I to have to incorporate illness like cancer into my life? I am an athlete. I eat, exercise, sleep better than anyone else around me, almost anyone I know. I am often the only adult in the room who knows how to take care of myself, who in fact does take care of myself. I put my head down and I do it. All the time. Every day. I always have.

And yet I have cancer. I will never not have cancer. I am not a denier. I’m not a compartmentalizing man with prostate cancer. This metastatic breast cancer is part of me now and I will incorporate it into my everyday life. I have to.

But how?

I’m not sure.

Then again, I think I’m already working on it. I think I have been for a while.