If you're looking for Joseph's story about learning to live through cancer, it's not here anymore. The reason is that some dirtbag script kiddie hacked the site and infected it with a rootkit so that he could use it to spam people, hack other websites, engage in DDoSes, and other things of a less than savory nature. It's sad that someone would intrude upon the life of someone with a terminal diagnosis just for a cheap way to make the Internet a less pleasant place to be, but that's the world we live in.
I still have the text of the spiritsubstance blog, and I may see about uploading it into this place as static content. Long story short, I was diagnosed win 2010 right after my 32nd birthday with a soft-tissue sarcoma. And then another. My current diagnosis is terminal stage 4 melanoma, although I still look pretty good for a guy who's supposed to be dying. :) I've been "NED" for about two years now. I'd like to say that's because I'm stubborn, but really that's God's doing, not mine.
I never really wrote anything about what happened before the cancer here, and I don't intend to now. Suffice it to say that there's a guy who has a diagnosis rather similar to mine out there and we're not part of each other's lives these days and mutually prefer it that way. Anyway, I wouldn't wish what I went through on my worst enemy! May God bring him healing and strength in body and mind. Truly, he doesn't know it but he's basically the reason I was prepared to fight and survive as long as I have.
When you are faced with something this life-altering, this unfair, and this terrible, you really only have two choices: You can wallow in self-pity, bitterness, anger, and despair. Or you can stand tall and say, "I won't back down, I won't give up, and I won't quit. No matter how many times you knock me down, I will get back up. No matter what you do to destroy my life, I will rebuild it!"
If you can say those words and mean it, as I did... Well the reality is that you might still die. But the rest of your life will have meaning whether you live another five months, five years, or fifty years.
Some have mocked my faith in God throughout all of this, but I know now what I have always known: With God, your odds of survival are not 23% as the literature says mine were. Your odds of survival are one out of one. You will or you won't, according to God's plan and your willingness to cooperate with it. And if you don't survive in this world, you'll be on to the next.
Faith manages.
Joseph, 2015-Aug-17