Or: How I spent your money, and why I’m requesting a second round of funding.
Greetings, Beloved Community,
I hope this finds you thriving in this beautiful new year. I am grateful to remain on the mend and to be feeling stronger and healthier all the time. I spoke with my UCSF team last week, and I expect to have my next big scan (the No Evidence of Disease Scan I’ve been dreaming of!) in March. If you missed my latest progress update, you can read it here.
I am writing today with a specific and humbling goal: to ask for help again. I have been astonished by all the contributions that have streamed in since a friend launched a GoFundMe after my cancer recurrence last summer. Those donations, combined with modest state disability payments, have helped to keep my family afloat and supported my ability to pay out-of-pocket for the many complementary healing services from which I’ve benefitted. I feel humbled and grateful.
Now — as I greet the new year (and with it, a new health insurance deductible) — a new slew of medical costs are keeping me company across the treatment finish line. At the same time, I recently received notice of my “Exhaustion of Benefits” from the state, meaning my disability payments have ceased and I’m now living off dwindling savings I had hoped to someday use to buy a home. So it goes! At least I am alive : )
I’ve got plenty more to share today — but first, the ask: Can you make a donation to continue funding my healing?
With the disappearance of my disability payments, I’ve functionally been living for the last couple of months on emergency savings (from that secret envelope tucked away far under the mattress). And it’s just about empty.
I’ve been in conversation with my professional community about returning to work this spring, likely in the next couple of months. I really desire to have that No Evidence of Disease scan first, and my days in the meantime remain full of healing activities.
I am looking forward to my return to work this year, but with my next scan (again, insh’Allah, the big, golden NED scan) right around the corner, now has felt like the time to continue full-speed-ahead with my holistic treatment. That has meant that, in addition to no income, I’ve also continued to have some major expenses in the realm of health care.
My focus lately (through healing practices as mundane as taking walks, juicing, and going to the gym — and as extraordinary as lymphatic massage, cupping sessions, and brewing decoctions of traditional Chinese herbs) has been restoring my homeostasis and vibrancy.
I’m not only rebuilding my body and repairing it from the ravages of cancer and chemo, but also overcoming some side-effects (like neuropathy) that have lasted far longer than I had hoped — not to mention tending to the psychological and spiritual dimensions of my recovery.
When I sat down to write this dispatch, I envisioned including a line-by-line accounting of some of the healthcare costs I’ve fronted lately from the bowels of my emergency savings, but it is too much to list in any brief and elegant fashion.
Just the other day, I spent over $600 on vitamins and supplements. I saw my acupuncturist today for an appointment that costs me $85 every other week. I’ve had a few IV infusions at the naturopathic clinic so far in 2022, each one costing between $200 and $500. And I deeply believe that this is all essential for my healing, so there is little question about whether to do it — just how I’ll pay for it.
And when I float through that big, expensive donut in March for my No Evidence of Disease CT scan — which I look forward to! — I also get to look forward to paying around $4,000 for it, as we are in a new insurance year and I am working off a new $5k deductible.
I’m aware that, once I’m back at work, the floodgates are bound to open to a whole new host of responsibilities that I don’t quite feel ready for. As long as I can maintain sufficient funds to see me through the next couple of months — including this final holistic healing push before my scan in March — I know that’s the best thing I can do for my health.
I’m also hoping to leverage this time to get quite a bit more writing done and integrate the traumatic and transformative experiences of this last year (…and of life itself).
I’ve been pretty quiet on here these last several weeks, not sharing any posts since my celebration of the “radical King” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. That’s because this last month or so, I’ve been trying my hand at feeling a bit more normal, and it has felt good to take a break from talking about recovering from cancer (…and instead just, y’know… work on recovering from cancer).
Also, while I love the immediate feedback, appreciation and personal satisfaction I experience after sharing dispatches like this with my loved ones, I’m even more interested in the feedback, appreciation and personal satisfaction that I know are awaiting me on the other side of a much larger and longer-term project I’m working on. So I have begun to develop the conscious discipline of holding back from writing more frequent updates and instead channeling that energy into my book project.
It has been slow going, with all the daddy duties, continued health care appointments, and other daily functional items that seem to demand my attention (filing taxes here, dealing with insurance forms from a hit-and-run that happened to my car there), but if I emerge from this all with at least a basic and sustainable practice in cobbling away at the book and keeping it alive as I return to work, that will more than suffice.
In the long run, I hope to balance all these things — regular (and shorter!) blog posts and email updates alongside sustained deep practice on my larger creative projects; paid work and outward service in this world alongside deep inner healing and spiritual practice; give and take; in-breath and out-breath.
And I’m also, in many ways, just bouncing back from chemo, just coming to celebrate freedom from cancer (and clinically demonstrating it), just making sense of this intense and trying year and feeling safe and ready to move forward. I give myself grace here. I’ve been though a lot and I’m just emerging from the fog and wiping the crust out of my eyes here.
In order to get over this next hurdle, I could sure use some support in community.
Can you help out?
Today, I leave for a week in New York City with Satya. We will be staying in the Upper East Side flat of a dear friend from college (who currently resides in London and just had a beautiful baby girl two days ago!). In addition to visiting some dear loved ones in the city, we’ll be exploring and enjoying a few days in the Big Apple that I used to call home.
In my next dispatch, I’ll share some tales from the road and describe the role of travel and experience in my wider healing journey. In short, though, I am reclaiming my life from cancer, making up for the time I lost last year to treatment, celebrating the emerging feeling of health and joy in my body, cherishing my aliveness, and seizing the moment to create happy memories with my beloved daughter — and, as much as possible, doing so on the credit card points I earned during this last year of wild health care expenditure. (Give it up for #cancerperks.)
Thank you, as always, for walking with me — not only through those most difficult first weeks of diagnosis, chemotherapy, and all the fear and discomfort I got to befriend — but also on this more sustained journey on this longer road to full recovery and true wellness.
I wish much health and joy to you and your loved ones. Infinite blessings!
Yours in light,
Nils
