When I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, one of the first things I did was search online.I Thought I Might Be on a Time Limit: My Multiple Myeloma Story on Living Well Together

What I found scared me.

Some of the information I came across made me believe I might only have a limited amount of time left. I had a young daughter, and suddenly the biggest question in my mind wasn’t just what cancer was going to do to me.

It was whether I would be there to raise her.

That was one of the experiences I recently talked about during my appearance on Living Well Together with Dr. Terry and Lisa McCoskey.

Watch the Short: Why I Keep Talking About Cancer Even When It Hurts

In the conversation, I opened up about being diagnosed with multiple myeloma, going through cancer treatment and a stem-cell transplant, becoming a full-time father, dealing with anxiety and mental health struggles, and trying to keep moving forward while other parts of my life were uncertain.

But one of the most important parts of the conversation was what happened after the hardest moments.

Surviving something doesn’t mean you stop carrying it

Something I’ve realized more recently is that telling my story can sometimes reopen things I thought I had already moved past.

For a long time, I didn’t really think of myself as “someone with cancer.” Cancer was something I went through, but I didn’t want it to become my entire identity.

Writing about it and talking publicly about it forced me to revisit some of those memories.

That isn’t always comfortable.

But I keep doing it for a reason.

When I was going through multiple myeloma, I couldn’t find many people whose experiences felt like mine. I wanted to see somebody I could relate to—someone dealing with the same disease and some of the same fears.

If sharing my experience now gives somebody else that person to find, then revisiting some uncomfortable memories is worth it.

There’s always a bounce-back period

One idea I came back to during the interview is something I’ve learned through several difficult periods of my life:

Bad seasons can make you feel like they’re permanent while you’re living through them.

They usually aren’t.

There are valleys, but there are also peaks.

That doesn’t mean everything magically works itself out. It doesn’t mean difficult experiences stop hurting. And resilience doesn’t mean never struggling.

For me, it means recognizing that where you are today does not necessarily determine where you’ll be tomorrow.

There can be a bounce-back period.

Cancer taught me that.

Fatherhood taught me that.

Anxiety taught me that.

And some of the hardest experiences of my life eventually forced me to become stronger in ways I probably would not have chosen for myself.

Why I continue sharing my story

I never set out to make cancer the center of who I am.

But I’ve realized that there can be purpose in talking about something you once wished you never had to experience.

That purpose is one of the reasons I wrote my memoir, Rise Anyway: A Memoir of Survival, Fatherhood, and Becoming.

And it’s why conversations like this one matter to me.

If somebody is dealing with cancer, anxiety, a difficult family situation, uncertainty about the future, or simply a period of life that feels like it is never going to end, I want them to know that the chapter they are in right now does not have to be the end of their story.

Sometimes you don’t realize how much you’ve survived until you have the opportunity to look back at it from the other side.

Watch Living Well Together with Brice Davis

I appreciate Dr. Terry and Lisa McCoskey for giving me the space to have such an open conversation.

We talked about multiple myeloma, treatment, fatherhood, mental health, resilience, Rise Anyway, and some lighter parts of my life along the way.

If you’d like to hear the complete conversation, watch Living Well Together with Brice Davis | Episode 136 below.

Watch the full interview on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dloZ8YRmuIU

If something in the conversation connects with you, I’d love to know:

What helped you keep going during one of the hardest periods of your life?