Pack Over Lone Wolf: Community, Words, and Miles Through Cancer

Want to hear Bill read his story? Register for our next Perkatory event here! June 4th from 7:00-8:30pm ET

When I was diagnosed with neuroendocrine carcinoma at 33, I thought “getting through” meant surviving treatment cycles and scan days. I imagined a finish line: make it through this surgery, this chemo, this radiation, this clinical trial, and then life would return to something like normal. Instead, my cancer became chronic and terminal, with no clean endpoint and no bell to ring. In that reality, I had to completely rethink what it meant to cope, to live, and to keep showing up for myself and my daughter.

Over time, I’ve learned that what gets me through isn’t one big thing but a collection of them: community, stories, service, words, and movement. Together, they give structure to chaos and meaning to days that might otherwise be swallowed by fear or fatigue.

Before I found Man Up to Cancer, I felt like I was the only one carrying this particular combination of identities: a man with cancer, a dad, a person of color living with a rare and serious disease, trying to hold it together for everyone else. The people in my life loved me, but they couldn’t fully understand what it felt like to sit in a waiting room wondering how many summers I have left with my child. There’s a specific kind of loneliness that comes from trying to stay “strong” so you don’t scare the people you’re trying to protect.

Man Up to Cancer changed that. It gave me a brotherhood of men who understood the language of scans, side effects, and quiet terror, without needing every detail explained. In that space, I could say the hard things out loud: that I was afraid of dying, of leaving my daughter, of becoming just another name in a registry. I didn’t have to pretend. I could show up exhausted, angry, hopeful, or numb, and there was always someone who had been there too.

Community doesn’t erase the pain, but it spreads the weight. On the days when I feel like I can’t carry it alone, I know I can log into Circle, hop on a call, or show up in person and let someone else shoulder part of it for a while. Having a pack instead of trying to be a lone wolf, has been one of the biggest shifts in how I survive this.

Reading has also become one of my quiet lifelines. Cancer shrank my world down to exam rooms, infusion chairs, and MyChart messages, but books quietly blew it back open. On days when fatigue or pain makes it hard to move, I can still turn a page. I read memoirs, novels, essays, and anything that piques my interests—some about illness, many not. Memoirs remind me that humans have been walking through impossible things for a long time. Fiction reminds me that I am more than a diagnosis: I am still capable of curiosity, imagination, and being moved by a sentence or a character.

When my own words feel stuck, I often start by reading someone else’s. It’s like jump‑starting a dead battery. Their stories lend me enough insight to look directly at my own again. In those moments, reading is not an escape from reality but a way to process it from a slight distance, to see that I am not the only one living in the in‑between.

One of the strangest parts of being a “professional” patient is realizing that you know more about navigating cancer systems than many people who are just starting their journey. I never wanted that expertise, but I have it now. At some point, I had a choice: let that knowledge sit in my head and haunt me, or use it to guide others.

These days, some of the most meaningful moments of my week are conversations with newly diagnosed patients or caregivers. Sometimes it’s helping them organize questions for their oncologist. Sometimes it’s demystifying clinical trials or explaining what a tumor board is. Other times, it’s talking through the emotional black hole of being told “there’s no cure” and still having to show up for kids, jobs, and everyday life. I’ve had people reach out with fears about ostomies, changing bodies, or losing the future they thought they had.

Every time I get to say, “You’re not crazy for feeling this way,” or “You deserve to understand what’s happening to your body,” it softens my own experience a little. Guiding other patients doesn’t fix my cancer, but it transforms some of the chaos into direction and purpose and ultimately makes another patient’s life less shitty.

Writing is where the things I’m afraid to say out loud get a safe place to land. On the screen, I can admit the full truth: that I am furious, exhausted, grateful, hopeful, and heartbroken—sometimes all in the span of a single morning. When I write, I get a temporary reprieve. I can take the mess inside my head and give it shape.

Some pieces I use as life lessons to my daughter, for when I pass. Others evolve into essays, bios, or advocacy pieces that I share with organizations and communities. Putting my story into words helps me understand it a little better. It also gives other people language for what they’ve been feeling in silence. There is a specific kind of healing that happens when someone messages me after reading something I’ve written and says, “That’s exactly it. I thought I was the only one.”

In those moments, the suffering doesn’t vanish, but it becomes shared. It turns from “my private nightmare” into “our collective truth,” and that shift matters. It’s a reminder that while cancer can isolate us, storytelling can pull us back into connection.

Exercise and movement might seem like strange to cling to when your body has been through as much as mine has. I’ve had an 18‑hour surgery and live with two permanent ostomies. My torso maps out a history of incisions and scars. Treatment schedules dictate huge parts of my calendar. From the outside, it would make sense if I wanted to retreat from physical effort entirely, but I haven’t.

But for me, movement has become one of my most important forms of coping. I’ve leaned into ultramarathons, long‑distance cycling, and outdoor adventures as acts of meditation and self-discovery. Every mile is a message to myself: “You are still here. This body still belongs to you.” On some days, that looks like long runs or hours on the bike. On harder days, it might be a slow walk around the block or gentle stretching in my living room. The point isn’t performance—it’s presence.

Exercise gives me something concrete to work toward that isn’t dictated by my cancer. Training plans, routes, and goals are things I can shape with my own hands. In a life where so much is out of my control, that small island of agency is priceless. Movement also quiets my mind in a way few other things can. It turns down the volume on “What if?” and “How long?” and replaces it, at least for a while, with the rhythm of breath and footsteps.

Some of the most powerful support I’ve received has been small and wordless: a friend messaging me before a scan, a social media post mentioning me to keep me in their thoughts, my daughter curling up against me on the couch without asking questions I don’t have answers for. Those moments remind me that love doesn’t always need the right phrase. Sometimes being there is enough.

I’ve also had to learn how to show myself compassion in ways that don’t come naturally. I tend to hold myself to impossible standards—as a patient, a parent, and an advocate. Parenting with a terminal diagnosis has forced me to accept that there is no manual for this. I will get it wrong sometimes. I will be too tired, too short‑tempered, too distracted. On my better days, I can meet that reality with gentleness instead of shame. I can say, “Of course this is hard. You’re doing the best you can in a situation no one is prepared for.”

I already know that when the time comes, my cancer story will end brutally. But as long as I have my community, my stories, my ability to guide and be guided, my words, and my movement, I have enough to keep going—one conversation, one page, one mile at a time.