Counting Backward, Coming Forward

A long time coming...

Even heroes need rest.

Counting backward from 100 by seven.

It sounds so simple when you read it on a screen. Like a brain teaser on a placemat at a diner. Something to keep your hands busy while you wait for coffee.

In the hospital, it was a lifeline.

A nurse stood near the bed with calm eyes and a steady voice, and I could tell from the way the room tightened that this was not casual conversation. This was assessment. This was them checking the weather inside my head.

“Can you count backward from one hundred by sevens?”

I started.

Ninety-three.

Eighty-six.

Seventy-nine.

Then the numbers began to blur like someone had smeared ink across a page.

At some point, they switched gears.

Counting backward from 100 by ten.

Easy enough, right?

Ninety.

Eighty.

Seventy.

Then the instructions came from within my mind:

“Skip thirty and twenty.”

Skip thirty and twenty.

100, 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 10

The nurse told me to try again.

I nodded like I understood. Like my brain was still mine to command. Like I was fully in control.

100, 90, 80, 70, 60, 50, 40, 10

Here is the part that still makes me shake my head when I think about it.

I was wrong.

But I would not admit it.

Not because I was being stubborn on purpose. Not because I was trying to be difficult. It was something deeper and stranger than pride. It was like my mind had decided that being confident mattered more than being correct.

Like the truth was negotiable, and I could simply will my way through it with enough determination.

I kept answering with certainty, even when the certainty was made of sand.

That is the thing about neurotoxicity. It does not always arrive like a dramatic crash. Sometimes it comes like fog. The kind that creeps in slowly, thickens quietly, and makes you think you can still see the road even while you are drifting off the lane.

I did not know where I was.

I did not know what day it was.

I was answering questions, but I was floating somewhere else while I did it.

Then there was the moment that still hits me the hardest.

I did not remember Maria.

Not fully. Not right away.

My rock. My person. The one who has carried me through all of this with white Converse on her feet and a warrior’s calm in her voice.

I looked at her, and the recognition that should have been instant was delayed, like a slow-loading page.

That is not a feeling I ever want to experience again.

But even inside that fog, even while my mind was slipping in and out like a radio losing signal, something made it through.

I said her name.

Just not the one everyone else knows.

During those moments, I called Maria my secret name for her. The one that has belonged only to us since we were dating. The one that started back when we were trying to keep the whole thing quiet.

It came from the Colonel’s secretary, of all people.

Back then, when Maria would call me, the secretary gave her a name to use so everyone wouldn’t know we were dating. Something about me getting a warning not to date her. As if love can be regulated. As if two people choosing each other requires permission.

The name stuck.

A private nickname wrapped in a little bit of rebellion. A little bit of humor. A little bit of this is ours.

Somehow, even with neurotoxicity doing its worst, that name survived the storm.

Maria told me when I said it, she beamed.

Not a polite smile. Not a tired “he’s trying” expression.

A beam.

The kind that lights up a room. The kind that says, he’s still in there.

The nurse apparently said something when she heard it. A small comment, the kind people make when they realize they have stepped into a moment that wasn’t meant for them.

Maria did not miss a beat.

“He knows who I am,” she replied.

I love that line.

Not as a correction, but as a declaration.

Like she was planting her flag in the middle of the chaos.

You can take a lot from him right now. You can take his orientation. You can take his numbers. You can even take his certainty and twist it into something unreliable.

But you cannot take us.

You cannot erase the history written into the soft places. The names. The rituals. The way love brands itself into memory deeper than facts and dates ever will.

I wish I could fully remember that moment.

I wish I could remember the beam the way she describes it. I wish I could remember the exact look on her face when she heard that name come out of me like a thread leading back home.

But I can’t.

That part is missing.

All I have is the shape of it. The echo of it. The story she carried back to me afterward, told gently, like she was handing me something fragile and priceless at the same time.

When she explained it to me, I did see her smile.

Not the smile from the moment itself, but the smile from her memory of it. The way her face lit up all over again as she told me what happened.

It was a strange kind of gift.

Her joy, delivered secondhand.

Her relief, retold.

Her light, reflected back to me.

That is when it hit me: I do not have to personally hold every memory for it to matter.

Sometimes, the people who love us remember for us.

Sometimes, they carry the moment when we can’t.

Sometimes, the clearest version of a memory is the one seen through the eyes of someone steady, someone present, someone who stayed awake while you drifted somewhere beyond yourself.

Some memories are best through the eyes of others.

Even the hard ones.

Maybe especially the hard ones.

Thankfully, little by little, I started to come back.

The fog thinned.

The numbers began to make sense again.

The room stopped spinning into unfamiliarity.

I remember the first moment I realized I was improving. It was not dramatic. It wasn’t a movie moment with swelling music.

It was quiet.

A nurse asked me something again, and I answered it correctly, not just confidently.

Correctly.

I could feel the relief in the room. I could feel the way the staff relaxed, even if just a fraction. I could feel Maria breathe again.

So why did it happen?

Because this therapy is powerful. Because it is not just medicine moving through veins. It is an immune system being trained to hunt. It is the body going into an all-hands-on-deck state. When those T-Cells activate, they release chemical signals to do their work, and sometimes the whole system gets loud.

Sometimes that “loud” spills over into the brain.

Sometimes the inflammation and the storm that helps kill cancer also disrupts the delicate wiring that makes you you.

That is what neurotoxicity felt like for me.

Disorientation.

Confusion.

Stubborn certainty in the middle of being wrong.

The terrifying, hollow space of not recognizing the face I love most.

I hate that it happened.

But I am grateful they caught it quickly. I am grateful it was temporary. I am grateful for the people who asked me the right questions at the right time, even when I thought I was fine.

Especially when I thought I was fine.

The truth is, the counting was never about math.

It was about finding me again.

One number at a time.

One question at a time.

One secret name that somehow survived the fog.

The Detour After the Finish Line

I thought I was through the worst of it.

That is the tricky thing about discharge. It feels like a finish line. Like if you can just get the paperwork signed, get the IVs removed, and make it back to your own bed, then the danger must be behind you.

The hospital gives you this strange sense of closure. A door clicking shut. A chapter ending.

But my story, once again, had other plans.

Not long after I got home, I started to develop a hiccup.

That sounds harmless when you say it out loud. Almost funny, even. Like something you cure with a sip of water and a badly timed scare.

This wasn’t that.

This was my body reminding me, with violent consistency, that the T-Cells were still in there working. That the immune system was still loud. That the storm was still moving through my nervous system whether I was ready or not.

The simplest way I can explain what they told me is this: when those T-Cells activate, the body can stay inflamed and hypersensitive for a while. Nerves get irritated. Muscles don’t behave the way they normally do. The diaphragm, that muscle that should quietly and faithfully help you breathe, can start firing like a glitchy circuit.

So instead of a hiccup, you get something closer to a full-body jolt.

It lasted for two days.

Two days of my body jerking like it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to inhale, exhale, or shake itself apart.

You know when babies get hiccups and their whole little bodies bounce?

Now imagine that in a full grown man.

Every thirty seconds.

Non-stop.

There were moments I truly thought I wasn’t going to breathe again.

I thought I had taken my last breath.

Not in a dramatic way. Not in the way movies do it with speeches and slow music.

Just this sudden, raw certainty that my body might finally quit the fight without warning.

Here is what scared me most: there was nothing I could do to stop it.

No willpower.

No grit.

No “suck it up.”

Just the helplessness of being trapped inside your own chest while it spasms against you.

I tried to relax.

I tried to let my body take over.

I tried not to fight it, because fighting made it worse. Fighting stole the little air I had left.

Except this time, I couldn’t tap out.

It was like fighting on the mat while your opponent hits you in the diaphragm again and again, and then pins you with his knee pressed into your solar plexus. Two hundred pounds grinding down while you try to remember how to breathe.

Over and over. That deep, hollow impact that makes your breath disappear.

(Shout out to the mat room.)

On the mat, you can tap.

Here, I couldn’t.

This was my body.

This was inside me.

This was survival with no referee.

It was the scariest moments of my life.

Eventually it got bad enough that I went back into the ER, where we spent thirty-six hours in the before I got a room.

Thirty-six hours of fluorescent lights, waiting, monitoring, trying to breathe through something that didn’t care how tired I was. Trying to stay calm while my body kept throwing punches at itself.

But I stayed.

Because the truth is, I wasn’t there for comfort.

I was there for the kind of treatment that could quiet the nervous system, relax the muscles, interrupt the chaos.

By hour forty-eight of my stay, it finally eased, awhen it stopped, it wasn’t like victory.

It was like mercy.

A quiet return.

A pause in the storm long enough to remember what normal breathing feels like.

I was released again, to go heal and relax.

A little more fragile, and very aware that this therapy is both miracle and monster depending on what hour of the day you catch it.

The Foot Pain and the Continued Search for the Super Soldier Serum

Two days after being home, my old foot pain came back.

That old familiar ache like an unwelcome guest who knows exactly where you keep the spare key.

At first, none of us could figure out why.

Not me. Not the doctors. Not the people who have studied bodies their whole lives.

It was just there.

Sharp.

Constant.

Limiting me in all the small humiliating ways pain does. Making the simple act of standing feel like a negotiation.

Then it dawned on me.

Gout.

The last time this happened was partly because of my Neupogen shots. I went back to my blog to get the dates, compared them to my medical history and bam!

That was the pattern. That was the clue. The kind you only catch when you’ve been living inside your own medical mystery long enough to recognize its habits.

So we brought it up to the nurse practitioner.

I tried to explain it, but I can’t speak fluent medical. I’m still over here struggling with counting backward from one hundred. Still working on one hundred to one by seven.

Funny aside: during the neurotoxicity testing, I refused to say zero was a number.

I said what I said, zero is not a number.

(Shout out to my math geeks.)

The doctors had many consultations about the foot. They took pity on me and started me on steroids. We had to consider what this does to the study results. We were all worried that it may mess up the study results and the answer came back that this regiment of steroids won’t be a problem. By the way, I wasn't going to chose the pain free option if it meant compromising the study. It means too much to me to provide good results.

I immediately joked that I’m always looking to build that super soldier serum. If my life is going to feel like a Marvel origin story, I might as well commit to the bit.

But here is the part that amazed me.

The steroids worked.

Not in days.

In hours.

The pain began to loosen its grip like it finally got tired of holding on, and for the first time in what felt like forever, I was able to walk to the bathroom on my own.

Maria was right behind me, of course.

Quiet.

Ready.

Making sure I didn’t fall.

Not hovering.

Guarding.

That is what she does. That is who she is.

Home Gets Louder Again

Gabriel and Grace Ann were here for the weekend.

I didn’t get to interact with them much because of the foot pain and the fatigue. My body was there, but my energy was rationed down to essentials.

But still, it was good to hear them in the apartment.

To hear their voices.

I’m so blessed they came to visit and I promised Grace Ann that I’ll go visit a museum with them, the next time they come down.

My dad and Ethan are coming to stay with me for a few days while Maria goes home.

That sentence alone feels like comfort.

It feels like family logistics and love moving into place. Like people taking turns holding the line.

Then there is Noah.

Noah has been putting in the work. It’s now track season and he is not joking about it.

He’s a 200 and 400 meter runner, plus relays.

He is also doing the long jump and triple jump.

School seems to easy for him. He is truly disciplined.

I am so proud of all three boys I can’t even fit it neatly into a sentence.

Pride is too small a word for it.

It is awe.

It is gratitude.

It is the strange emotional whiplash of watching your kids grow stronger while you are learning how to stand again.

I’m excited that my dad will be here with Ethan, and that they both get a chance to explore the city.

I’m probably still a bit too frail to be outside right now. My body is still rebuilding. My stamina is a rumor. My strength is coming back slowly, like a tide that refuses to be rushed.

But I heard they have plans and I love that brcause even if I’m not ready to be out in the world, the world is still here. Still moving. Still offering itself to the people I love. Still needing to be explored!

I’ll be here, listening to my new collection of inspired music by known other the the former Under-18 All-Valley Karate Tournament Johnny Lawrence. You can find the list on Spotify. If you can’t send me a message and I’ll get you the links.

Letting home be loud again.

Letting love take shifts.

Letting my body heal on its own schedule.

Breathing without having to do another all out match on mat.

I am grateful to just be breathing.

Finally, I’ve read your messages and emails. I see that some of you have called. I try to reach out when I can. Just know I appreciate the love. My eyes swell when I turn to my phone. Every time. Thank you for caring. I truly mean more than you will ever know.

As I was finishing this piece that kept on going through my journal and I’m sure I’ll revisit some of the other stuff in-between these days - I found this in my journal:

100, 93, 86, 79, 72, 65, 58, 51, 44, 37, 30, 23, 16, 9, 2

Yeah I was there all along. Trying to hack the system, by memorizing 100 backwards by 7.

Finally this was written in a inside to outside circle manner with my hand never turning:

“Sunlight holds fast in her hair She is effortless in her beauty unstudied in her poise She knows the room and the room bows to her In those white Adidas, built for the long wait she is Aphrodite welding a caduceus staff”

I’ll post this picture when I can explain some of the other things on the page. Brain fog and neurotoxicity are weird, like Mad-Tea party weird.

Be well my friends and family, especially to all my prayer warriors. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Our voices are being heard.

I feel well.