This substack is about to be back.
I have a lot to write about and I promise it’s not going to be as depressing as it’s about to sound:
In the last 6 months, I got a rare cancer and my mom died. Actually, she died 3 days before I had surgery to get an organ removed. With the loss of my mom came the loss of my entire family, I have no more blood relatives remaining.
My mom, Angela Davis-Gardner, was an acclaimed novelist who wrote four published novels, with a fifth unpublished that she had only just completed when she passed away unexpectedly. I grew up loving to write, but I always felt very much in her shadow.
Compounding the intimidation factor of how good I felt her prose was, my mom had also dealt with growing up in the shadow of a writer parent - my grandfather was once a well-known popular historian who wrote over 60 books. So, she had pulled off what I couldn’t do twofold.
As I’ve been coming to grips with my grief - she was a single parent, and she did 90 percent of the work raising me, with my grandmother and my dad contributing roughly 7 and 3 percent, respectively, so the enormity of the loss can’t be overstated — I’ve been realizing that writing has always been my connection to her, and that I need to do more of it, even if it’s just going to lead to frustration and the sense that I can’t sustain focus long enough to build an audience, etc…. Like, I stopped doing this for a lot of reasons, but one big reason was that it sucks to spend a bunch of time writing something and then you can’t even get anyone to read it, or if they do, they have no feedback. But that shit doesn’t matter - just because this platform has become overrun with hustlers, particularly political grifters, that doesn’t mean my stuff has to be that way.
The cancer was crazy… I’ll give the good news first, it does seem that I got super super lucky. My wife made me go to the doctor over some symptoms that I felt were too minor to merit the need, they sent me for scanning on Christmas Eve of last year, and the radiologist happened to notice a sign of a possible tumor that would have had to be somewhere in my urinary tract. Turns out it was on my kidney. It’s a rare cancer you get from smoking (turns out they weren’t kidding about that shit) and though I only smoked for a few years, it only takes one hitting you the wrong way to start this shit.
Anyway, I had to get that kidney removed, but the doctor warned me he’s never seen this cancer as just one tumor and that the spread is the part that is difficult or impossible to treat, and they started looking for another one. They saw some spots in my lungs on a chest ct that were too small to call one thing or the other but since this cancer travels to the lungs most frequently as its next stop, there was a lot of concern about getting a followup ct. and because a tumor on the kidney is not sealed in by a muscle wall like it would be if it appeared in the bladder, and because of gravity, the chances of spread and recurrence are much greater. I still have a 50 percent chance of a recurrence, but they didn’t find any cancer in me on my 3 month scan followup. I will be an oncology patient for the rest of my life since this is a high-risk type of recurrence, but as long as I can maintain access to health insurance (ughhhhhh) I will be getting cystoscopies every 3 months (oucchhhhh… they don’t even put you to sleep, it’s a camera straight up the urethra, past the prostate and into the bladder) and the pace of those should be good enough to zap any recurrent fuckface pos tumors.
So, I’m experiencing some relief as it was a very real possibility that it was too late to help me, and now it looks like I might beat it. I could still have pretty close to a normal life expectancy but if that thing had spread, which they conclusively proved it hadn’t, I would be in my last months. It’s a very aggressive cancer.
For that reason it’s been impossible to take stock of the other insane things happening around me, like my mom dying in a completely unexpected way as she was receiving medical care at the time at a rehab facility after being stepped down from the hospital after having an infection she had recovered from. I inherited her house, and the estate process is a whole thing, I barely understand what the hell is going on.
But between the issues I’ve had with billing for my own care and the hospital my mom died in being super overzealous in trying to collect their revenue from her having been in their care, I definitely have a new perspective on just how brutal this system we live in is. Weirdly, getting cancer is something that often causes people to lose friends (look up “cancer ghosting” if you’d like to feel depressed about a thing that could happen to you someday) and losing a parent brings all the people out of the woodwork wanting money for this or that. I have an estate/probate attorney, he literally charged $100 for receiving a bill for my moms care from the hospital and emailing me that there was a bill.
yes … I’m saying it cost me additional money simply to receive a hefty bill for my mom’s care when she died unexpectedly (how do I know for sure they didn’t just fuck up somehow and that’s why she died? Her heart stopped in the CT machine).
anyway, I’ve been posting remberances of her on Facebook, which is where I was at when I stopped signing up for new social media things, even insta! But Facebook has become even more of a hellhole than it once was. So I’m moving the posting back over here, but I’ll share the links on Facebook so the few interested people can do what they always seem to want to do and read my posts without ever signing up, which keeps me from ever knowing who is reading it.
hello to anyone out there still checking this, thank you for being there for me to receive my various monologues.