(Or, My Cancer Scare)
I won’t get into the back story of how I ended up in Europe in the first place; that will come at a later date. Today I won’t talk about living in a ski lodge in the middle of the Julian Alps in Western Slovenia, feeling shamed and empty, hiding from the world and afraid to fail. I won’t delve into any of that now.
I’ll start where the new version of me started.
Sometime in May in the year 2010, is where the shift happened. I know the exact location where it happened; I know exactly what I was doing. It was in a parking lot, in a park, and I was running as fast as I could. What was I running from? I felt the shift, and it was as real as any crack of lightning or plate tectonics. It was a definite and tangible shift.
I’ll get into all of that, but first you need some back story.
I won’t get into the back story of how I ended up in Europe in the first place; that will come at a later date. Today I won’t talk about living in a ski lodge in the middle of the Julian Alps in Western Slovenia, feeling shamed and empty, hiding from the world and afraid to fail. I won’t delve into any of that now.
I’ll start where the new version of me started.
Sometime in May in the year 2010, is where the shift happened. I know the exact location where it happened; I know exactly what I was doing. It was in a parking lot, in a park, and I was running as fast as I could. What was I running from? I felt the shift, and it was as real as any crack of lightning or plate tectonics. It was a definite and tangible shift.
I’ll get into all of that, but first you need some back story.
So who was I then, right before the shift?. I was a lost 28 year old kid; immature, selfish, and scared. I ravished in a two can a day chewing tobacco habit. Now replace the word “habit” with “drug addiction”. I didn’t know what I wanted any more. Ever since I was five, I always knew what I wanted. I wanted to play hockey. And that was it. It made life simple. Hockey made life simple.
Now for the first time at age 28, I didn’t know if I wanted to play any more. I didn’t like who I had become. I couldn’t go an hour without filling my mouth with nicotine-infused worm shit. Then I would sit and spit worm piss into an empty water bottle, and watch the molasses-colored slime slowly crawl down the side of the bottle, and pool at the bottom with a frothy layer of dead skin cells and taste buds.
But it wasn’t just me now; I had Doll, and it must have broken her heart to watch me throw away my hard-earned money every day, throwing away my hard-earned life, caressing that half-filled spit bottle for more hours of the day than her.
And I knew that it broke her heart.
So I became a ninja master. My day consisted of balancing my nicotine intake, alternating between massive golf ball sized plugs of tobacco and discreet tiny pouches that I could hold way back in my mouth, way behind the last molar, and nobody knew but me. I special ordered these tiny pouches of Snus from Sweden, spending insane amounts of money because I could swallow the juices, and feed my addiction without anyone knowing.
It makes me sad to type this because it reminds me of the old version of me. I had achieved 100% saturation of nicotine in my blood and soul. It was sucking me lifeless, and then something happened.
“It can’t be,” I tell myself as I stare into the bathroom mirror with my mouth wide open and gaping like some drug-fiend baboon. “Oh, god, please don’t let this be happening.”
I saw the spot, back behind my last molar. It was the size of a dime, a perfect circle, ghostly-white in color, with small specs of red blood and puss emanating from it.
I knew it was cancer the moment I looked at it. So my fate was sealed. I would have half of my face cut off. I would become a monster. Children would stare and laugh at me; and fear me.
I ignored it for one week. It didn’t go away. It got worse. The reds became deeper, these violent lesions.
After one week I made a promise to God.
“I’ll quit, I’ll quit right now.” I said aloud, staring into my own mirrored reflection. “I’ll never touch that crap again, just please, please, let me be ok.”
I thought of Doll, and my family and friends. How could I let them down? I’d rather be dead than be a faceless monster. My flooding thoughts could not drown the fact that something big was happening, and that I could be in real trouble.
So I quit that night, I flushed it down the toilet. The next 72 hours are a blur. If you can make it 72 hours without any nicotine, it is officially out of your body. The first 72 hours are the most dreadful, torturous, personal hell that you will ever know. But it will let you know just how powerful the drug is. How is this drug not illegal??
Nicotine is a weapon of mass destruction.
Day one, hour five: I was a frail, withered worm in a puddle of doubt, depression, sadness, longing, deprivation, and exhaustion. All I knew at this point was that I needed sunflower seeds or I would legitimately go insane.
The gas station was three blocks from my house. I rode my bike. I knew that I was walking into a wolves’ den with veal cutlets in my pockets, as the wall of nicotine was impossible to ignore. Every kind of tobacco in every flavor imaginable. Chew, cigarettes, cigars, nicotine gum, it was everywhere!
I walked in, and I was hallucinating. I decided to only look at the ground so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with the Dip Demon behind the counter. The floor was breathing. I’m pretty sure I was also limping, just because it hurt so bad. I felt the pain in every part of my body. Every cell inside of me craved nicotine. Every electron buzzed and glowed neon explosions of excitement because I was in the same building as pounds and pounds of tobacco. My cells could sense it.
I found the seeds and threw money on the counter.
I thought I said, “keep the change”, but I am sure that I spoke in tongues, something bizarre and unnatural.
I made it back to the apartment. At that point, I knew I was a junkie. But at the same time, it was such an enormous victory for me to leave my apartment on day one of my tobacco quit and go into a gas station and not break down and buy my drugs. Looking back, it seems like such a small accomplishment, so meaningless and trivial, but I might as well have tossed a gold medal around my neck, it was that profound.
“I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.”
Then I started talking to the cat. Poor Tom Tom, I’m so sorry that I took it out on you. I knew my fangs would be exposed at some point in the quit. I knew the hair on the back of my hands and forearms would grow into thick patches. My stained yellow claws cracked through the skin at the tips of my fingers. I knew I would become a monster. But I knew, most importantly, at all costs that I could not take it out on Doll. This was my mess, and I couldn’t take it out on her.
She didn’t even know about any of this. She had no idea of the cancer growing in my face. No idea that today was day one of my quit. All she knew is that she got up and went to work, just like any other day. And that her boyfriend was addicted to nicotine, just like…any other day.
I can only describe the feeling as this: I felt like I was going to explode and all my insides would splatter all over the room, but the explosion would not be a violent or sudden one, but a slow motion explosion, a bulging release of ripping sadness in a high-pitched hiss, like some coiled snake lurking behind the drywall, with a deep scarlet venom sack tucked away in the back of his mouth, back behind his razor fang, and it’s filled with the most potent nicotine extract the world has ever known, cooked in antiquity by some satanic alchemist in a time forgotten, melted down from an ancient monolith that once mapped the stars and solstices.
“You’re the worst cat in the world, prancing around like you own the place, piss off you four-legged shit factory,” as I give the most evil stare right through Tom Tom, and think that his black fur might be made from thin strands of tobacco leaves.
I’m sorry for all the terrible things I said to you Tom Tom, but thank you for deflecting all that negative energy away from Doll. I am forever indebted to you. And that is why I feed you as many cans of the expensive cat food that you can stuff into your stomach. That is why I buy you treats in flavors of salmon, and seafood delight, and chicken and bacon. That’s why I let you get high on cat nip. That’s why I love you.
I gauged the day in minutes and seconds on that first day of my quit. I can refrain from tobacco for one minute. I may think about tobacco 60 times in that one minute, but I can refrain from using. Slowly, a minute turned into an hour, and an hour turned into a day. I made it one full day without tobacco! It has been nearly eleven years since that has happened.
It was at the end of the first day, thirteen or so hours into my quit that I told Doll that I was trying to quit. Actually, I didn’t want to tell her in the first place because of the countless failed attempts I had in the past. There is no worse feeling than telling a loved one with the most conviction that you are quitting tobacco, only to cave and resume your addiction one day later. It is a shameful thing.
It happened at the dinner table. I cooked a mediocre meal, but a gourmet feast with all things considered. I sat awkwardly across from Doll and didn’t say much. Tom Tom came to beg for food and brushed against my leg.
“Maybe I’ll leave the front door open tonight, and we’ll never see you again, you vile skunk rat.” Tom Tom was staring directly into my eye balls as I finished the sentence. I looked up toward Doll and she had a look of disgust on her face. She didn’t know how to react. I rarely say anything remotely mean, especially to our cat. She just stared at me and shook her head.
“Are you serious?” still shaking her head back and forth, her mouth slightly opened in disbelief.
I apologized, and decided that it was time to fess up.
She was excited to hear that I was quitting, but she was far from ecstatic. She wasn’t getting her hopes up, and I couldn’t blame her. This quit was different though. This quit had conviction. That conviction hid behind my back left molar and took the form of a bloody meteor crashing into my world. Doll didn’t know about the cancer and the impending meteor impact and my inevitable extinction. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
I made it through day two. It got easier. I just kept eating and eating. I destroyed Taco Bell. I ate until I couldn’t eat any more. I didn’t care how fat I got. I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t care about hockey, or where I would play, or body composition testing at training camp, none of that mattered. All that mattered was the quit. My lifestyle afforded me the luxury of making the quit my priority. I didn’t have a job to worry about. It was the off season. Maybe it was my last season. I didn’t know at that point. All I knew was to get through every single minute of every day without putting tobacco into my mouth, keeping nicotine out of my blood.
Day three was a breeze. “I can definitely do this. Get through today, and it’s all smooth sailing.”
Day four almost killed me. But I read all over the quit forums, I googled and googled. It said 72 hours, and it was out of your system. Well, this might have been the dreaded death rattle. That snake emerged from a nest of pink insulation inside the wall, and slithered out from the electrical socket behind the refrigerator. It curled up on the kitchen table and cocked his head, exposing a hood and two translucent fangs, dripping hot acid, and burning through the carpet and floor joists, disintegrating foundation footings and pillars, burning the house down and leaving a pile of rubble. And I was buried underneath this mass for 24 hours on day four. It was dark in there, and I couldn’t move. I could hear the snake lurking in the darkness. I heard his whispers.
“Just one more. One more taste. You’ve made it this far. Why not treat yourself? If you can make it three days, you can make it three years. Just chew when you want to, on your terms. One more taste.”
I closed my eyes, and went somewhere else. When I woke up, it was day 5. A heavy fog had been lifted off of me. I began to see the world in a different light, with different eyes; but the fight was far from over.
After three days (four days in my case) the nicotine is out of your blood stream, and you are over the main physical withdrawal symptoms. From this point on, it is a mental game. After eleven years of nicotine abuse, there is no doubt that you are mentally addicted as well. Of course there are shocking moments of physical longing for tobacco called craves, and this is from old nicotine that is stored in fat deposits in the body. But they are manageable.
Slowly, day by day, it gets better. What started with an ear-blasting scream, becomes a hushed whisper, smaller and smaller, until it isn’t there any more.
You learn to ignore the voices. You evolve.
That is where I am today.
October 5, 2011. Today I am officially 500 days clean from nicotine in any form. Cold turkey. I looked the demon in the eye 500 days ago.
You may be wondering what happened with the cancer, or how this has anything to do with hockey fights in the minor leagues.
(It has everything to do with it.)
Two weeks into my quit, I came clean with Doll and told her about the spot in my mouth. I cried. I just cried and opened my mouth. She looked at it, and said we needed to show my mom, who is a nurse. We went home and showed my mom, and she said we should see a doctor. The doctor looked at it, and said we needed a biopsy. I secretly prayed that the doctor would look at it and say something like, “not to worry, Bobby, it’s just a canker sore, now go get em kiddo!”
But I knew.
The doctor maneuvered a small tube with a camera on the end of it into my mouth and down my throat to examine my esophagus and trachea. All clear.
Next, he cut out of piece of the spot in question with a metal pair of scissors. It hurt. I winced in pain and my eyes welled up with salty tears.
Then it was the waiting game.
Now for the first time at age 28, I didn’t know if I wanted to play any more. I didn’t like who I had become. I couldn’t go an hour without filling my mouth with nicotine-infused worm shit. Then I would sit and spit worm piss into an empty water bottle, and watch the molasses-colored slime slowly crawl down the side of the bottle, and pool at the bottom with a frothy layer of dead skin cells and taste buds.
But it wasn’t just me now; I had Doll, and it must have broken her heart to watch me throw away my hard-earned money every day, throwing away my hard-earned life, caressing that half-filled spit bottle for more hours of the day than her.
And I knew that it broke her heart.
So I became a ninja master. My day consisted of balancing my nicotine intake, alternating between massive golf ball sized plugs of tobacco and discreet tiny pouches that I could hold way back in my mouth, way behind the last molar, and nobody knew but me. I special ordered these tiny pouches of Snus from Sweden, spending insane amounts of money because I could swallow the juices, and feed my addiction without anyone knowing.
It makes me sad to type this because it reminds me of the old version of me. I had achieved 100% saturation of nicotine in my blood and soul. It was sucking me lifeless, and then something happened.
“It can’t be,” I tell myself as I stare into the bathroom mirror with my mouth wide open and gaping like some drug-fiend baboon. “Oh, god, please don’t let this be happening.”
I saw the spot, back behind my last molar. It was the size of a dime, a perfect circle, ghostly-white in color, with small specs of red blood and puss emanating from it.
I knew it was cancer the moment I looked at it. So my fate was sealed. I would have half of my face cut off. I would become a monster. Children would stare and laugh at me; and fear me.
I ignored it for one week. It didn’t go away. It got worse. The reds became deeper, these violent lesions.
After one week I made a promise to God.
“I’ll quit, I’ll quit right now.” I said aloud, staring into my own mirrored reflection. “I’ll never touch that crap again, just please, please, let me be ok.”
I thought of Doll, and my family and friends. How could I let them down? I’d rather be dead than be a faceless monster. My flooding thoughts could not drown the fact that something big was happening, and that I could be in real trouble.
So I quit that night, I flushed it down the toilet. The next 72 hours are a blur. If you can make it 72 hours without any nicotine, it is officially out of your body. The first 72 hours are the most dreadful, torturous, personal hell that you will ever know. But it will let you know just how powerful the drug is. How is this drug not illegal??
Nicotine is a weapon of mass destruction.
Day one, hour five: I was a frail, withered worm in a puddle of doubt, depression, sadness, longing, deprivation, and exhaustion. All I knew at this point was that I needed sunflower seeds or I would legitimately go insane.
The gas station was three blocks from my house. I rode my bike. I knew that I was walking into a wolves’ den with veal cutlets in my pockets, as the wall of nicotine was impossible to ignore. Every kind of tobacco in every flavor imaginable. Chew, cigarettes, cigars, nicotine gum, it was everywhere!
I walked in, and I was hallucinating. I decided to only look at the ground so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with the Dip Demon behind the counter. The floor was breathing. I’m pretty sure I was also limping, just because it hurt so bad. I felt the pain in every part of my body. Every cell inside of me craved nicotine. Every electron buzzed and glowed neon explosions of excitement because I was in the same building as pounds and pounds of tobacco. My cells could sense it.
I found the seeds and threw money on the counter.
I thought I said, “keep the change”, but I am sure that I spoke in tongues, something bizarre and unnatural.
I made it back to the apartment. At that point, I knew I was a junkie. But at the same time, it was such an enormous victory for me to leave my apartment on day one of my tobacco quit and go into a gas station and not break down and buy my drugs. Looking back, it seems like such a small accomplishment, so meaningless and trivial, but I might as well have tossed a gold medal around my neck, it was that profound.
“I can do this, I can do this, I can do this.”
Then I started talking to the cat. Poor Tom Tom, I’m so sorry that I took it out on you. I knew my fangs would be exposed at some point in the quit. I knew the hair on the back of my hands and forearms would grow into thick patches. My stained yellow claws cracked through the skin at the tips of my fingers. I knew I would become a monster. But I knew, most importantly, at all costs that I could not take it out on Doll. This was my mess, and I couldn’t take it out on her.
She didn’t even know about any of this. She had no idea of the cancer growing in my face. No idea that today was day one of my quit. All she knew is that she got up and went to work, just like any other day. And that her boyfriend was addicted to nicotine, just like…any other day.
I can only describe the feeling as this: I felt like I was going to explode and all my insides would splatter all over the room, but the explosion would not be a violent or sudden one, but a slow motion explosion, a bulging release of ripping sadness in a high-pitched hiss, like some coiled snake lurking behind the drywall, with a deep scarlet venom sack tucked away in the back of his mouth, back behind his razor fang, and it’s filled with the most potent nicotine extract the world has ever known, cooked in antiquity by some satanic alchemist in a time forgotten, melted down from an ancient monolith that once mapped the stars and solstices.
“You’re the worst cat in the world, prancing around like you own the place, piss off you four-legged shit factory,” as I give the most evil stare right through Tom Tom, and think that his black fur might be made from thin strands of tobacco leaves.
I’m sorry for all the terrible things I said to you Tom Tom, but thank you for deflecting all that negative energy away from Doll. I am forever indebted to you. And that is why I feed you as many cans of the expensive cat food that you can stuff into your stomach. That is why I buy you treats in flavors of salmon, and seafood delight, and chicken and bacon. That’s why I let you get high on cat nip. That’s why I love you.
I gauged the day in minutes and seconds on that first day of my quit. I can refrain from tobacco for one minute. I may think about tobacco 60 times in that one minute, but I can refrain from using. Slowly, a minute turned into an hour, and an hour turned into a day. I made it one full day without tobacco! It has been nearly eleven years since that has happened.
It was at the end of the first day, thirteen or so hours into my quit that I told Doll that I was trying to quit. Actually, I didn’t want to tell her in the first place because of the countless failed attempts I had in the past. There is no worse feeling than telling a loved one with the most conviction that you are quitting tobacco, only to cave and resume your addiction one day later. It is a shameful thing.
It happened at the dinner table. I cooked a mediocre meal, but a gourmet feast with all things considered. I sat awkwardly across from Doll and didn’t say much. Tom Tom came to beg for food and brushed against my leg.
“Maybe I’ll leave the front door open tonight, and we’ll never see you again, you vile skunk rat.” Tom Tom was staring directly into my eye balls as I finished the sentence. I looked up toward Doll and she had a look of disgust on her face. She didn’t know how to react. I rarely say anything remotely mean, especially to our cat. She just stared at me and shook her head.
“Are you serious?” still shaking her head back and forth, her mouth slightly opened in disbelief.
I apologized, and decided that it was time to fess up.
She was excited to hear that I was quitting, but she was far from ecstatic. She wasn’t getting her hopes up, and I couldn’t blame her. This quit was different though. This quit had conviction. That conviction hid behind my back left molar and took the form of a bloody meteor crashing into my world. Doll didn’t know about the cancer and the impending meteor impact and my inevitable extinction. I didn’t have the heart to tell her.
I made it through day two. It got easier. I just kept eating and eating. I destroyed Taco Bell. I ate until I couldn’t eat any more. I didn’t care how fat I got. I wasn’t thinking about that. I didn’t care about hockey, or where I would play, or body composition testing at training camp, none of that mattered. All that mattered was the quit. My lifestyle afforded me the luxury of making the quit my priority. I didn’t have a job to worry about. It was the off season. Maybe it was my last season. I didn’t know at that point. All I knew was to get through every single minute of every day without putting tobacco into my mouth, keeping nicotine out of my blood.
Day three was a breeze. “I can definitely do this. Get through today, and it’s all smooth sailing.”
Day four almost killed me. But I read all over the quit forums, I googled and googled. It said 72 hours, and it was out of your system. Well, this might have been the dreaded death rattle. That snake emerged from a nest of pink insulation inside the wall, and slithered out from the electrical socket behind the refrigerator. It curled up on the kitchen table and cocked his head, exposing a hood and two translucent fangs, dripping hot acid, and burning through the carpet and floor joists, disintegrating foundation footings and pillars, burning the house down and leaving a pile of rubble. And I was buried underneath this mass for 24 hours on day four. It was dark in there, and I couldn’t move. I could hear the snake lurking in the darkness. I heard his whispers.
“Just one more. One more taste. You’ve made it this far. Why not treat yourself? If you can make it three days, you can make it three years. Just chew when you want to, on your terms. One more taste.”
I closed my eyes, and went somewhere else. When I woke up, it was day 5. A heavy fog had been lifted off of me. I began to see the world in a different light, with different eyes; but the fight was far from over.
After three days (four days in my case) the nicotine is out of your blood stream, and you are over the main physical withdrawal symptoms. From this point on, it is a mental game. After eleven years of nicotine abuse, there is no doubt that you are mentally addicted as well. Of course there are shocking moments of physical longing for tobacco called craves, and this is from old nicotine that is stored in fat deposits in the body. But they are manageable.
Slowly, day by day, it gets better. What started with an ear-blasting scream, becomes a hushed whisper, smaller and smaller, until it isn’t there any more.
You learn to ignore the voices. You evolve.
That is where I am today.
October 5, 2011. Today I am officially 500 days clean from nicotine in any form. Cold turkey. I looked the demon in the eye 500 days ago.
You may be wondering what happened with the cancer, or how this has anything to do with hockey fights in the minor leagues.
(It has everything to do with it.)
Two weeks into my quit, I came clean with Doll and told her about the spot in my mouth. I cried. I just cried and opened my mouth. She looked at it, and said we needed to show my mom, who is a nurse. We went home and showed my mom, and she said we should see a doctor. The doctor looked at it, and said we needed a biopsy. I secretly prayed that the doctor would look at it and say something like, “not to worry, Bobby, it’s just a canker sore, now go get em kiddo!”
But I knew.
The doctor maneuvered a small tube with a camera on the end of it into my mouth and down my throat to examine my esophagus and trachea. All clear.
Next, he cut out of piece of the spot in question with a metal pair of scissors. It hurt. I winced in pain and my eyes welled up with salty tears.
Then it was the waiting game.
| Metamorphosis Part 1 |
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