Prologue

Prologue

I’m in a hospital bed. It’s nighttime, but the darkness is broken by a muted orange glow. The light from the hall pours in under the door searing its outline into me. The dim, orange nightlight in the washroom is on. The pump next to me quietly hums away with the regular mechanical creaking that wouldn’t stop throughout the treatments. I look around. I’m constricted and tied down by a mass of tubes that are painfully anchored deep in my arms. Everything is distorted. Like living in the reflection of a funhouse mirror. I feel sick. A deep, dark sickness like my insides are rotting and my bone marrow is polluted. The fog from the drugs leaves me confused and I feel like I am concussed. That is when it starts.

My IV is low and the pump’s alarm sounds. It’s a muted note, flat and insidious. Boooop. Boooop. Boooop. It’s jarring. Like being awakened by an airhorn but so much more subtle and surreptitious. It keeps beeping. I struggle to hit the button to silence it, but my arms feel like anvils. I am tied down by tubing and my own complete weakness and can’t move. I call out for a nurse. The pump gets louder. Boooop. Boooop. Boooop. I call louder but it’s clear that no one hears or cares. I feel desperate like I am suffocating. There is a smell. Its almost necrotic and haunts the darkness of the room. I am horrified as I look down and see that my bed is a putrid mess of vomit and urine. It’s frightening and I start to panic as a deep, shuddering chill washes over me. I start to feel like something is watching me; in fact, it feels like the room itself is hunting me and has me ensnared.

I call out to the nurses again in desperation with tears running down my face but there is nothing but the smell and that sound. Boooop! Boooop! Boooop! The fear is so deep and overwhelming and the acrid stench of the mess I am trapped in surrounds me, overwhelms me and festers. The room feels cavernous, damp and cold. The beeping is everywhere and echoes in the hollow blackness. Each tone is like a shock from a taser that cuts into me. I scream out in desperation but all I hear is a corrosive mixture of laughter and wailing. Far, distant laughter that fills the void between the beeps that still grow and grow. The laughter rings in harmony with the unsettling din of other patients’ cries as I scream and feel like my heart is going to beat out of my chest. Shaking and crying and I feel like I am going numb and drowning in frigid water when suddenly the world shatters with overwhelming force like a bomb going off and I am in the quiet of my bedroom. My heart is racing, and my face is drenched. I grasp at my arms in a panic because my PICC is missing, suddenly remembering that it was removed. I see my wife laying next to me and realize I was dreaming. The sickness is still there. I breathe and try to calm myself while quiet tears of desperation stream down my face. Sometimes the shock is so great that I can barely make it to the bathroom before I collapse and vomit violently.

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Cancer changed me. I was never the same afterward, and this dream came every night for months after I finished just the first rounds of chemo. Later, after months of cognitive behavioural therapy, psychotherapy, personal growth and anguish I finally learned how to take control and turn off the alarm but even now there are other times where I think back to that time where my odds of survival were dropping and its enough to bring me right back to the darkest most gruelling experience of my life.

My name is Stephen Tomlinson. I am a father of two, a husband to my high school sweetheart, and an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy. These are the three pillars that make up who I am; they guide me in my decisions because they are always in that order. These pillars were built by choice and they represent the things that I would die for: my family and my nation. Through my life I have endured significant adversity and struggle to will the life I had into reality. It still doesn’t even feel real that I was forced to endure the erection of a fourth pillar that I never wanted and that nearly killed me: Cancer Survivor.

When I had joined the Navy, I knew there was a chance that I may find myself in a set of circumstances that may overwhelm me and at the time the subject of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was very much making headlines. There were soldiers all over the country committing suicide who were unable to live with the trauma of war during their service in Afghanistan. It was clear that I was arriving at a time of transition because the goal seemed clear to address early training for people about the importance of mental health both for themselves and for the people they work with. I knew there was a chance it may rear its ugly head in my life but I was unconcerned because I felt like I was a pretty tough and resilient guy who wouldn’t be taken down by the weakness that was perceived to be at the heart of the matter. The way that I saw it I would just do my best and roll the dice. Seven years later it would happen, and I would begin another battle alongside my Cancer: depression and PTSD. I had survived a significant amount of stress through my life both before and after I had joined the RCN, but PTSD didn’t come from the deserts of a warzone or in the vast emptiness of the Ocean. It came for me in a hospital bed with the treatments I needed to fight a highly advanced form of Metastatic Testicular Cancer.

This book began as my outlet, a journal of my life and a venting area that was suggested by my therapist as a means of organizing my thoughts and helping to ease the mortal terror that came to grip me over the course of the treatments. The treatments themselves were required to save my life, but it was a deal with the devil because I traded my mental health in order to save my body from the hundreds of tumours that were ravaging it. The true pain came later as I took time to recover from the high intensity chemotherapy that had shaken me and beaten me down until I literally begged to die.

Throughout the first rounds of treatments I wanted nothing more than to know that everything would go back to normal. I just wanted to return to my work and put Cancer behind me. I was so desperate for that normalcy that I silenced the occasional surge of emotion or worry by telling myself to suck it up and denying the real cost of saving my life. I was deeply repressive and so eager to show everyone the kind of tough guy I was by just dusting myself off and carrying on with my life. It got to the point where I refused to see the most obvious signs that things inside were not right. Little did I know I was being slowly eaten up by the pain that was very much festering in the deep, deep wounds that the Cancer had left in my soul.

In time the reality sank in. I had died already. My natural life ended in August of 2017 at the age of 33. I am only alive today because of medical science but the me who lived is a very different man than the one who was told a month before then that he had Cancer. Cancer took everything that I was. I only retained what I was willing to fight tooth and nail to keep. The fight came at such a cost that there will never be that normal again. Throughout my fight I tried to remember those pillars, those three things that I considered to be foundation of my identity and realized that I would do anything, pay any price, endure any sacrifice to live for my children and my wife and, if I was blessed enough, to be able to fight my way back to serve my country again.

It’s funny how the things that we say or do can come to have a tremendous impact on others’ lives, usually without us knowing. It’s surprising to me to see how little many people understand how powerful an honest, sincere conversation can have in shaping the course of another person’s life and that it is even possible to save a life simply by being honest and direct. Through my treatments and afterward I came to realize that I had a powerful story of perseverance, resiliency, and commitment. One that, if I could write it out honestly, could possibly help people work up the courage to seek help when they need it. More than that though I feel like I have a duty now as a survivor of a battle that I never wanted to fight to tell my story so people can understand what Cancer does to people and for those touched by it to know that its OK to feel beaten and overwhelmed. It’s my hope that someone somewhere could draw inspiration from it because to me it would in some small way make the suffering that I was forced to endure worth it.

This is a story of personal growth and triumph in the face of defeat, of survival and perseverance, of service, comradery, and love. It is not the most pleasant read. Much of it was written as therapy to help me put what I was feeling into words and to allow my wounds to heal by exposing them to the air and cleaning them one at a time. I have tried wherever I can to be detailed and honest. The raw details of surviving Cancer are ugly and unpleasant and those of PTSD, depression and suicide are equally so, but I wanted this story to be warts and all so that I wouldn’t be lying to someone in the same boat and pretending like it was easier for me than it was. My fight with Cancer and with the demons it wrought very nearly ended me and will never fully be over. It brought me lower than I had ever before conceived, laying in a hospital bed and begging God to take my life, and on the bathroom floor with a bottle of pills asking myself if it was worth continuing to drag my family through the treatments. It has shown me how the power of our experiences, of friendship, family and most of all love can support us, temper us and even pull us from the darkest of depths, back into the light of life.

It is impossible to tell the story of my fight with Cancer without telling the story of my life before Cancer. I went into the fight with the three pillars that helped me back up and that shielded me when I was ready to give up. To tell the story of that I need to tell the stories of those pillars being built. That will serve as well to introduce the people that would later save my life. I fought Cancer as a military officer and tried my best to never forget who I was. The Navy is so intertwined with that story that there is no way to talk about my Cancer without talking about my service as well. If I were to really tell my story though it would begin long ago when I was in high school, when I met the woman who would build those pillars with me and who I would not be alive to write this story without: my wife Stephanie.

Being a husband was my first real role as a true grown-up and it was built on a foundation of friendship that extended for two years before we had started to date. I have no idea how I could have fought my Cancer without her. I would be nothing without her. My heart goes out to anyone who is left to fight Cancer alone because to me there is no way that I would have survived without her love and support. She is just as much a part of this story as I am, and it was through the reactions of the people around us throughout our journey that I began to realize that our story in general was special.

When I was diagnosed I was 33 and Stephanie and I were looking forward to celebrating our yearly triple anniversary. It was our 12-year wedding anniversary which was on the 15-year anniversary of our first date and the 17-year anniversary of us knowing each other. We have a thing for streamlining. She has been a part of my life more than she hasn’t and I can’t tell my story without first telling our story. We were high school sweethearts without cares or a single clue what love was, but early on we became tied to one another and my story begins with how Stephanie and I came together to start our family.


Next Chapter: The Green Door