The Recluse Report - June 2025 Part 2

2 July, 2025. 1,842 words.

The Serious Stuff

Not to sound overly dramatic, but my body has been trying to kill me, and only recently revealed its intentions. I officially have non-smoker lung cancer (adenocarcinoma of the lung, to be specific), and it’s going to be with me for the rest of my life. It’s a hard thing to write down.

I don’t really want to get too deep into my emotional state on here. But I do want to be fairly transparent about the process because you don’t hear much about it, and maybe I can help demystify it a little bit. I definitely had not been properly educated in life to prepare for this possible eventuality. If nothing else, writing things down helps me process a bit better.

A cancer diagnosis is one of those unexpected life-changing events, like the death of a loved one or marriage or divorce or a car accident. Most everyone goes through one or more life-changing events per life, but usually nobody is ready for it, and this is no different. One day you’re living Life A and the next day you’re living Life B, and there’s an impenetrable wall separating the two existences. Cancer isn’t an inevitable outcome of the human experience, like cataracts, but a lot of people will experience it at some point, and almost everyone knows someone who has/had cancer.

Like everyone else, I’ve feared cancer from afar my whole life, but did I ever really know what cancer was before now? Really internalize it? Nope, not really.

Now I know. It lives and grows secretly inside you, and there’s nothing you can do on your own to make it better. You can’t exercise harder, you can’t eat better, you can’t rest more. None of that helps. It starts as a mutated cell, it invades and grows into neighboring cells, and it’s all without your consent, like an alien presence inside of you.

You can cut it out, but only up to a point. Unfortunately, I have a fairly sizable tumor (~7cm) wrapped around the airways of my right lung, pressing against an important vein, which has partially collapsed the upper lung. That one’s not getting cut out anytime soon. If left unchecked, it will suffocate me to death.

As if that weren’t bad enough, when it was discovered last month, the cancer had already spread to my brain, which is the standard path of lung cancer. That means I’m already at Stage IV. There was one decent-sized tumor in the back of my left cerebellum causing a lot of headaches, and two smaller tumors elsewhere in my left brain.

As of this writing, I can say that the brain tumors have been dealt with. I was checked into a hospital early in June and the larger tumor was removed surgically. Last week, the two smaller tumors were treated with something called Gamma Knife–a very targeted radiation treatment.

So from the neck up, I should be cancer-free. For now. I’ll need to get brain MRIs every three months to check for any return.

That part was easy, believe it or not. Brain surgery was a breeze. (I was cut open a little after noon and I was up and walking around again that night.) The Gamma Knife treatment was easy. I just lay there mildly sedated and napping in a big tube while the machine zapped the tumors, and I felt nothing whatsoever.

Now all my headaches are gone, which is a huge relief. I honestly didn’t realize how bad the headaches were until they were gone. The only negative side effect is I have a small divot on the back of my head from the craniotomy, but I feel exactly zero change in my brain function. In fact, I feel more mentally alert than ever. Too alert, honestly. My brain is constantly spinning out of control.

The hard part is coming up though.

After many tests, I’m lucky to match a specific cancer genetic mutation (EGFR) to qualify for a pill as the first line of attack, which targets all cancer cells in the body, no matter where they are. This is a relatively new treatment option. As far as I can tell, this is pretty much the best case scenario for my situation. I’ll be taking a pill at home every day, and that will be combined with outpatient chemo infusions every three weeks, and they’ll monitor progress. Chemo starts on July 8.

There will be side effects to manage. As yet, I don’t know how I will feel mentally or physically during these treatments, but I’ve been given a fairly sizable list of possible issues I’ll have to deal with, along with strategies to cope with them. It’ll be things like rashes, nausea, lack of energy, mouth sores, something about my fingernails, and yes, some patchy hair loss.

But will it even work? I have no idea. There’s no guarantees. Cancer likes to fight back. It adapts to the treatments being used against it, like those Borg adaptive shields.

As far as how I currently feel, my main symptoms are a persistent dry cough, shortness of breath, and some wheezing. There’s still a lot of cognitive dissonance between the seriousness of my diagnosis and the way I look and feel, which is at worst like maybe I’m getting over a mild pneumonia. I was given an Albuterol inhaler in case it got bad, but so far I haven’t needed it. I often run out of energy in the last third of the each day. My sleep schedule is completely wrecked. I’ve lost a bunch of weight this year, and my appetite isn’t great, which I attribute (for now) to stress and an overly-stimulated brain. When my brain is racing full speed I forget to eat, so I have to force-feed myself a lot.

Mentally I’m all over the place. I have fairly significant social anxiety and agoraphobia that I try to hide from everyone, and you might be able to imagine how stressful it would be to upend all of my carefully-selected safe routines and race to an endless parade of strange hospitals and doctors practically every day for a month.

In terms of health insurance and expenses, I’m very lucky to have a decent plan through my employer, and they have been covering almost everything so far, so there are no financial burdens (yet?).

My oncologist, the person who is in charge of my overall treatment plan, has been optimistic but cautious not to give false hope. This is a pretty serious case. This cancer has been growing in there for a while. I went from nothing to Stage IV cancer overnight (the stage, I’ve learned, is a shortcut that tells you how much it’s spread… ideally you’d want to find cancer well before Stage IV).

If this had happened when I were 75 instead of 55, I probably wouldn’t stand much of a chance, and the doctors probably wouldn’t waste much of their time on me. This cancer will never be cured completely, the best I can hope for are periods of remission, where it stops actively growing. This is going to be the concluding chapter of my life, however long that might be. Another hard thing to write down and process.

But, maddeningly, it’s all outside of my control. The cancer-fighting drugs and a mutated alien intruder will be battling it out at a cellular level inside me while I watch helplessly from the sidelines. All I can do is try to stay positive and avoid anything that might hurt my chances (like losing my health insurance).

And get all my affairs in order, as they say.

Sorry, that was a downer. I’d like to think I can bring a little more levity to this kind of writing in the future. I’ve got 50+ pages of notes from when I was in the hospital and then careening from one doctor appointment to the next at break-neck speed over the last month. Surely I can find some amusing anecdotes to relate from there. Like maybe the time I was trying to figure out how to use a suppository in the hospital because I’d been constipated for a week.

Also, did I mention my car is falling apart and I still have a cataract and it turns out I need a couple of root canals? Yeah. That too. When it rains it pours.

UPDATE: As an addendum to the feeling of powerlessness I mentioned above, I have just learned about the scientific relationship between stress and cortisol and its effects on the body at a more cellular level, and I’ve been encouraged to hear I might be able to positively influence this treatment process after all, just by proactively managing stress.

Gaming

I’ve pretty much stopped all gaming, I’m just too tired in the evenings. I want to find some quick and easy games I can put on my phone for times I get stuck in a waiting room. Maybe something like that Balatro phenomenon I keep hearing about.

And I definitely won’t be recording any game videos for a while. I’ve uploaded everything I had left in my upload queue, for what it’s worth.

Media Consumption

As you might imagine, I’ve been in need of a lot of distracting television lately. Here’s some more stuff I’ve watched.

For All Mankind (AppleTV via. Amazon). Finished all the current seasons. Seasons 1 and 2 are excellent, season 3 is good, but I thought season 4 was comparatively weak. They just completely gave up on the whole gravity and rocket science thing, and somehow they built the whole season around dodgy makeup and the least likable people. Don’t really know where they can go from there, but there’s supposed to be a season 5 someday.

Archer (Netflix). On bad days, I pretty much have this on repeat all the time.

Plane (Netflix). Serviceable Gerard Butler thriller, who seems to be the hardest working actor in making serviceable thrillers, following the Nicolas Cage “just do everything” mantra. The first half was better than the second half, but I didn’t hate it. There were some decent characters and a pretty good one-take hand-to-hand fight scene, I thought.

Geostorm (Netflix). Another Gerard Butler vehicle. Sometimes a lot of people put a lot of effort into making a blockbuster movie but it doesn’t work out and you can’t really tell why. In this case it seemed pretty obvious to me. It started with a really terrible script, on which even an eight-year-old science student may have offered some valuable critiques, and then nobody else involved in the project seemed to care about what they were making. It had “somebody’s pet vanity project” written all over it. Stupendously forgettable, even while in the middle of watching it.

Now You See Me (Netflix). So formulaic, so forgettable, so unbelievable. Basically a movie for children, but it passed the time. Except for all the times I got up and left the screen because I didn’t care what was happening or why.

The Serious Stuff

Gaming

Media Consumption

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