One Week Before Cancer Surgery: The Story I'm Choosing to Tell Myself


At 18, he was wheeled down a cold, too-bright hallway to have his leg amputated. Thirteen years later, he's walking that same hallway again.

Matt recorded this in the week before surgery for a second cancer: not a return of the Ewing sarcoma he survived in 2013, but a new, stage one kidney cancer, caught early after a GI bleed in June and most likely caused by the chemotherapy that saved his life the first time. In his own words, he walks through how different this diagnosis feels. Last time the question was whether he would survive. This time the questions are about his family: can he still be the husband and father he wants to be, with his wife Lauren six months pregnant with their first son?

Plenty of people have called it the worst possible timing. Matt and Lauren chose a different story: how fortunate they are that a new life is coming, and what a gift waits on the other side. That choice is the heart of this episode. Every hardship can be told two ways, and the story you choose shapes who you become inside it. He's honest that the fear is still there; he feels it rise as he speaks. But he goes into surgery trusting the man who will wake up from it.

The key to life isn't happiness; it's peace, and peace can be built in the presence of any emotion.

Shared in Matt's own words; his diagnosis, prognosis and treatment are his personal account, not medical advice.

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