THE TIME BARGAIN — POST 1 OF 6

It didn’t announce itself. It never does.

Normal doesn’t disappear all at once. That’s the thing nobody tells you. It doesn’t go out with a bang or a siren or some dramatic moment you can point to later and say — that’s where it happened. It just quietly starts to slip. And by the time you notice, it’s already been gone a while.

For me, it started the first week of May, 2025 — I made note of it in my journal a little over a week later, on May 12th. But May 30th is the day I finally had to stop pretending.

The Art of Dismissal: Oral Cancer Symptoms Denial.

I woke up one morning with a pain in my mouth. Ran my tongue across it, felt a small hard lump on the left side. And my first thought — without missing a beat — was that I must have bitten it in my sleep.

Easy explanation. Clean. Required no further investigation.

Years back I’d had a run-in with Bell’s Palsy that left me chewing on my own tongue pretty good. This felt similar enough. So I filed it under ‘been here before’ — one more symptom I was ready to dismiss — and moved on with my day. Figured it’d be gone in a few days. Wasn’t going to give it another thought.

If you’re a patient reading this, you know exactly what I’m describing. And if you’re a caregiver who watched somebody you love do this same song and dance — you know it too, probably better than the patient does. We’re real good at protecting ourselves from news we’re not ready to hear. We bargain with time. We tell ourselves stories.

I told myself a good one.

When Minutes Turn to Weeks

Except the lump didn’t leave. It started making itself known.

Eating got harder. Drinking got uncomfortable. Finding a position to sleep where it wasn’t throbbing became its own nightly project. And when I’d catch my own reflection in the bathroom mirror — still trying to ignore what was staring back — I could’ve sworn it was getting bigger. But I wasn’t ready to say that out loud yet.

So I kept waiting for the morning I’d wake up and it’d just be gone. Problem solved, no harm done, move along.

That morning didn’t come.

Days turned into weeks. And the waiting — that’s something I wasn’t prepared for. Not the lump itself, but the quiet noise it made in the back of my head while I was trying to live my regular life. Drive my route. Come home to Barb. Pretend everything was fine.

It gets louder, that quiet noise. The longer you ignore it, the louder it gets.

Handing Over the Reins

By May 30th I couldn’t talk my way around it anymore. It wasn’t getting better. If anything it was getting worse. And I did something that does not come natural to me at all.

I let Barb make the call.

I handed her the reins and let her set up an appointment with the dentist. And even then — even walking into that office — I had myself half convinced it was just a bad tooth. Sharp edge rubbing the wrong way. Dentist would fix it and we’d be done.

I was standing at the edge of something I didn’t recognize yet. Still holding onto every explanation I’d built up over the past few weeks. Not ready to let go of any of them.

That’s where this story starts. Right there at that edge.

What happened next — the back and forth, the bargaining, the mental gymnastics of a man who is not built to sit still and wait — that’s a whole series of its own. And it’s the next thing you should read.

Nobody Fights Alone

I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” — Philippians 4:13

Healed and Strong • Scott’s Story • healedandstrong.com