Probably Nothing

When fear runs your life, what’s left of it?

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

The doctor asked me what month it was, and I couldn’t remember.

And I was scared.

I wasn’t scared when I hit my head on the ice during a hockey game. Or the next morning when my neck hurt and I told Nancy it felt like whiplash. Or even as I felt a little fog settle in my brain later in the week. All that, I could explain away. I felt a little off, but a little off can mean anything from mild fatigue to not enough coffee to just another day in your 50s. Usually a little off is not a medical emergency.

But I should have known the month.

I was sitting in the emergency room, and the doctor was asking basic questions. Where are you? What happened? What month is it? And nothing came.

It’s a detail so ordinary you never think about knowing it. But I didn’t. For some reason all I could think was “October,” which is my birth month. And when I tried to recall other details from the week, that didn’t work either. The hockey game. Breakfast. The car. I could see them as stills, but they overlapped and had no order. It was like someone had taken the slides out of a projector and thrown them on a table.

Then I started crying. Because I was scared, and because whatever part of the brain that usually stops me from crying in front of strangers had also been forgotten.

In the end, as some of you know from my recent notes, the CT scan was fine. There was no bleed, and thankfully no fracture. It was just a concussion.

Just. What a strange word.

A few weeks before that, a different doctor had a camera down my throat when he told me he saw a small lesion. Just a little red mark. Followed by “it’s probably nothing.”

I don’t know if there’s a good time to hear that particular comfort from a doctor, but for me it happened during a visit to my oncologist with a flexible scope threaded through my nose inspecting the place where cancer already tried to kill me once.

Just is a word people use when they want to make a bad thing seem small, and probably nothing is a maddening phrase that leaves open every possibility. There is no certainty in either.

Doctors say these things because most problems are small and not life threatening. Odds are that a red spot in a mouth is irritation from your teeth or something hard you ate. Just an ordinary scuff from the ordinary business of eating and chewing and talking. My doctor said it looked like a small lesion. Probably a scrape. We’d keep an eye on it.

But there was no certainty, so he reminded me that I reached my limit of radiation during throat cancer treatment in 2023. A lifetime supply blasted through the part of my body I use to talk, eat, taste, swallow, argue, kiss my wife, yell across the house, tell stories, order drinks, make jokes, and do most of the things I associate with being me. So if cancer comes back, radiation is off the table and the options get ugly. If it’s on the tongue, they take the tongue. If it’s on the vocal cords, they take the vocal cords. If it’s in the jaw, they take the jaw. Depending on where the new bad thing decides to live, I could become a person breathing through a hole in my throat.

I guess I should probably back up to fill you in.

At the end of 2023 and into the beginning of 2024, I had stage 4 cancer at the base of my tongue. A tumor four centimeters wide. Picture a golf ball. Now put that in your mouth just past the back of your tongue heading down your throat. Actually don’t, because you’ll choke, which is basically how I discovered my cancer. Over time I started having trouble breathing and woke up one morning coughing blood.

Anyway, after I was diagnosed, I was told surgery would mean taking out a large part of my tongue. Since talking and eating are not bonus features to me, this wasn’t a realistic option. Like many of you, my mouth is my primary operating system. So I had radiation and cisplatin chemotherapy instead. It destroyed the cancer, but it didn’t feel like medicine. It felt like being dismantled. I was in constant pain and could barely swallow. What I could eat, I couldn’t taste, though I threw up nearly everything anyway so I needed a feeding tube. But I threw up the tube feeds too and lost weight at an alarming rate. Eventually, I lost around 55 pounds, settled into a deep depression, and stopped getting out of bed which led to a blood clot in my leg. I had to go on blood thinners, and then there were blood transfusions on top of daily hydration infusions, and that’s only about half of it. The whole process became a series of problems caused by the solutions to the previous problems.

Cancer tried to kill me. But the treatment took that as a challenge and tried to beat it there.

I did make it through though. The tumor went away. The tube came out. Taste returned in pieces, one flavor at a time but never entirely, and nearly three years later it’s still a work in progress. I came out of it wanting more life inside my life, and for a while I got it. I wrote. I cooked more. I paid attention to small things again. A good sandwich matters. Bocce ball with my wife, that matters. And of course the big things, like my kids wandering into my office to tell me about their day, they matter even more.

Then I saw my dentist. Man, the dentist. Because apparently once you survive cancer, your reward is a punch card for medical appointments.

Radiation through the mouth made my teeth weaker, and there’s less saliva to clean out bacteria. The jaw now has less blood flow, which means certain options are off the board. If I need a tooth pulled, which apparently I do, it can’t easily be replaced because the risk of breaking the jaw is too great, and the jaw can’t be fixed if that happens.

This time it was a crown with a crack underneath. Bacteria gets inside and then, of course, infection follows. The dentist didn’t think the tooth could be saved. Ordinarily, fine. Not fine, obviously, but the ordinary version of not-fine. Usually you’d pull the tooth and talk about an implant or maybe a bridge. Then you move on. It’s just dental work.

But not anymore. The radiation changed everything.

I actually already had four teeth pulled before my cancer treatment because they were in the danger zone and couldn’t be fixed before I started radiation. At the time, the extractions felt like one more ugly thing added to a hideous pile. But fine. Pull them. They weren’t visible anyway. Do what you have to do. Let’s save my life and deal with the inventory later.

Now is later.

Now, implants would require months of hyperbaric oxygen treatments and the cost of a luxury car, all so my jawbone could be coaxed into healing like a normal jawbone, which mine no longer fully is. So I sat there in the dentist’s chair thinking about the crown; the crack; the infection; the implant I probably couldn’t get; the teeth that might fail next; the jaw that may not heal right; the phrase osteoradionecrosis, which means bone death, sitting somewhere in the back of my brain; and I thought: this is how it keeps happening.

Damage.

I went home and cried. I wasn’t sure what else to do. I never thought middle age would involve so much crying. But as a few readers pointed out, women acquainted with perimenopause are nodding their heads and saying: sorry, this is life. (KJ Chamarette, I’m still waiting for my club t-shirt.)

After the appointment, I did what I usually do. I got busy. There were emails and clients and deadlines. Other people’s problems, which is one of the great tricks of my profession. I can step out of my own fear and into someone else’s urgency, and for a while it works. For a while, I am not a man wondering how many teeth he gets to keep. I am a lawyer outlining arguments and solving problems.

But my body does not offer the same escape. I can accept that my mouth is different now. I can accept that radiation and chemo saved me but damaged me. I can accept that sometimes the foundation is damaged and can’t be fixed. I can accept that, but I am not fine with it.

There’s a difference.

Sure, this wasn’t cancer. That should have been enough. But not cancer is not the same as nothing. The concussion was just a concussion and not a brain bleed. The lesion in my mouth was probably nothing. Each assurance should have made my fear smaller, but instead, each one opened another door.

And then, while I was still trying to figure out what to do with all that fear, I got knocked backward onto the ice. And suddenly hedges like just and probably nothing didn’t work anymore. Minimizing risk and hoping things were fine felt dangerous.

My first thought, naturally, was maybe I should quit hockey.

Over the years, various friends and family have wondered the same to me. I’ve had concussions before. Enough that if I wrote a number here some of you would get a serious look on your face. The maybe-you-should-stop-doing-this look. And maybe you’d be right. Sometimes worried people aren’t just worrywarts.

Hockey in my league isn’t exactly dangerous, but it isn’t safe either. It’s ice and speed and a bunch of old guys running into each other, sometimes on purpose, but more often it’s a series of uncoordinated accidents strung together into a game. But it’s also one of the best parts of my life. It’s exercise and friendship. It’s the joy of doing something silly with a group of guys who also refuse to quit because we know what stopping means. So what do I do with that?

Fear wants subtraction. It says quit. Fear says reduce the size of your life until nothing can reach you. Judgment wants adjustment. It says maybe don’t play with skaters who need to knock you down to keep themselves up. Maybe stay in the old guy over-fifty leagues instead of playing with the young guys because, you know, less speed. Maybe listen to the doctor, and to Nancy, and to the body. But judgment and fear need to be contained so they don’t confuse safety for living.

Nancy and I talked about this on a long drive to Oregon this last weekend. It wasn’t about me, or us exactly, but it was about older people in our lives and the way we sometimes shrink theirs without realizing it. Somebody falls or gets hurt, and everyone around them responds with love, which often means doing everything for them. Grandma, sit down. I’ll get the dishes. Grandpa, don’t lift that box. Don’t reach for the shelf. Don’t go down the stairs. You stay there, I’ll do it for you.

It seems kind. And sometimes it is kind, or even necessary for a while. But we can swaddle a person so completely that we take purpose away. We replace movement with rest. It seems like care, but eventually it becomes erasure. Be safe turns into do less which becomes needed less. And we don’t help the people around us by making them easier to protect. We help them by making them stronger and more resistant to harm. But fear subtracts, so we make them less.

I can feel that impulse in myself now. After the cancer, after the dental news, after the concussion, there is a part of me that wants to make a list of everything dangerous and cross it out. But what would be left? A safer life, maybe, but safer for what? What am I preserving if fear gets to choose what I do?

Look, I don’t want to wake up one day and find out the cancer is back, or learn a new cancer showed up, or that my body pulled some other cruel trick and realize I spent the years I had left inside a protective bubble that crystallized into a prison. I don’t want to have loved writing and failed to write. Loved food and failed to cook. Loved my wife and kids and somehow given them the tired leftovers of myself while saving my full force for strangers and deadlines at work just because the easiest thing to do is subtract.

The lesion is probably nothing. The tooth can’t be ignored. The concussion was certainly something and, to be honest, it still is. Writing this essay was harder than usual, and I’m not sure I nailed the point, but getting this done is also part of the point. Because stopping is easy. And between those sentences is where I need to live right now.

It’s where so many of us live now. Between the thing that is probably fine and the thing that plainly is not. Between the good news and the next appointment. Between gratitude and exhaustion. Between knowing fear is not the same as wisdom and knowing fear is not always wrong.

So, “probably nothing” followed me home from the oncologist. It lives inside the cracked crown. And last week it was hiding in a crossword I couldn’t finish. It’s my tongue running across a rough spot trying to feel what the doctor saw, and it’s packed into my hockey bag as I wonder whether the thing that makes me feel alive is also one of the things that will hurt me.

But maybe that’s the work now. I may never remember exactly what happened when my head hit the ice, and my heart will race every time the oncologist’s scope goes down my nose. It’s certainly going to take time to adjust to the idea that some of my teeth may not be mine to keep. But it’s my job to figure out when just means small and probably nothing is the best answer anyone can give. And then to do my best to keep from turning the uncertainty of an outcome into a certainty of fear. Because that fear, it’s the damage.

Don’t play. Don’t travel. Don’t drink. Don’t write. Don’t want too much. Don’t give life so many places to hurt you. But if I let fear make every decision, then just doesn’t minimize an outcome, it minimizes me. I just live, I manage, and I just get through the next day. I start to just keep myself alive, waiting for the next scan, the next tooth, or the next bad day. Or maybe the next good one, but either way it’s still waiting.

So maybe the question is not how safe we can make ourselves. Maybe the question is how much of ourselves we are willing to give away to feel safe. How much do we let fear subtract before safety becomes its own danger, its own damage, and we simply stop living.

And maybe after that, after enough of that, if I keep subtracting, or waiting, or fearing what might come or not come, I’m just done. And once I’m done, the only thing that becomes probably nothing is me.

Charlie Finch’s Substack is free. To receive new posts and support my work, consider subscribing, which is also free. I appreciate your re-stacks and love talking with you in the comments. Thanks.