I Know Why It Happened
When you're a grownup, you deserve what you get for some reason or another. It's just a matter of figuring out why.
When I was 9 or 10, my friend got a kidney transplant. Once the new kidney settled into its new environs, he (my friend, not the kidney) got to go to a Harrisburg Senators game with a group of other kids who had also received organ transplants through Gift of Life, and asked me if I wanted to be his plus-one for the game.
When you’re a kid in a town without an MLB team, and you’re but a small child, the Minor League stadium in the middle of the river polluted by Mayflies is practically the Colosseum.
Before the game, my friend and the other kids who had gotten organ transplants were going to go out on the field to be honored by the crowd for their bravery. My friend told me to come with him.
I protested on the grounds that I still had all of my original organs. I was just here for some baseball. Maybe a soda. He insisted, and before I knew it I was standing between first and second base facing the crowd. The voice on the loudspeaker prompted everyone to give these brave boys and girls from the Gift of Life Organ Donation Program a big round of applause, and they did.
I just stood there, absolutely certain that I was breaking some rule and probably, because I was in the throes of Catholic school, very much sinning. I think I still had fun at the game, despite that.
This same friend got to do the Make-a-Wish program, too. The Senators game was not his wish. I don’t remember what it was, but it was definitely better than that.
When you’re a kid and you get dealt incredibly difficult hands like organ transplants or injury or disease, they (rightfully) shower you with praise in how brave you are and you get to do things like making a wish to meet your heroes or go on an awesome vacation because the assumption is that because you are a kid you don’t deserve to get sick. And you don’t! No kid deserves to be sick and I hope every kid never gets sick again, even into adulthood.
Because the tacit part of “no kid deserves to get sick” is that adults do, and when you’re an adult with cancer, even on the younger end of when you “are supposed to” get cancer, people look for something to blame. You deserve to have this for one reason or another, we just have to figure out what it is.
Fast-forward to 2021. I am 29 years old and have been told that I have colorectal cancer and it has spread. I have no family history, no genetic marker or any habits that would make me a shoe-in for that kind of disease. No clear “Oh, here’s why you deserve this.”
I was what the medical community calls “really fucking unlucky” and an outlier in that I was an otherwise healthy guy in his 20s being diagnosed with something we thought only affects guys over 50 who have done enough in their life to make them deserve it.
And yet, I did not get to make a wish. Bullshit.
When you are an adult with cancer, you don’t get a wish, you just get hats.
I didn’t go fully bald when I did chemo. I lost my hair by the fistful, yes. But my hair was one of the few real genetic gifts I got. God damn I had good hair. I remember posting a picture with my chemo bag attached saying “I’ve decided I’m not going to lose my hair.” But I did. I just had so much to start with that I didn’t go fully bald. I just now had shitty hair.
I’d run my fingers through my hair and come out looking like when a toddler pets a cat and has its fur sticking out between its fingers. If I wasn’t in my house, I wouldn’t know what to do with this tuft of hair so I’d often put it in my pockets, until I was told to stop putting my hair in my pockets because it’s gross and weird and also would turn up in the laundry.
There’s a scene in Always Sunny where Mac wears a bald cap to pretend he has cancer, and the person they’re trying to scam says, “By the way, when you have cancer, your beard hair falls out, too.”
Not true. I had to shave every day during chemo, and I can’t even grow a beard. Just my usual shitty, black facial hair that makes me look dirty. Again, bullshit. Almost all downside, cancer.
I say almost all downside because free hats is an upside.
I got a lot of hats because it’s one of the agreed-upon things that people do when you have cancer. You wear hats, and you receive hats because you wear hats with more frequency now. But that’s about as far as you get as a grownup with cancer, even if you are on the young end.
Being on the young end, though, as a millennial, I feel like we’re still due a wish. Mine is a generation that had to withstand several once-in-a-generation moments before we could even vote, leaving us in this liminal space between adolescence and true adulthood, however you want to define that. We’re the generation that profited off of kitschy decorations that say things about “Adulting” and how we can’t do that today. We’re the most child-like adults who have ever adulted — a verb that I would like stricken from the lexicon.
We open businesses that are just playgrounds where you can drink. If you were to survey people between 28 and 40 right now, most would say they would still trick-or-treat if it were socially palatable (and as long as they could drink while they did it). I’m surprised there isn’t a beer garden/bar crawl that’s trick-or-treating themed yet.
We’re also the ones who are facing an earlier onset of cancers once reserved for adults who deserved it, like breast cancer and colorectal cancer.
So let this be my formal appeal to the powers that be at either the esteemed and honorable Make-A-Wish Foundation, or some aspiring altruist who might want to start a foundation where adults get to make wishes, too. Let people who of any age facing a tough go of it make a wish.
When you get some difficult disease like cancer or something of that nature, it’s natural to feel scared. Something to look forward to, something extraordinary, can be a huge boost. It could make all of the difference. It’s at least a small reprieve from asking the universe or God, “Why me?”
I never asked “Why me” though. For one thing, it didn’t matter. I’d always joke that it’s not as if we pinpoint the cause and we all smack ourselves in the forehead and go, “Oh, there’s the problem!” and the cancer disappears. The why isn’t so important when you’re going through it because it doesn’t make a difference.
But, regardless, I know why I got cancer. It’s simple.
I got cancer because I pretended to be a kid who got a kidney transplant at the Harrisburg Senators game. God saw it and was like, “OK, hot shot. Mr. Rubber Burner. You want some applause for being sick? That can be arranged, but it’ll be when you least expect it.”
Catholic God is undefeated, and you pay interest on your debts.