It’s so hard writing poetry in pen
A gun to the head,
Or flipping an omelette blind balancing against gusts of wind
Everywhere.
Or saying I Love You for the first
Last
Time.
It takes the courage of 10 year old skaters and mind melders or
Shackleton frozen against panes of glass or
A hole dug for planting or
A dog eyeing the top of fence
(lots of hope there)
The moon breaking through,
I finally reach for my pencil.
It’s so hard writing poetry in pen.
These are experimental writing sketches and not edited.
October 17, 2017, was the day my Mom decided to die. She was laying in bed, and she reached out and grabbed my arm, squeezed it as hard as she could, and said -
“I’m tired. I’m no fun. I need to go join my mates.”
The words by their very nature bounce off reality and shudder against my understanding. There wasn’t much light in the room, the shades drawn, but her eyes collected all of it and shone back at me.
“What do you mean, Ma?” We’d been having these conversations for a months now, but this time it was different. More final. More assured. There was no more hiding in the shadows or what I wanted.
“Today was my very last day of dialysis,” she said. “I won’t be going back.”
“Oh come on now, that’s not happening.”
“It’s happening. It’s happened. I’ve reached the tipping point. Can you turn that down?”
She pointed at the always on TV, right now playing Matlock. The two of us had been catching up on the murderous plots and missteps. I stood up, shut off the TV, and the darkness sank even deeper. But not her eyes.
“The what was, and now is, that’s what I need to answer to. That’s the only thing. The rest…” She waved her hand. “My only real regret is that we won’t get to the end of the season together.”
When I do the math now, it all adds up. Back in March, she had been admitted to the hospital with a very mild stroke. So mild, in fact, that by the time we got there an hour later, my wife Lisa and I, she was speaking normally and downplaying the whole thing. “I gltiched,” was how she explained it. “I’m back.”
The doctors wanted to keep her another night, which she agreed to. The past couple years of her life had been so rocky, so dramatic, that this seemed just like a minor blip. A glitch, absolutely.
But in the hospital the next day, right as she was preparing to be released, she came down with a fever. “We want to keep her another night,” the nurse said, and I could tell by the look on his face that there might be something up. “She probably just caught a bug somewhere.”
Which proved to be true. What she caught was MRSA, a highly resistant infection that for many can be easily treated. For my Mom though, in her late seventies and fraglled by circumstance, this was the beginning of end. Her kidneys began to shut down, her breathing became so labored that she was put on a ventilator, and over the course of the next 6 months I was told 3 separate times she wouldn’t live another 3 days. But she’s always been a fighter and a dreamer, so she didn’t let go easily.
Until she did.
“You can tell the family, you can call your brother and the kids, but this is happening. I’m going to die this weekend.”
“No way, Mom.” Not after so much fighting and weeping and gasping for breath. “No fucking way.”
She just stared back at me, then nodded. “I understand. But I’m just living in the grey. And you can’t make me.”
Over the years, there were many times when we switched back and forth between being a petulant child. It was her turn when she said these last words, and I knew she wouldn’t be swayed. Couldn’t be swayed.
I went out and talked to one of the nurses, and she said it didn’t work that way. If she stopped dialysis, it could be up to two weeks before she died. Not pretty. Not graceful. It was no way to go. “You need to talk her out of it,” she said. “It’s really that simple.”
I was the oldest son. I looked back into her room, and for the first time in months, there were no tubes in her arms. There were no ventilators forcing her to breath, whether she wanted to or not. She looked peaceful in the half-light. After she had battled and finally beat bi-polar mania for the last 6 years, after she had been in and out of one mental hospital after the other, after she had somehow, miraculously, survived living homeless on the streets of Los Angeles, after she had burned just about every bridge she had with old friends and family, here she was. Determined to finally die.
So I went back into the room and sat down, grabbed her hand. “I have a proposition for you,” I said. “One more dialysis. It’s Tuesday now, do one more on Thursday, then I can call everyone and they can come on Friday and say goodbye.”
“Nope.”
“But if you do that, Quinn and Phoebe can get up here. Your sisters. Cam. It will give people time.”
She paused at that, the mention of Quinn and Phoebe. Her granddaughters, my daughters, working in the film business Los Angeles and college in Seattle. They represented my last hope, my strongest point of leverage. Her sisters, Cam her other son, even me no longer held sway.
She clenched and unclenched her hands, knotted and veined. She breathed small breaths. She didn’t say anything for the longest time.
“You don’t have to make up your mind right now,” I said as I stood up and turned back on the TV. “Think about it.”
“Okay. I’ll do it one more time. One more. To give them a chance to get up here.”
Then she paused, turned from Matlock back to me.
“But I’m still dying this weekend. That’s a promise.”
I went out into the hallway to make some calls.
Note: Making a decision on cancer treatment is highly personal. This is NOT a recommendation, just my personal story.
Here’s the bottomline: I went ahead and had prostate surgery on December 9th, three weeks ago to the day. This was after I almost hit the pause button.
Perhaps the most frustrating thing about prostate cancer in particular is the sheer number of options available for treatment, ranging from Brachytherapy to external radiation to surgery, which removes the prostate entirely and might be considered the most radical. When I talked to my radiologist and my surgeon, they both said very similar things: outcomes are generally similar from one treatment to the next. So I was in a bit of a limbo, unsure of which way to go. I scheduled my December 9th surgery as a back-up, giving myself a little time to do more research on which options to pursue.
In mid-November, I posted on FaceBook a little ‘PSA about your PSA’, encouraging men of a certain age to get their PSA levels checked STAT, with the hope that maybe a few of my friends would read it and get the wake-up call: Prostate cancer is easy to diagnose, and treatments are plentiful if caught in time. You can read the post here.
Within minutes of making this post, one of my clients called and insisted I call his doctor in California (Dr. Steve Kurtzman) who specializes in a very specific and highly targeted approach to Brachytherapy. Brachytherapy has gotten somewhat of a bum rap over the years, but has recently seen a resurgence with new technologies and new approaches. Basically, this treatment involves placing radioactive seeds next to the prostate tumors, which in turn destroy the tumors over time.
I reached out to Dr. Kurtzman via email, and he replied that same day and we set up a call. On the call, he not only explained the benefits of Brachytherapy to me, but he was pretty clear: this is the best treatment out there. He was very definitive about this, but only if done with the right doctor, of which there are only a handful in the US (and which he is one).
On top of that, he was responsive and congenial, something not always found in the medical profession. He asked me to watch a video he put together, and when I was done with it I was pretty sure this was the way to go. If you have prostate cancer, I highly recommend spending the time watching this and taking this approach into consideration.
My challenge? I was running out of time. It was now mid-November. And the referral Dr. Kurtzman gave me in the Seattle area couldn’t see me until mid-January. Then the Brachytherapy itself couldn’t be scheduled until later. The clock was ticking, and I felt the pressure of just getting this all resolved.
So I talked to my surgeon again (Dr. Schade at Fred Hutch), and though he agreed that Brachytherapy was a good option, he did not agree it was good to wait. He thought there was a 95% chance the surgery would remove all the cancer, and that this would be a ‘one and done’ approach. I was swayed yet again.
As a side note, what was especially tough through the whole process is that Brachytherapy wasn’t even initially recommended to me by anyone other than my client. It was not considered a primary form of care at Fred Hutch, nost likely because they lacked the expertise. This confused me even further, since Fred Hutch is considered one of the pre-eminent cancer treatment hospitals in the world.
At the end of the day though, I went under the blade on December 9th. Yes, I went back and forth on it. Yes, I wish there was a clear definitive answer as to which path I should have taken, but at the end of the day I had to make the decision with the best available information I had at the time. Results may vary.
I’ll tell you the complete story about my surgery in my next post later this week. But in a nutshell: it was a lot less painful than expected. I’m recovering nicely. Incontinence and sexual dysfunction (two huge side effects of surgery that you need to anticipate) are so far very manageable. All pathology came back negative, which is a good thing. There are, indeed, signs of life.
But, as we all know, cancer is a pesky adversary. So hyper-vigilance is needed. In the meantime, I’ve been resting. I’ve been spending time with family. I’ve been watching movies and playing Wingspan. I’ve been ever thankful for my wife Lisa, who has helped pull me through like the saint and warrior that she is.
More to come.
If you’re following My Mad Mad Madcap Prostate Adventure (coming to a theater near you), I just want to let you know that there is a very good chance - to be confirmed Tuesday November 26th - that I might postpone or cancel my prostate surgery in favor of some other options.
More to come on that - but if you need to know for your own sanity or health, just reach out to me and I’ll let you know more of my story and thought process.
Salud!
~ Chris
27 days until surgery. Remember, this is NOT medical advice. I’m not a doctor. And I don’t even play one on TV.
Here’s the basic timeline of my Most Magnificent Prostate Adventure, without much fanfare or editorializing. Let me just start with this: there are, nor have there ever been, any physical symptoms. So there is piece of blue sky good news.
How it All Came Down:
Back in early March of 2022, I went in for what was supposed to be a run of the mill physical exam. During that exam, my doctor gave me a Digital Rectal Exam - not the most pleasant of things but something I’m a firm believer in, especially now - and this proved negative. We also ran a blood panel, and it was here that my newfound adventure began to raise it’s head, with a PSA of 6.02. Normal PSA is < 4.0. Men of a Certain Age (50+), please get this tested.
So my doc urged me to speak to a urologist, since in his opinion my PSA was trending in the wrong direction (it was < 3.0 just a year earlier).
I went to my urologist here in Bellingham, and based on the results of my blood test, he wanted to do a Prostate Biopsy. I agreed. This is where it also gets controversial, as most people recommend getting an MRI first, but I didn’t know any better at the time.
In May, I got a biopsy, which took 12 core samples of my prostate, 3 of which proved cancerous. My urologist at this point concluded that I had a Gleason Score of 3+3 = 6, which denotes low grade, non-life threatening cancer. There is even some debate as to whether this should be classified as pre-cancerous, but this is a topic for a different day.
Because the prostate biopsy leaves heavy scars, we had to wait 3 months for those scars to heal before getting an MRI. In early September of 2022, I got the MRI, which validated the 3 areas of cancerous growth, still at a 3+3 = 6 Gleason Score. The highest Gleason Score is a 10, so I felt pretty good about it. The doctor did too.
Treatment: I was put on ‘Active Surveillance’, which isn’t that really that ‘active’ at all. Bascally, it involved getting my PSA re-checked every 6 months, and my PSA actually dropped back into the 4 range after my first test in 2023. So far, so good. I went about life.
In February of 2024, we went on a road trip to visit my nephew Henry in Yellowstone, who was rocking it as a snowmobile guide. On that trip, I listened to this exhaustive podcast about Prostate Health with Dr. Peter Attia and Dr. Ted Schaeffer. Lots to absorb here, but when Dr. Attia asked Dr. Schaeffer ‘how do you know if you have a good doctor?’, Dr. Schaeffer replied quite bluntly: if your doctor does the prostate biopsy first and the MRI second, it’s time to switch doctors. Since this was exactly what my doctor had done, it was time for a second opinion (which, frankly, I should have gotten earlier. Why didn’t I? I need to explore this psychology more).
I decided to load the big guns, and went to Fred Hutch in Seattle. They’re considered a preeminent cancer center in the US, if not the world. My PSA was still in the 4 range, but my new doctor, Dr. Schade, was a little concerned about the frequency of my check-ups. He wanted an MRI right away.
In July, I went in for the MRI. Sure enough, there were signs of cancer growth and shadows in the image that needed to be explored.
In late September: Another prostate biospy, this one with 16 core samples. This procedure is not pleasant, and my doctor’s follow-up wasn’t optimum, but the bottom line: I was now a 3+4 = 7 Gleason Score, obviously trending in the wrong direction. Many of the core samples had indications of cancer, and one tumor in particular was approaching the prostate wall (not a good thing).
Doctor Schade recommends surgery to remove prostate entirely, or radiation. Both, he says, have high and almost equal efficacy rates. Multiple downsides and upsides to each.
After talking to various people, and a very informative Fred Hutch radiologist, I decide to go with surgery, for reasons I’ll describe in another post. This is a very personal decision, and other people make other choices with the same data set. If you want to know the absolute bottom-line, it’s sort of a coin flip. But my take is to remove the problem child entirely, in the hope this resolves it fully.
Surgery is scheduled for 12/9/24. About a 4 hour ordeal, I’m walking the same day, and leaving the hospital the next day.
4 week recovery. Rest and family.
Am I nervous? Oh heck yaz. Especially at 2:00am just about every morning. But all signs point to ‘yes’. And Radical Optimism.
So on December 9th, shoot some good karma my way, won’t you? I’ll feel it.
30 days until surgery.
If you’ve ever been surfing, you know how it sounds when you’re held underwater. The rush of chaos, loud pounding everywhere, maybe the sounds of rocks bouncing off one another, the spin as you’re turned over and over again. Then somewhere from the back, a voice that’s casual at first, then increasingly insistent, increasingly loud, increasingly panicked:
It might be time to get the hell out of here.
That’s sort of how I felt when my doctor called. I was driving so I pulled over, and from the moment I picked up the phone, the second I heard his voice, it was if I had slipped and headed headlong into the darkness. Spinning, everywhere.
“The choice is really your’s. Surgery. Or radiation. Or…”
He said a lot more, but somehow the words were lost in the sudden compression of one simple thing: my prostate cancer had progressed and it was time to get my prostate taken out. Maybe he explained ramifications after that, or percentages, timetables, but by then my mind had gone blank in an attempt to right myself, to reach the surface again. I wanted to ask all the right questions and maybe I did, but the answers didn’t stick. The bottom line was that maybe, probably, it was all good, that things would heal, that I’d be fine (whatever that means). A 4 hour surgery all-in, in and out, you’ll be walking again in no time. The same day, almost as if that alone was the big universal selling point. The thing that would be written in the brochure or the Yelp reviews.
Same day service. Walking in no time. BOGO.
When the wave pulled away and I saw sunlight again, the end of the call had already happened. He said ‘Let me know what you want to do’ and hung up. It wasn’t that he was impersonal, or rude, or even not nice. He was perfectly everything a doctor was supposed to be, in fact. Perfectly professional. Perfectly polished in his information. Flawless in his delivery. It was me that was a wreck.
I just stared at my phone. The next calls, the ones to my wife and kids, those would be the ones that would be messy. The unpretty ones. The unprofessional ones. The flawed ones. I started dialing.
My doctor was right, as I gasped for breath. As the voice in the back of my head said It might be time get out of here.
I had decisions to make. Calls to make. Life to think about.
There, on the side of road, counting the minutes until I’d move again.
Maybe I shouldn’t be so dramatic.
When I taught my girls how to ski, my oldest mostly terrified and my youngest mostly fearless, I used to say ‘the most important part of form is a smile’.
This I believed. A smile could get a person out of just about everything, a little life hack that deflected meteors and incoming shrapnel. That warmed cool waters. That parted the grey right down the middle. That made landings in icy hard snow just a little bit softer.
That’s what I’m working on now, this better part of form. I’ve done the math, the long division especially, and what the news tells me is the prognosis looks good. Yeah, I’ll be on my back a couple weeks. Yeah, it looks like, for now anyway, that the cancer hasn’t spread beyond the prostate (which shouldn’t really be a concern but still somehow is). When I think of these things, and add a teaspoon of perspective (there’s that word again) given all the other travails in the world, well yes, I smile. Briefly, perhaps, but a smile nonetheless.
It does indeed help. I’ll do more of it.
Listen to this podcast if have any prostate questions or concerns, or email, text, or call me.
My three weeks in Africa was a blessing. Not only did I see some amazing things (truly mind-blowing), but I had time to reflect (a lot) on just how lucky I am to have things as simple as clean water and a light switch. I also was gifted time to ponder what it means to be human, and I developed this mantra along the way.
The New Daily Affirmation:
I am a joyful father.
Joyful husband.
Joyful writer.
Joyful warrior.
Let’s go out and do the work.
That’s it. Plain and simple.
Or, seeing the world all at once.
I just returned from a 3 week safari to Kenya. Very little email or texts or to-do lists.
Just being. Just listening. Just trying to learn. Just trying to absorb the expanse of beauty, life, death, that rules the open savanna, where it truly does come down to cunning and strength. guile and the ability to outrun. We saw cheetahs eating their kill, vultures swarming over carcasses. sunsets that stretched across everywhere, birds the colors of spun kaleidoscopes, a baby elephant curl it’s trunk, giraffes spread out across the horizon, a hundred baboons cut across the earth, a purple grasshopper the size of the sun.
More. Much more.
I went with my family, which was the best part. By far. My wife Lisa, my daughters Quinn and Phoebe, Brad, my son-in-law.
We saw the infinite together, wondering how we got so dang lucky.
Sunrise on the Maasai Mara, July 5th 2023
There’s the horizon there, off in the distance, glimmering. Where we all have 1000 true fans. Where escape velocity has been achieved and the parade has already started. We hear about this unicorn, running untamed. This goal of 1000 connections has long been a great goal of business, has been a metric we’ve held a ruler to and examined. With 1000 true fans, it’s been said, you can melt entire icebergs and continents with your bare hands.
But most of us (me) aren’t even close. So maybe it starts today, that filling of a blank page. Those connections, built one by one. Not as a transactional goal, but as an emotional one. To truly bring value and mean something special to one another.
To that end, I’m starting a little group called Creative State. This will be a community of people hoping to build this value more deeply in 2023. If you’re into it, and want to learn more, drop me a line. Then, we can discuss what the future looks like.
Yogi Berra once said something like “If you don’t know where you’re going, that’s where you’ll end up.’
Which seems to be the state of many of us in the creative economy right now, from Netflix on down. The macro-economic compass has shifted, and the smartest people in the room are scrambling to capture profit over growth. For those keeping score, this is the same cycle we saw in 2001, 2007, and now again in 2022. It isn’t just about eyeballs or subscribers, it’s about actually having a bag at the end of the year you can hold onto.
To the small scale creator like me, the challenges are similar but maybe not quite as tectonic. I’m always amazed whenever I’m putting together a budget how quickly the numbers add up, and often we’ll get push back from clients saying they just can’t spend that much. So that’s where the balancing act begins: where do I make sacrifices? How do I scale back into scope? What do I, as a creator, have to give up? And most importantly, how can we hold onto the integrity of our vision around the project?
It’s the challenge of every client, producer, director, production designer, cinematographer, and artist out there, especially in a bear market. The question we’re going to be asked, now more than ever, is how we do more with less?
But it’s not all doom and gloom. If we can keep making and building and winding our way through the next 18-24 months, we have a chance of building a strong foundation around ‘making’ that will do us well once the economy cycles back around. Patience is teaching me how to become very friendly with the long game again. But let’s not kid ourselves, it’s not without a struggle. The last couple years have been unique in their own right, so I’m reminding myself again (and again) of perhaps the single best piece of advice I ever received along the way:
Keep your overhead LOOOOOOOOW and your eyes on the prize. Fly with the least amount of baggage. Carry-on + 1.
Flying to Colorado - September 2022
Optimism isn’t a cure all. Being a stoic doesn’t solve everything. Life can sometimes tie your shoelaces together.
I’m going through it myself a bit right now, chopping at the vines with a broadsword. Back in June, I was diagnosed with low-grade prostate cancer (on the cusp really - some argue my diagnosis is pre-cancerous) but to hear those words at all is pretty intimidating. The whole thing involved a prostrate biopsy (note to self: sedation next time) and now I’m rotating through an ‘Active Surveillance’ protocol. The first step of this protocol happened this week, where I had an MRI and this Tuesday I get a much clearer picture of where I really am. So I’m beginning to relate to everyone else out there who has heard the C word. It’s a real hairy thing.
Radical Optimism isn’t about pretending everything is going to be all right. It’s about believing change for the better can happen, and that we can be agents of that change. That’s a beautiful thought.
So as I go down my own path figuring out how to be a better participant in the Creative Economy, and writing/filming/building/sharing/being more, it’s good to have that fall back position: positive change is right here, waiting to be made.
Field in Montana, 2022
I’ve been exploring meditation again (I use Calm and Insight Timer, though you only need one), and one of the tenets I like is ‘Begin Again’. When you find yourself distracted by a myriad of thoughts, just take a deep breath and begin again.
Athletes talk about this all the time. They miss a basket? They wipe it from their memory and begin again. It’s the work of the artist and the builder, to begin again when things go sidewise or the canvas didn’t quite turn out the way we expected. Beginning again is a superpower.
It also relieves the pressure of not getting it right the first, second, or third time. The answer is pretty simple:
Begin again.
People like to talk about how we can all shape the world we live in, that reality is a subjective thing that can be shaped by what we believe and what we do. And this is true…
Except at the edges. There is a point in the subjective space where objectivity kicks in, and there is indeed a right and wrong, the yes and the no. This space is reserved for the axe murderers, the dictators, the pyramid scheme artists, the fascists and a litany of other (often times colorful) characters. These people have lost their privilege of shaping their own subjective reality.
But for the rest of us, for most of us, reality is a piece of clay waiting to be spun. Yes, we are all challenged by the obstacles forced on us by paperwork and To-Do lists, the laundry and the garage that is never organized. We’re pushed and pulled by the many obligations of work and everything else that tries to box us in.
But we can control that. We can slowly wrestle these realities into something that works for us if we’re intentional enough. We can make often make the world behave as we wish and not the other way around.
George Bernard Shaw had this to say about it:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Shape who you are. We’re all depending on it.
One of the challenging things about running a relatively new company (going on year 3 now) is taking the space and time to create stuff, like this blog. It’s not an excuse, it’s just a point of fact - the same point of fact that all content creators everywhere have to face, day after day.
Indeed, I want to hold myself more accountable around content creation, especially since that’s my business. It’s how I make money and is what brings me joy. The content can always be better and the grass is always greener for sure - but look for more stuff from me moving forward.
One workflow tip I’m going to implement: using this blog space as more of a personal notebook for drafting ideas, thoughts, sketches. A lot of it will be half-baked. There will be mistakes (always). But then I will refine this into the other platforms like LinkedIn, Radical Optimism, and Patreon. Using this space as a notepad and content engine.
Then distributing.
This space is my first step at getting rid of the Resistance (that voice in my head that likes to say I’m not good enough) and growing as an artist and maker from there. What sayest thou?
If you’re reading this - maybe you have some tips. Comment below.
