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“Still Here”

Day 312 of Living with Cancer
Day 241 of Chemotherapy
Cycle 16, Day 2

There are still eight more days ahead. Thirty-two pills waiting for me.
My stomach felt a little more settled today, but my eyes are dry, leaking tears and sticky discharge. I probably won’t be going anywhere this coming week—at most just a walk nearby. I’ll try to spend whatever lucid energy I have filling my days with a quiet, solitary kind of home life.

Just now, by pure chance, I opened Notability and stumbled across a string of notes written in an almost unreadable scrawl. The timestamp said it was the third day after my diagnosis. That would be over 300 days ago—deep in the night, when I couldn’t sleep. I remember: instead of tossing and turning, I got up, switched on a small night light, grabbed the iPad, and opened an app I hadn’t touched in years. I began writing. Five pages, twelve scribbled lines of thought.

After that night, I never opened the app again. In fact, I’d completely forgotten it existed—until now.

Reading it again, trying to decipher my own fevered scrawls, I realize something unexpected: my attitude hasn’t changed. Not really. Even after all this time, even through the grind of treatment, the exhaustion, the slow erosion of self, something fundamental has stayed with me.

I suppose I had thought that my ideals, my inner clarity, had long since crumbled into ash—scattered among the endless repetition of hospital routines. But it turns out that the core of my thinking, the spirit that quietly anchors this weary body, was always there, working silently in the background.

What surprises me most is this: those twelve quick-fire lines written in the solitude of that night are, in some ways, more lucid than how I feel today—after ten months of this journey. Perhaps it’s only natural. The body adjusts to pain, becomes numb. But the mind pays a price for that numbness. It dulls too.

The lines I wrote about cancer, about death, and about time-as-existence… they were delicate, yes. But also sharp. Uncompromising.

It’s getting late.
Tomorrow, I think I’ll transcribe those lines one by one. Sit with them. Talk to the version of myself who stood trembling but unbroken at the starting line of this long, impossible race. I want to remember what he felt, what he saw, what he believed.

And maybe—just maybe—I’ll let him wake up again inside me, and walk beside me for the rest of the way. Strong. Clear-eyed. Undaunted.