I thought I had cancer. Was told I had cancer. And in that one moment, my life changed forever.
Last October I underwent my yearly lung cancer screening. Folks like me who have smoked for a long time are eligible to receive a low dose CT scan every twelve months, to look for signs of cancer in the lungs. I’d undergone several and thought of this test as routine. Yes, I always had anxiety around the time of the scan. Tobacco use is the leading cause of lung cancer in the United States. Lung cancer killed 131,000 people in 2020, making it the fifth leading cause of death in our country. Last year 231,000 people were newly diagnosed with lung cancer, most of them smokers. Most of them will die from that disease.
Yet even with all of those statistics, last fall I imagined and assumed the test would come back as negative and yes, I’d then go on smoking, in a state of denial about how dangerous it truly is to light up. Then the phone rang, and my nurse practitioner let me know the scan had found a large nodule on my right lung, suspicious for malignancy, and that I needed to see a lung surgeon ASAP for evaluation.
She gave me that information and then simply said, “Good luck Mr. Hudson.” I hung up the phone and it felt like everything under my feet, the ground, the very earth I stood upon, and all the assumptions I made every day about my life, a life that I believed would continue on for many more years…it all shifted. It shook. It rocked. It broke apart.
The next six month were a blur of so many tests and so many doctor’s appointments, time spent in the MRI machine listening to the whir of the magnets and wondering what it would see deep inside my body. I told only a handful of people of my diagnosis. My surgeon was convinced the spot was malignant, but I sought a second opinion. That doctor's opinion counseled that I wait and get re-scanned in three months. Ninety days later the scan showed the nodule had actually shrunk by half. I had one final scan in late April, and the spot was almost gone.
I was the rare patient.
All the medical evidence overwhelmingly indicated I had lung cancer and would have to have a part of my lung removed. A biopsy was not possible because of the nodule’s location. You see, I’d probably had a lung infection that looked like cancer. For six months, I had felt like I was holding my breath: waiting and wondering and worrying. I woke up every morning with one thought: I have cancer. I told only a handful of people, in part, because of waiting for a definitive diagnosis, and also because I was ashamed of how I’d put my life in danger through a nasty and ugly addiction. I wondered about all the things I might miss in life: retirement or finishing my book or watching the kids in my life grow up or just growing old with my friends and family.
Little stuff too: riding my bike on a balmy summers’ day. Sitting at a baseball game in the twilight and listening to the crack of the bat and the buzz of the crowd. Hearing the “hush, hush” of snow falling or looking up into a cold December night sky and marveling at all the stars. It’s true—you don’t really know what you’ve got until it’s gone, or until there is a very good chance it will be gone and very soon.
My heart breaks at all those who get a cancer diagnosis that is definitive and deadly. Too many of my loved ones have died from this awful disease: Uncle Billy, my golf partner and wise advice giver and Nora, a kind and smart eighth-grade girl whom I taught in confirmation class and Sue, who mentored me for 35 years. And so, so many more. I miss all of them so much.
I marvel at the bullet I dodged, at the second chance that I’ve received from life. And so, I hope, and I pray that I have changed and will continue to be transformed by this once in a lifetime come to Jesus moment.
I quit smoking, a habit I’d embraced and been held hostage by, from the time I was 16 until I was 61. I’d like to imagine I am appreciating life more and more these days, that my close call has perhaps woken me up to how fragile and how precious and how beautiful this life really is, even with all its brokenness and suffering. I’ve no idea what the future holds. Given my many years of smoking, chances are still higher than average for me to get some kind of cancer from all those decades of smoking.
But I do think God is somehow calling me through this weird and terrifying experience to not indulge in wasting God’s gift of life, not even one single day anymore. Or spending time complaining about this or that ultimately trivial concern, when the reality is I have a wonderful life and have little to whine about. That’s the truth for me. For many of us.
I just want God to wake me up and make me more alive to my alive-ness. To everything that makes up my life. In my most favorite of plays, “Our Town,” by Thornton Wilder, the main character is Emily, a teenage girl who dies in childbirth but is given the chance to return to the earth as a silent, invisible witness to the life she lived. She is given only one day and so she picks a childhood birthday. When she returns to “heaven” she asks this heart-breaking question.
“Do any human realize life while they live it…every, every minute?”
I want to try Emily. I really, really do. And dear reader, I hope you do too.
(I'm undertaking my thirteenth Pan-Mass Challenge (PMC) this August. The PMC is a long distance cycling event that hopes to raise $70 million for the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in 2002. I'd love your prayers and if you feel so moved, your donation too. Here's a link: https://profile.pmc.org/JH0352 )
