Irony

It was surprising to me how quickly I adapted to the new wake up time. Every day now, at 5:00am, my phone serenaded me in the generic preprogrammed tone that I had strategically selected. I had wanted something that was not unpleasant to awaken to, but still something that was not likely to soothe me back to sleep at that early hour of the day. I rolled over and silenced my alarm, went to the bathroom and finished my morning routine, usually listening to Mandi snooze her alarm a couple of times until she stopped fighting it. By 6am, we were drinking coffee downstairs, prepping lunches for the kids, and giving the dogs their breakfast. For a few quiet minutes we also just enjoyed each other’s company before heading into our gym-converted-garage. By 6:15am, we were in the gym working our program. Mandi had found a great app for the phone that allowed us to create and save workout templates, tracking our progress and acting like a virtual personal trainer. Our workouts started fairly basic at first, mostly dumbbells, plyometrics, resistance bands, and that kind of thing. Over time, we added a treadmill, and a full cable machine with something called a smith bar. It really allowed us to escalate our training to the next level. We were finished each day by 7:15 or 7:30. Ten minutes to shower and then sit the kids down to their breakfast and make sure that they got dressed. Then rush out the door to walk them to school at 8am. A routine, Monday through Friday consistently. For over two years.

I personally started this routine in January of 2022, though Mandi had already been getting in consistent workouts for nearly a year. At the time, my dad had been admitted to CMH hospital after having self reported breathing difficulty, and then testing positive for COVID. I had gone down to visit him because it seemed that he was not doing well, and I called my brothers to come do the same. We all left work in the middle of the day and snuck past hospital security to be able to see him. In those days, with COVID hospital policy, they did not allow visitors in to see patients that were COVID positive. Even though Dad was in an airborne contamination room, they would only allow one visitor at a time. We broke those rules and were able to stand in the “airlock” room and speak to him through a glass door. For two hours we’re were able to skirt the hospital rules, with the help of a couple rebellious nurse allies. It was the last time I would ever speak to my Dad. Early on the morning of his 69th birthday, January 25th, he was put on a ventilator. I received a call from the doctors at 2:35am with that news.

It was at this time that I began my religious morning workouts. It came from a place of feeling helpless. There was so much that I couldn’t control about what was happening at the hospital, with my Dad, and somehow I felt that pushing myself in the gym could somehow influence that outcome. Illogical? Yes. Superstitious? Probably. To this day I don’t really understand it, but I made that sacrifice each morning. Hoping that it was enough. After my Dad passed, the meaning of the workouts changed. Instead, they became about living the best and healthiest life that I possibly could. It was something that I know my Dad would have been proud of. In fact, I have a photo of my Dad standing in the backyard of my Grandpa’s house by the pool, shirtless with his signature tanned skin, holding two huge fish they had caught by their tails. It’s in my closet and I look at it every day when I’m getting ready to go to work. He was forty years old in that photo. I made myself a promise that I would be in the best shape of my life at forty years old, and I would do it to honor my Dad’s memory. And so I did, Monday through Friday, working toward that goal, along with Mandi as my gym partner every single week.

I am really someone who appreciates irony. It is like a form of divine humor, many times underappreciated by the mortals who are its victims. The photo taken below on the left is from January of 2019, and the one on the right is 6 days after I was diagnosed with lung cancer. I have been living a clean life, exercising regularly, eating home cooked meals with high protein, and after two years of that it all earned me…this.

So why does this kind of thing happen? It doesn’t seem to make sense to most people. So many of my friends and colleagues have remarked that I am one of the healthiest people that they know, and that I don’t deserve this. But the answer is that you cannot make sense of things like this. Do I deserve the life that I have? Do I deserve any of the things that I have been blessed with? The truth is that I believe that we so often do not deserve the good or the bad things that happen in our lives. I have to stay in a place of gratitude for everything that I am lucky enough to have, and know that I lived in a manner that I could be proud of. Also the surgeon tells me that my fitness will help me in my recovery, so if nothing else I have been preparing myself for this challenge for the last two years.

It’s a shame that I didn’t have a photo from January of 2022 (the one above is from 2019) for better comparison sake over the two year period. As it turns out, I really didn’t take very many shirtless selfies back then. Rest assured that I have changed that and now have an abundance of shirtless selfies. If you are interested in seeing more of them, I post them on a separate website that you can access for a small monthly membership fee. (It’s a joke Mom)

I have officially decided to pause my resistance training until after my recovery. Something about the post-workout soreness just feels unsettling to me now. It’s hard to tell the difference between that pain that tells you something good is happening, from the type that tells you the thing growing inside you is killing you faster. Of course, the other reason is that I just don’t have the energy to spare. I’ll have to settle for walking the dogs once a day for the time being, but I’m looking forward to feeling strong again.

Brain MRI is scheduled for 12:40pm on Monday, so I’m hoping for one last clean scan. I am so ready to have this cancer removed before it does more damage. Every day I can feel a change, and at this point, that surgery date can’t come soon enough.

Will update again soon.