Cancer didn’t clear everything else off my plate.

In 2021, I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a blood cancer. At the same time, I was dealing with court issues involving my daughter and mental-health struggles that had already been part of my life before the diagnosis.

Cancer was a major problem. It just wasn’t the only problem.

https://youtube.com/shorts/CznU983aids

Cancer didn’t happen in a vacuum

When people hear that somebody has been diagnosed with cancer, it naturally becomes the center of the story.

But real life doesn’t always separate problems that neatly.

My multiple myeloma diagnosis happened while other parts of my life were already demanding my attention. I still had responsibilities as a father. I was still dealing with the courts involving my daughter. My previous struggles with mental health didn’t suddenly disappear because cancer entered the picture.

Everything was happening at the same time.

That part of the experience can be difficult to explain because each issue was serious enough on its own. Put them together, and there wasn’t one simple thing to focus on before moving to the next.

There was just life.

Fatherhood was still part of the picture

Being diagnosed with blood cancer didn’t stop me from being a father.

I was still dealing with issues involving my daughter while trying to understand what was happening with my own health. Those two parts of my life weren’t separate stories. They were happening alongside each other.

That is one reason fatherhood became such an important part of how I eventually told my story.

When I talk about having multiple myeloma, I’m not only talking about cancer. I’m talking about what it was like to have cancer while the rest of my life kept moving.

Mental health didn’t begin with the diagnosis

I had dealt with mental-health struggles before I was diagnosed with multiple myeloma.

I think that distinction matters.

It would be easy to tell the story as if the cancer diagnosis created every struggle I was dealing with, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Some battles were already there. Cancer arrived on top of them.

That is probably the simplest way I can describe that period:

Everything hit at once.

Why I started writing it down

Before all of this, I had already been making commentary videos on YouTube. I was comfortable talking about things happening around me.

Eventually, I started documenting more of what had happened in my own life.

There was the cancer diagnosis.

There was fatherhood.

There were the court issues.

There was mental health.

Instead of treating those experiences like completely separate chapters, I began looking at what it meant to go through all of them during the same period of my life.

That documentation eventually became part of my memoir, Rise Anyway: A Memoir of Survival, Fatherhood, and Becoming.

[Rise Anyway: A Memoir of Survival, Fatherhood, and Becoming]

The book gave me somewhere to put experiences that were difficult to reduce to one conversation or one short video.

One diagnosis doesn’t stop the rest of your life

That is what this short clip represents to me.

Getting diagnosed with multiple myeloma was enormous, but life didn’t suddenly organize itself around that diagnosis. Other problems still existed. Responsibilities still existed. Fatherhood still existed. Mental health still mattered.

Sometimes the hardest periods aren’t defined by one thing going wrong.

It’s several things demanding something from you at the same time.

I’ve also written about another part of my multiple myeloma experience—the fear and uncertainty I had after being diagnosed and trying to understand what the disease might mean for my future.

The short video above came from my appearance on Living Well Together with Brice Davis | Ep. 136. In the full conversation, I talked more about multiple myeloma, fatherhood, mental health, and why I eventually decided to document my experiences.

Watch the full conversation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dloZ8YRmuIU&list=PLKJHG_NIQX1DQoNBNstxVpx12MI1fjDkh&index=4&t=14s

Have you ever gone through a period where several major problems seemed to arrive at the same time?