FAITH HOPE LOVE

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1 I was asked this evening to speak about my “story.” Well, to be honest with you, my story isn’t particularly interesting. I was diagnosed with pancreatic adenocarcinoma in March of 2016; since then, I’ve gone through 9 rounds of the chemotherapy cocktail FOLFIRINOX, 5 rounds of stereotactic cyberknife radiation, a whipple surgery with partial pancreaduadectomy, 1 year of Capecitabine Xeloda, a second customized open-abdomen surgery, and 12 rounds of GemzarAbraxane. Throughout: creon, atavan, lovenox, Zofran, needles, IVs, tests, scans, nausea, darkness and blood. Would I do it all again? Eh, I happened to meet the love of my life through the process, the kind-of human being that makes any trudge through hell worth it, so my answer is a resounding, if not confusing “yes.” But beside that I have compiled this resume only to otherwise say: cancer is like a dream; avoid this dream at all costs. But I have some inclination you already know that—hence why you are here tonight. What I am much more interested in discussing, and I hope you will permit me your patience here, is outlining what I would call “our” story. If any speech worth its merit might be distilled down to one single point, I’ll be quite upfront with you: my purpose tonight is to show how our story, what we are doing here, is not some minor or arbitrary or even isolated effort against a horrendous disease, some blip on an otherwise silent radar. Our efforts here tonight rather reflect something a little more grand, if not harder to perceive. What I want to show you—and trust me, I know how juvenile a hypothesis like this may sound, but when you lock yourself in a bathroom after surgery for three months straight, in the dark, in the water, in the heat—well, you can stumble upon some pretty nutty ideas. So what I want to show you is how our story is woven into the momentum and thrust of this reality, how what we do here tonight is ordained by the very nature of things, that there is something to the great arc of our known history that has bent toward this very moment. I will show you, with you sitting there and me standing here, I will


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