Prologue to this "Book"

This book began as a series of updates.

At first, the updates were practical. People wanted to know what was happening, and I needed a way to tell them without repeating the same information dozens of times.

A diagnosis creates a kind of communication emergency.

The phone rings. Messages arrive. Family members want the latest numbers. Friends ask whether the treatment is working and whether there is anything they can do. Everyone wants to help, but no one wants to overwhelm the person still trying to understand what has happened.

So, I wrote.

I wrote from hospital rooms, waiting rooms, hotel rooms, living rooms, treatment chairs, parked cars, nature trails, and ordinary places that became sacred because of what they held. I wrote when I felt hopeful, tired, grateful, afraid, amused, frustrated, and occasionally all of those things before breakfast.

The updates became a record.

They recorded the medical facts, but also everything around them: the jokes, prayers, family conversations, plastic dinosaur, rubber chicken, chemotherapy pumps, burgers, music, birds, fatigue, waiting, difficult decisions, and people who became part of the story.

Leukemia was a medical disease, and treatment was not background scenery. Bloodwork, chemotherapy, transfusions, stem cells, medications, infection precautions, engraftment, and monitoring were the road itself.

But this is not a book about medicine alone.

It is about what happens when medicine meets a human life.

Cancer enters a body, but it also enters a marriage, a family, a calendar, a budget, a church, a friendship group, and the ordinary routines of daily life. A blood count changes plans. A fever alters an entire week. A hospital admission can make a previously insignificant object—a guitar, a cap, a piece of mail, or a favourite meal—feel like a lifeline.

You will find humour in these pages because humour has always been one of the ways I breathe when life becomes ridiculous.

There is a particular kind of absurdity in being a grown man receiving highly complex medical care while worrying about the proper relocation of a rubber chicken. There is absurdity in carrying a chemotherapy pump in a fashionable satchel and in having a medical team discuss your kidneys while you calculate the distance to the nearest washroom.

The humour did not mean the situation was funny.

It meant the situation did not get to take every form of joy away from me.

One of my favourite descriptions of me over the years has been “Prairie Philosopher.”

I like short, pithy sentences I can remember—and that I hope the reader will remember too. As I found out during this journey, chemotherapy affected my attention span, and I found long paragraphs difficult to follow. I have kept many of the paragraphs in this book short in the hope that readers facing similar challenges will find the journey easier to follow.

You will also find faith woven through these pages. I am a Christian, and my faith shaped how I processed fear, pain, uncertainty, treatment decisions, community, and the possibility of more days. Removing it would make the story less honest.

I know not every reader shares that faith. My intention is not to argue, persuade, or pretend everyone experiences suffering in the same way. I am telling the truth of my experience, not claiming that my experience is universal.

If you read from another faith, from no faith, or from a place of uncertainty, you are welcome here.

Take what is meaningful.

Leave what is not.

The invitation is to walk with me through the story, not to pass a test.

More than anything, this journal is a record of being carried.

I was carried by skilled medical teams who knew what to do when I did not. I was carried by Leslie, family, friends, my Mountain Crew, and a wider cheering squad. I was carried by blood donors, a stem cell donor, and people whose work, generosity, and names I might never know.

I was carried by grace, which often arrived in very ordinary packaging.

Every person’s cancer journey is different. This is one account of one year on a road that continues beyond the final page. It does not offer a formula or guarantee. Gratitude for my remission does not erase grief for those whose stories have taken a harder turn.

I did not know the whole road when I began.

I still do not.

But the bridge in front of me was enough for that day.

And it is enough for this story to begin.