Hi, it's me, Samir. I know it's been a while. I wish I were coming back to this blog with a new project or a tutorial, something I built that I couldn't wait to show you. Instead, I've started this post a dozen times in my head tonight, and I'm finally writing it for real, because in twelve hours, at 5:30 tomorrow morning, I go in for surgery, and my life is about to change forever.
Some of you know me as a software engineer, or from around the programming community. Some of you are family and friends. Some of you just stumbled in. Either way, I want to tell you the truth about where I am, where I've been, and where I'm going.
I have cancer. It's a bad one. Pancreatic cancer.
It started quietly. Back in February I thought I had food poisoning. By the 18th, I couldn't do the things that make me me. I couldn't code all day, couldn't get on the treadmill. The nausea wouldn't quit, and I tried to tough it out. I didn't get better.
In early April, I looked in the mirror and I was jaundiced. I went to sleep praying I'd imagined it, and woke up to the same answer: I was as yellow as a banana. Urgent care took one look at my bloodwork and sent me straight to the ER. My liver numbers weren't a little high. They were off the charts.
At first, the picture pointed somewhere else entirely. I had an active Hepatitis A infection, foodborne, probably from something I ate back around Christmas. As strange as it is to say, that infection may have been an early saving grace. It likely left my ducts more dilated and brought on the jaundice that made everyone start looking in the first place. Fingers crossed. An ERCP found no stones and no obvious growth, but a brushing came back with "abnormal cells." They placed stents in my bile and pancreatic ducts and sent me home to let the infection clear.
A month later, the stents needed replacing, and while they were in there, they biopsied something on the head of my pancreas.
It was cancer, and I was absolutely floored.
And then I did the thing everyone tells you not to do. I read. I read everything. I fell down the rabbit hole of survival rates and five-year percentages, statistics that read like a countdown clock. I lost my mind in those numbers for a while. What I keep trying to remember is that a statistic is a crowd, not a person, and not one of those numbers is actually me. But at 2am, alone with a search bar, that is a very hard thing to hold onto.
A statistic is a crowd, not a person. Not one of those numbers is me.
The road since has been brutal. The stents got infected on a day I had three appointments and no sleep, which put me back in the hospital for another week and pushed my surgery back while I waited for the infection to clear. And every day of that delay, I was praying. Praying the cancer wasn't metastasizing. Praying it wasn't creeping into my lymph nodes. I was acutely aware of every pain and every ache, petrified of this thing growing inside me. I've had to fight just to make it to the operating table.
Tomorrow they perform what's called a Whipple procedure. They'll remove the head of my pancreas, my gallbladder, part of my bile duct, and my duodenum, and then, somehow, they rebuild me, rewiring what's left so I can digest food again. After I heal, I face about six months of aggressive chemotherapy.
I'll be honest with you, because I promised myself I would: I am terrified.
Right now I feel like a lamb being led to the slaughter. Every twinge in my abdomen feels like the grim reaper tapping me on the shoulder, reminding me my time might be up. The cancer feels like a self-replicating time bomb inside me, the proverbial sword of Damocles hanging over my head by a thread.
And so today I find myself trying to steal a little more time. A little more to tell my family how much I love them. To see a hummingbird in the morning sun. To pet my cat. To hear my nephews and nieces laugh.
And here's a part that hurts in a way I didn't expect: the look on everyone's faces. The sadness in their eyes when they think I'm not watching. It's like I've already become a ghost they're mourning, someone they gaze at with a tenderness that breaks my heart, because I can see exactly what they're afraid of.
I am not doing this alone. My dad has been here through all of it, doing everything he could. My sister is here now, carrying so much of the load, and my mom, my mom is an angel. My brothers have been there for me every step of the way, my cousins and aunts have been wonderful, and my other sisters, even from the other side of the country, are absolute gems. My phone keeps lighting up with friends and relatives calling and texting. If you're reading this, there's a good chance you're one of them, and I need you to know: I feel you with me.
And I need to say this plainly, because asking for help has never come easy to me:
I'll need you. I need my friends. I need my family. I need my community. I can't do this on willpower alone. Your calls, your messages, your prayers, your showing up, all of it. I need my people.
I don't have a neat, inspirational ending. What I have is a wish. I just hope the cancer goes away. I want to get to the other side of this and one day just feel normal again, to live without always bracing for the next catastrophe. That's all. That's everything. I want to get there.
So here's what I'll ask: think of me at 5:30 tomorrow morning. Send up whatever you send up, a prayer, a good thought, a quiet hope. And then go hold your people a little closer tonight.
I'll see you on the other side.