A HEALED AND STRONG SERIES — PART 1 OF 3
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance somebody just handed you news that turned your world upside down.
I know that feeling. I’ve been there. But I’m sitting on the other side of it now, coffee in hand, and I want to tell you how this place came to be—because it started with you, even before I knew you existed.
It’s been a little over a year. I’m sixty years old, sitting here thinking back on how all of this started, and honestly, it still surprises me a little.
In May 2025 is when it began. That’s when the lump appeared—a lesion that turned out to be oral cancer, tongue cancer, the kind of diagnosis that stops you cold and rearranges everything you thought you knew about your life. Head and neck cancer has a way of doing that. One day you’re living your normal life, and the next day you’re not.
I documented all of it. Not for anyone else—just for me. Notes along the way, thoughts I needed to get out of my head and onto paper. I wasn’t thinking about a blog or a website or any of this. I was just a truck driver trying to make sense of what was happening to him.
Most of my thinking happens in the cab of my truck, somewhere between Knoxville and Nashville, running night miles while the rest of the world sleeps. That’s where a lot of this happened, too.
Then about a year later—middle of May 2026—I started going back through those notes. Barb knew I had them. We’d talked a little about putting them together, maybe as a memoir, just to organize everything out and make sense of it.
So I started reading back through what I’d written, and something started shifting. By the last couple weeks of May, somewhere out on that highway in the dark, something started pulling at me.
What if.
What if you put this out into the world? What if your words reached just one person?
What if that one person was sitting right where you’ve been sitting—scared, overwhelmed, full of questions nobody was answering—and your story helped them make it through another day?
What if you could help just one person feel a little less alone?
That question wouldn’t let me go. And once it got a hold of me, it started growing.
What if it wasn’t just one post? What if it was a blog? What if it became a resource—something I could’ve used when I was in the middle of it, something my family could’ve used? Something that covered not just the medical side but the mental side, the emotional side, the things the doctors don’t tell you and the questions you’re afraid to ask?
What if this wasn’t just for the patient, but for the caregiver sitting in that waiting room—holding it together for everyone else while nobody’s holding it together for them?
That’s how Healed and Strong started. Not with a plan. With a question that kept getting bigger.
I’m still a truck driver. I’m still running those night miles. And I want you to know something—I’m not writing this from some distant finish line.
I’m nine months out of chemo and radiation, scans have been clean, and I’m grateful every single day. But I still go in for PET scans, CT scans, and blood work. That’s the reality of where I am, and it’ll be that way for the next five years at least. You carry that with you. You learn to live alongside it.
So when I say you’re not alone—I mean it in every direction. I’m still on this road, too.
Pull up a chair. Let’s walk it together.
Nobody Fights Alone
If you just got the news — today, this week, whenever it was — and you’re reading this because someone sent it to you or you went looking for it yourself in the middle of the night: you’re already doing the hardest part. You showed up. Everything else, we figure out together, one post at a time.
“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13
Read the series:
Part 1: How It Started (Current)
Part 2: How It Grew