The New Routine

November 1, 2025

Photo by Francesca Saraco on Unsplash

Today I’m writing from our apartment in New York City. We didn’t get into Hope Lodge, so we found a small place on the Upper East Side, Yorkville, to be exact. It’s nothing fancy, just a two-bedroom tucked near the hospital, surrounded by grocery stores, late-night takeout spots, and enough city noise to remind me that I’m far from the quiet order of the suburbs. For those who watched How I Met Your Mother, we’re only a block away from Ted Mosby’s apartment. Somehow that small, silly detail makes me smile.

October 23 marked the start of radiation treatment. I spent most of that day pretending not to think about it, which of course meant it was all I could think about. Somewhere inside, the kid who grew up on comic books still wanted to believe in gamma rays and transformation. I pictured myself walking out of the session a little greener, a little stronger, ready to take on the world.

What I found instead was quiet precision. The team moved with a calm, practiced grace. What stayed with me wasn’t the hum of the machine or the flicker of light, but the music. Not the soft, sterile piano instrumentals you expect in hospitals, but real music: The Eagles, John Fogerty, Neil Young, Hall & Oates. Songs from another life, road trips with the windows down, Saturday mornings cleaning the house with the radio turned up too loud. For a few minutes, I wasn’t a patient. I was just someone listening to the soundtrack of easier days.

Friday brought the familiar rituals, blood drawn through the mediport, a plastic cup for the lab, and the slow drip of Rituximab. Fifty milligrams of IV Benadryl hit hard, and before long, I was floating somewhere between sleep and distance, half-dreaming in that sterile, fluorescent light.

The weekend offered a pause. No appointments, no alarms, just rest. Saturday and Sunday unfolded slowly, quiet and unhurried, a small stretch of stillness that felt like grace.

By Monday, the rhythm had taken hold. Each morning began the same way: radiation, a quick check-in, then rest. The days blurred together, labs, infusions, tests, all blending into a pattern that felt both monotonous and comforting. Routine has a strange way of grounding you when everything else feels uncertain.

Monday night, I stayed up watching the World Series, stubbornly pushing through to the fifteenth inning before finally giving in. I woke at four to check the score, the city half-asleep beneath the glow of streetlights and the soft hum of taxis. For a moment, it felt almost normal.

The next few weeks will bring more of the same, radiation, tests, and soon, physical therapy for the drop foot. Each small effort feels like a step toward balance, a quiet assertion that healing is still in motion.

My stem cell transplant is scheduled, though the donor search has taken an unexpected turn. All of my potential matches are international. Maria and I laughed, imagining my future cells arriving from a tall, blonde Swede somewhere across the ocean. There’s something profoundly humbling in that thought, knowing that my healing might depend on the generosity of a stranger halfway around the world.

In one of those long waiting-room conversations that start with science and drift into the philosophy of human nature, Maria and I talked about how some countries have built cultures of donation and how, somehow, we haven’t quite caught up. It’s a strange mix of gratitude and perspective, this realization that healing is a shared act of humanity.

The most New York thing I’ve seen so far happened on an ordinary morning. A pigeon got hit by a car right in front of me. I watched it tumble under the body of the car and braced for the worst. The car drove on, and the pigeon, unfazed and undamaged, just kept walking. It didn’t limp, didn’t pause, didn’t even glance back. It simply carried on.

There’s a kind of resilience in that small, stubborn bird that feels like a lesson. Life knocks you down, rolls right over you, and somehow you just keep walking.