Hard Truths

Room 15. This is my third time in room 15.

Emergency rooms tend to blend into one another after a fashion. The layouts

may be different. The patterns on curtains all blandly unique. And of course, depending

on when/where you are, the sounds and smells of your fellow emergencies can be-

dramatically- different.

What I’ve come to realize is that the commonality in all of these rooms is me.

The occupant.

The EMERGENCY. I am the emergency.

It’s just after 6:00 in the morning and I’m listening to an unnecessarily complex

omelet order from down the hall. I’m rolling my eyes at the woman visiting room 17 as

she asks a nurse to get her some of their coffee from the nurses’ station kitchen. She’s

asking for the nurses’ coffee (Oh, and could you put two hazelnut creamers in that

too?)!

I’m listening to the beep of my blood-pressure cuff and I’m casually stumbling

across perception-altering levels of self-realization. There must be something in the

water here in room 15.

The truth is, I’m listening to anything that will stop me from thinking. The tiniest

distraction to help me skip over the raw data that’s telling me that this is just the way

life’s going to be from now on. This is my new normal. Room 15 is going to get very

familiar. I am the emergency.

When you get diagnosed with a chronic disease, your relationship with truth

becomes an interesting part of your day-to-day life. On one hand, being sick can be

very freeing. Personally, I’ve found that I just don’t have the bandwidth to indulge most

people’s bullshit anymore. The terrible mental gymnastics that people play to convince

themselves that they’re in the right or that they’re not acting out of selfish motives-

Seriously, my cup runneth over.

That liberating touch of truth can feel like the first true breath of sweet air after

your shift in the filthy coalmine of the TikTok era self-indulgence we’re living in.

But reframing your life after heaving in that first free breath comes with some

serious warnings…at least it should.

It’s very easy to ride that freedom right into a reality of bitter emotional solitude.

Your inability to handle the social contract makes you a pariah, and damn it, usually it’s

the right call. Sick or not, people don’t have time to listen to your constant bitching.

Trust me, I’ve tried this one.

My first unchecked, unsupervised ride with truth, and I’ve blown right through the

speed trap. The speed trap, in this instance, is a Post-It note that I wrote to myself that

says, “Just don’t be an asshole 100% of the time”.

Too late. Another one fallen to the perils of using truth as a gown and gavel. To

judge everyone and everything. To get more and more bitter with every truth-filled

breath. By then, truth isn’t freeing anymore. It’s a weight tied around my neck.

If you do somehow manage to curb that rush, if you can find that happy middle

ground where you can see the truth in the world but you haven’t burnt the edges of it

into your forehead yet, being sick can allow you to access a level of empathy you never

knew existed.

At first, that probably sounds wonderful. If you’re reading these pages, I feel like

we can make a few fair assumptions regarding your character right out of the gate. One

of those assumptions is that you think empathy is a pretty swell concept and that you’d

like to have access to your fair share of a feeling like that…maybe even a little more

than your fair share.

When you’ve had to sit in the silence of room 15 and realize that this might be

the first step down a path that only goes one way, that aspect of truth becomes glaringly

obvious. When you’ve sat down with your spouse and listed the things that cancer has

instantly stolen from your life and your future, something in the universe decides that

you’ve earned the perspective to see the empathetic side of truth.

I won’t say that’s a fair trade. It isn’t. In fact, I got screwed. If you’ve been in

those rooms, if you’ve had to watch the money you’ve set aside go to pay for the poison

they have to pump into your arm to keep you breathing, you got screwed too. I’m

genuinely sorry.

But if truth can turn you bitter and rob you of the joys that life can bring, it can

also break you down into a doormat; forgetting your own fight and giving your illness

agency that it does not deserve. All the sudden you find yourself overly concerned with

asking people how they’re doing, worried how much your fucking cancer is affecting

them! Can you imagine that? What kind of spineless jackhole would stop advocating for

himself because he feels like his illness is too much for others to handle?!

...(no comment)

So I’m back in room 15. Wondering if another hard truth is coming. Wondering if

I’ll be strong enough to keep fighting. Wondering if I’ll be empathetic enough to see that

people try to help in their own way, even if it doesn’t look like help sometimes.

Wondering if this is the moment where we look back and say, “it started going wrong

right here”. Wondering if they’ll get that omelet right.

No matter how many visits I end up making to the ER, room 15 here, room 27

there, I know now that this is just another part of my new normal. This is part of the

path for me and my family. I am the emergency.

After a few days, I have no doubt, I hope to parse out another small bit of

understanding about truth, about my relationship with the concept, and what I can do to

make that relationship something positive in my life.

Staring down the barrel of my own mortality is tough, especially when I’ve come

to the ER having already admitted that this latest episode is too much for me to handle

on my own.

I’m starting to think that maybe I should stop looking at truth as a construct of

being a social animal and maybe I should start to look at it as a pillar within myself. In

other words, maybe truth is less about what’s between me and other people and more

about what’s between my ears.

There are certainly more room 15s in my future, and more trying times that will

force me to better define these truths and what they will mean for the remainder of my

life. One thing is for sure, the day I stop searching for those answers is the first day I

truly start dying. This might be a tough path filled with tough truths, but damn it, it is my

path, and I’m gonna walk it.

Love your friends. Die laughing.