A Year of Cancer: Somehow, It’s Still Me

Myk’s story is featured in our March 2025 magazine issue. Click here to read “My Identity After Cancer.”

Who am I after Cancer? I think I’m still figuring it out. It hasn’t even been a year.

When I refer to Cancer with a capital “C,” I mean it as the unstoppable, all-encompassing force it feels like—something more than just a disease. Lowercase cancer refers to the disease itself, the thing doctors diagnose and treat.

Valentines Day, 2024. I’m at work at my computer in my too-small-for-my-family apartment. The phone rings—it’s a call from my dermatologist, weeks late. “It’s melanoma,” she barely stuttered at some point during the call. “Only stage Ia,” she tried to reassure me. My ears rang. She scheduled me for removal, ASAP. Terrified, I blindly trusted her. That wide local excision was performed in her office. I was fully awake and aware of the pain, but not aware of what was actually being done to me. This was my first medical-procedure-related trauma I experienced this year. A brutal and violent introduction to what Cancer would be doing to me.

Cancer crashed into my life like a meteor hitting my body. A body already lying on the side of the road, dragging itself away from the 20-car pileup that already was (is) my life. My body was already broken and bloody, and then came along a surprise rock from space, pummeling into me. So, who then, is this body? By all means, it should have fallen limp, dead by now. It could have given up. It should have let the broken ribs pierce its own lungs and exhale one last time, withering away. But it didn’t. Is this . . . that . . . me? Me, I, myself, Myk? Perhaps me is just a redhead with chronic pain in a green wheelchair, who just also happens to have skin cancer now. Who am I?

“I am,” is a powerful statement—one that can be bold and empowering, but also sad. It’s definitive. Me is so much more than just “I am” statements.

“So, try then—just go for it; who are you?!” I hear the prompt gods say.

“In what way, then?” I shoot back. Physically? Objectively? Mentally? I don’t know. I don’t understand the question. How do I respond? Do I even know the answer!?

Cancer is not who I am. But that phone call, and what I have endured this year because of Cancer, has shaped who I am now. It’s changed even just how I act on a day-to-day basis. My entire life changed when Cancer mauled my body. I can’t even remember what my mental headspace was like before Cancer, which is weird because it hasn’t even been a year. But when someone goes through five surgeries in one year, four of them being directly caused by Cancer in some capacity, you change fundamentally as a person. Not to mention, I was already a severely disabled person before Cancer.

I’ve done everything I can to stay strong: endless appointments, thousands of dollars spent out-of-pocket on medical equipment I need to survive—all because our healthcare system refuses to change and adapt in any way that actually helps disabled Americans. I struggle and strain to keep a job I love, and even though I have limited energy, I have no choice. If I lose this job, we will lose everything quickly. I’m sick, my body is sick and broken, even regardless of my cancer. I won’t find a job that accommodates me as well as this one does. I am lucky to be employed. Lucky me.

All things considered, some people might think I’m lucky. Lucky to have a job. Lucky for insurance. Lucky we found it early. Lucky it’s “only” skin cancer. Lucky my partner loves me.

The reality of those statements? I’ve worked my ass off to be at the job I’m at right now. We found my cancer on a biopsy I didn’t intend to get. When I made the first dermatologist appointment of my life, it was for a different mole (which was benign). I was trying to be proactive! I’m not lucky it’s only skin cancer! No one who has to deal with Cancer is ever lucky to be a part of this club. My partner and I have been through hell and back multiple times this year, and we’ve gone through torture in the past as well. It is not luck he’s here, that he chooses me, chooses us. We work through everything together, and it’s not easy. Not counting each other, neither of us have had any real physical support system next to us all year. Our parents are not present in our lives. We have been dreadfully alone this year. He’s disabled too, and he’s had to take on the role of my full-time caregiver. How is that lucky?!

I used to not understand what people meant by “People who don’t have cancer/have a close loved one experience cancer just don’t understand what this is really like.” Now it rings truer than most statements I hear floating around the cancer spaces. I DO understand now. More than that, I know what it’s like to suffer. To scream at the top of my lungs as I sit outside the bathtub, my left arm tenderly hanging over the edge of the tub, next to the running water, so my partner can clean the wound area after my first surgery. Every day. For two weeks. Agony searing through every nerve in my body. Trying to stifle my screeching. Trying to stop myself from whiting out and falling over. Trying to stop myself from digging my nails into my partner’s arm, with an iron grip like a leopard, grasping blindly at his support. Two weeks into recovery, being told they had to resect more of my arm because the margins weren’t clear. Me refusing to do it awake again and insisting on surgery under anesthesia. Going under and having more of my left arm carved out of me. Waking up from surgery screaming out in pain, begging to see my partner who wasn’t there yet. Pain meds barely touching the pain. Going home in tears and nausea. Taking a month off work to recover, using my state benefits. Go back to work before I even began healing in a way that mattered. Struggle. Pain. Seeing an oncologist I had to insist on seeing. She gets me a PET scan. No one can get the IV started on me, in a cancer specialty building, and I leave my first PET scan appointment uncontrollably sobbing because they had to reschedule me. The second PET scan happened, but only after a nurse tried for nearly an hour to start the damn IV on me; we were there over an hour early just in case that very event might happen. The PET scan is clear, except some uptake in both tonsils. I get referred to an ENT. The ENT schedules me for surgery number four, a full tonsillectomy. I scramble with my HR department and FMLA for more time away from work, again. I get two more biopsies, two new concerning moles on my left leg. I schedule an in-office procedure to biopsy the moles. I scream bloody murder as he scrapes my skin, pain searing as if he’s stuck a needle straight into my open wound. I get the results on an online portal. Moderately atypical, no cancer found. I consult with a dermatologist. He highly suggests removal, no need for an actual wide local excision though. I sob as I advocate for myself. I needed to be put under for it. I mentally would not be able to handle the pain again. My one-month leave for my tonsillectomy recovery then turned into a nearly two-month leave. I got my fifth surgery to remove the areas on my leg exactly two weeks after my tonsillectomy.

Are you OK after reading all of that? Would you believe me if I told you that this is the watered-down, extremely shortened medical timeline of everything this year? My life is like a never-ending show, and the producers are set on making sure the audience ends the day sobbing, right alongside me. It’s unreal how much we have gone through, and how things always can and do get worse somehow. It would take me writing an entire book to even include all the life I still had to live throughout each of these medical traumas. Thanks, Cancer. Yes, I do blame Cancer and all its destructive force for providing me with the worst year of my life, thus far. You did it, Cancer. You even managed to make this year (2024) beat 2020 as my worst year of my life; and that was the year I was homeless for two months, right as COVID hit, after being kicked out of my childhood home for being queer.

So, who am I after Cancer? I gaze into myself like a mirror. Despite everything, it’s still me. Worn through, tired, and scarred. Yet here I am. I’m still here—and I plan on staying as long as physically possible.