Another Face in the Crowd: Life in the Face of Cancer

I decided to start a new segment on my blog. I call it Another Face in the Crowd because to the larger world, that's really what I am. I'm an average guy. Just another face in a crowd of billions who is pursuing all the ambition and dreams my little heart can come up with. Currently that is being as great a father as I can be, excelling at my current position with a fantastic non-profit organization that helps children, and, of course, becoming a bestselling author. The bestselling author part is challenging, admittedly, but I am stubborn and will continue to pursue it no matter how many rejections I get. So, rest assured, the pursuit is still on. Unfortunately, life has decided to throw yet another wrench into my path and this is a pretty big one. Getting a massive, life-changing injury that later resulted in amputation was a significant wrench as well, but now it has happened again.

What is it you might ask?

Well, I am assuming that most can guess by the title of this post. It is cancer. But let me backtrack a little to explain how we got here.

I can't really remember when it happened but at some point in the last several years, I got a stuffy nose. At least, that's what I originally thought it was. Time went by. A lot of time and the stuffy nose just...never went away. It was a new constant in my life and it sucked. A lot. I could barely breathe through my nose and struggled with tasks as simple as walking due to the feeling of not being able to breathe. I thought it was everything from a minor cold to late-onset allergies. I even thought the addition of a third cat to my orange tribe was the straw that broke the allergy camel's back. Never in all this time did the word cancer come to mind and I suppose that's my fault. I won't say it was arrogance to think I wouldn't get cancer but it is akin to that, I suppose. I just never considered that me, Rustin Petrae, could get cancer.

And then, I got a nosebleed. A really bad nosebleed. I've been having them sporadically throughout this time but never one this bad. So I wisely decided to go to an ER to get myself checked out. Since the bleeding had already stopped by the time I got to them, there wasn't much they could do for me except send me home and refer me to an Ear, Nose, and Throat doctor. At that appointment, the primary concern was still the bleeding that I'd experienced and I was told that it was likely due to a dry nose and a minor scratch. They cauterized the area and sent me on my way with a follow up appointment. It was this appointment that changed everything for me because it was here that I mentioned that the stuffiness in my nose still hadn't gone away. As a precaution, a wise one in my opinion, the doctor decided to have me do a CT scan.

Turns out this CT scan might have saved my life.

During the appointment to go over the CT scan, my doctor broke the news to me. There was a mass inside my sinus region that was causing these symptoms. I can't remember the exact measurements, but the doctor mentioned it was roughly the size of a racquetball (or maybe a little smaller). But it was BIG. I couldn't quite grasp the magnitude of everything and my first thought was, I have to tell my kids. It has to come from me. And, as you can imagine, that conversation was hard. I tried to be reassuring because at that time, the doctor told me there was a good chance it wasn't cancerous. So that's what I told my kids.

Things moved really fast after that. Shockingly fast. Originally, my ENT doctor was going to remove the mass himself with his team on May 2nd. Then I got a call saying they want to do a biopsy instead to try to identify the nature of the mass. As soon as I woke up from that surgery, my doctor said that the preliminary results came back and that it was indeed cancer. There was no getting around the fact now. No wrapping myself in the comfort of false reassurances from my doctor's prior comments.

Cancer. Cancer was my new reality.

I don't care how many cancer stories you hear, or ads you see on TV, or anything else like that. Nothing prepares you for the moment when that word comes hurtling at you like a missile. It exploded my entire world. Or, to be more accurate, could have if I let it. I've faced down so much tragedy in my life already. Personal pain. Loss. And a lot more. Those experiences were like steel reinforcements. They armored me against what could have been an absolutely debilitating new reality for me.

I think I've droned on long enough in this first segment. There will be more to come with content about what I went through to treat the cancer and everything that came with that.

One last thing to note, however. For obvious reasons, my writing has taken somewhat of a backburner these past few months. But now that I am feeling more like myself again, I will definitely be coming back strong. I am currently in the process of shopping around for an agent to represent my newest novel, Avalon - The Fallen King. I would really love to publish traditionally with that series. I am also in the process of finishing up a second novel, Under Marshal Law (not part of the Avalon series). This is a standalone novel that I started awhile back and wanted to finish now because I heard solo novels might be easier to get an agent for. I guess we'll see.

Until next time.