Life Before Cancer Diagnosis: Who I Was Before Any of This Began

Sunday was our day.

Didn’t matter what kind of week it had been. Didn’t matter how many hours I’d put in or how bone-tired I was by Saturday morning. Sunday, we loaded up and headed to the mountains. Barb and me, winding through the Smokies, maybe ending up in Gatlinburg, maybe not. Didn’t always have a plan. Didn’t need one.

That was life. And it was a good one.

I want to tell you who I was before cancer came knocking. Not because I’m looking for sympathy, and not because I think my story is special. I’m telling you because if you’re reading this, you probably know somebody — or you are somebody — who had a good life running, and then one day the whole thing lurched sideways. And I want you to know what that man looked like. What he was made of. What he stood to lose.

Forty-One Years Behind the Wheel

I’ve been driving a truck since 1985. Forty-one years. I went to vocational school for mechanics, always loved big trucks since I was a kid — just one of those things that gets in your blood young and never leaves. So when the time came to pick a direction, I picked the one with the biggest wheels.

I run linehaul routes. Monday through Friday nights. Clock in around 8:30 PM, drive out to one of our other terminals, work the dock for about four hours, turn around, drive back. Home by 10:30 AM or so. In bed by noon. Up around 6:00 PM and do it all over again.

You do the math on that and it comes out to fourteen-hour days, give or take. By Saturday morning, you’re cooked. Most of the guys I work with go home and go straight to bed. I never did that. Not once. Life’s too short to sleep it away, and time with Barb is too precious to waste.

I’d come in Saturday morning, pour another cup of coffee — lord knows I live on caffeine — and Barb and I would spend the day. Grocery store, yard work, whatever needed doing around the house. Then Sunday, the mountains.

That was my rhythm. Had been for decades. It’s a hard life, and I wouldn’t trade it.

What They’d Say About Him

I’m not going to sit here and describe myself. Nobody believes a man’s own assessment of himself anyway. So I asked the people who know me best — my daughters and my son-in-law Michael, who I consider my son — to tell me who I was before any of this.

Michael said: “You were always busy working on something. You had a lot of hobbies and projects, with the energy to do them. You loved cooking and feeding the family. The grill was a passion. You kept everyone’s spirits up and had a good attitude toward most things in life.”

He also said something that stopped me cold: “Even when things really do bother you, hurt you, or scare you, you pretend they’re not that bad so the people around you won’t worry.”

I read that and thought — yeah. That’s the one. If you want to understand everything that came after, start right there.

My daughters said I was full of life. Adventurous. Outgoing. The jokester. The optimist. The one who always put everyone else first. One of them said I had a way of making people feel loved, supported, and happy — and that whether it was cracking a joke or doing a little jig when the right song came on, I brought joy wherever I went.

I’m not going to argue with them. I’ll just say that’s the man I was trying to be.

Always Into Something

The grill. The griddle. The ugly drum smoker. The stove inside. If I had a free afternoon, something was getting cooked.

When I had the Jeep, Michael would show up on a Saturday and we’d have the thing jacked up in the driveway — leveling kit, running boards, lights, whatever it needed. Down in Florida, I was building ugly drum smokers out of barrels. At the house, I’d wake up thinking I was putting up a little bit of fencing and end up spending the weekend on a full privacy fence around the yard. Pam — my oldest daughter — wasn’t standing there handing me tools. She was in the dirt, digging post holes and running screws right alongside me.

Ceiling fans. Plumbing. Shelves. Modernizing stuff around the house. I learned something from my father-in-law — spontaneity. You grab a project and you go. What you don’t know, you figure out. It always got and stayed interesting.

At least it used to.

Barb

I know it’s a cliché. I’ll say it anyway.

She’s my world.

She’s the first thing I think about when I get up and the last thing I think about before I go to sleep. Every evening when I wake up for work, dinner’s ready and coffee’s on. That’s not a weekend thing — that’s just who Barb is, every single day. And when I walked in dead tired from a night on the road, she’d have that smile.

You can’t ask for more than that.

I have one regret in this life. One.

I didn’t ask Barb out a day sooner. I waited a couple of weeks when I should’ve moved the minute I knew. And if I had asked her out even one day sooner, that would have been one extra day we could have spent together.

That’s my one regret. Everything else, I’d do the same.

The Faith That Kept Me

I’m not going to pretend I’ve got it all figured out. We don’t do church on Sundays — there are reasons for that, personal ones, and they’re mine to carry. But don’t mistake that for a lack of faith.

Out on the road at two in the morning, it’s just you and the dark and whatever’s coming through the speakers. For me, that’s praise and worship music. That’s a good sermon when I can find one. That’s the thing that keeps me grounded when the miles get long and the nights get lonely.

My theory on faith is pretty simple: even when my faith wavered, God never gave up on me.

I don’t always know the rhyme or reason of why things happen. But if you have patience and you look — really look — you’ll eventually find the answer. And you’ll see that God is very real.

That belief didn’t come from easy times. It came from the hard ones.

That Was the Man: Life Before Cancer Diagnosis

Forty-one years behind the wheel. A wife who is his whole world. Three daughters and six grandkids. A driveway full of projects. A grill that was always going. A faith that was always there, even when it was quiet.

I wasn’t looking for a fight. I wasn’t thinking about cancer. I wasn’t thinking about much beyond getting home to Barb and maybe finding out what’s for dinner.

And then one day, something changed. A lump. A lesion on my tongue that started small — the kind of small that’s easy to explain away. And I did explain it away. For longer than I should have.

But that’s a story for the next post.

This one was about the man who had everything to lose.

Continue reading how the lump changed everything →The Day the Normal Broke

— Scott

Nobody Fights Alone

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