How cancer changed my life forever

A fateful hospital visit transformed my body, mind and spirit.

Five years ago, on February 19, 2018, I walked into the emergency room at North York General Hospital.

I went in expecting to have a routine problem dealt with and maybe leave with some antibiotics prescribed to me. No big deal.

Little did I know my life would never be the same again.

Emergency

A few hours and a few waiting rooms later, a doctor saw me. She checked me out and ordered some tests. Waiting for the results in a windowless room felt like time was barely moving. I couldn’t wait to get on with my day.

The doctor eventually called me into a room and sat me down. She looked concerned. Not what you want to see in the eyes of a doctor giving you test results.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

My heart sank.

The doctor struggled with her next sentence: “I think you have lymphoma.”

My jaw dropped.

After a few moments of silence. I started to accept that I had cancer. I asked the doctor, “How could I get so sick at my age?” I was thirty.

By then she was crying. I was crying. There were lots of tears.

“It’s just bad luck,” she said with disappointment. She wanted to give me a better answer, but there wasn’t one.

Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma grew into my bones, causing fractures in my neck and back. It was considered stage IV.

I called my girlfriend. But no words came to me. I didn’t know how to tell her the bad news. I felt like I’d been sucker punched. The best I could muster was “um” before being overwhelmed with emotion. I gave the phone over to my dear mom and asked her to break the news for me. Per usual, mom was strong enough to do so.

Weeks of testing followed: biopsy, lumbar puncture, MRI, x-rays. Then months of chemotherapy and radiation.

Self-Examination

Doctors had a plan to heal my body. There wasn’t much for me to do but heed their instructions and show up to the scheduled appointments. In between appointments, I tried my best to eat a healthy diet.

But doctors had no plan to heal my mind and spirit. I felt trapped, buried under fear and uncertainty. I was unprepared to face the possibility of death, and even more unprepared to find meaning in the life I had lived up to that point.

Every moment of the previous decade had been about struggling to get ahead. I spent the first half of my twenties in university and law school, pushing myself to perform well enough in classes that I would be rewarded with a stable career. The second half of my twenties was spent exploring different career paths: lawyer, professor, writer, policy analyst, community organizer.

As a student and recent graduate, I surrendered myself to the managerial elites who oversee corporate, government and university bureaucracies. I hoped to be welcomed into their institutions. My self-worth was derived from their approvals. And I was afraid to do anything that would close a door to a potential opportunity.

In a welcome address to new students at Yale Law School, former dean Harold Koh described the mentality that many of my peers and I had adopted on Ivy League campuses. “For many of you, the principle of decision so far has been easy: Keep your options open,” Koh explained. “In fact, I am sure that many of you came to Law School precisely to keep your options open. In fact, if there is an epitaph for your generation, it will certainly be: ‘They died with their options open.’”

At the age of thirty, with death as a real possibility, I had to ask, do I really want to die with all of my options open? Does playing it safe to maximize professional success actually make life worth living? What do I want my epitaph to say?

These questions could have easily worsened my anxiety and stress. But, as I tried to find meaning in my life, a community formed around me.

Two men in particular⁠—Michael “Pinball” Clemons and Pastor Rob Meikle⁠⁠—treated me like a son. They encouraged me to take my questions to God in prayer, learn about Jesus Christ and surrender myself to a High Power. With their support, I did just that.

Every Sunday I made the trip to the Kingdom House Christian Centre. Through the relationships I formed there, and the strength granted by God, I gradually dug out of the fear and uncertainty that weighed on top of me. 

I now had a plan to heal my mind and spirit, to go along with the oncologist’s plan to heal my body.

Voice

It was a tough year of hospital visits. Thankfully, the most physically-taxing part of this trek was over. No more chemotherapy or radiation. My spine healed. Cancer was in remission. Thank God.

Still, a reconciliation was in order, between the person I was before getting sick and the person I grew to be as a cancer patient. I felt the tension immediately, thanks to the activist group Black Lives Matter.

In the years prior to my fateful emergency room visit, BLM gained significant momentum as a voice for black communities. Of course, they were not elected to play this role, but news media corporations had propped them up as an authority on behalf of black people after the deaths of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown in 2012 and 2014, respectively.

From the moment BLM appeared on the scene, I had strong disagreements with the organization. They were worsening the divisions between police officers and some black communities by using a relatively small number of incidents of police misconduct to paint both cops and black people with a broad brush. Their name, “black lives matter,” was also manipulative, suggesting if you don’t support BLM’s leftist political agenda then you don’t agree that black lives do indeed matter.

At that time, I rarely shared my concerns about BLM publicly. I knew that picking a fight with them would not be ideal for my career because a significant portion of managerial elites either support or hope to appease BLM.

As a matter of fact, in the years before I was sick, I can recall three distinct times when I was advised to be careful about sharing my views on BLM. A Liberal Party politician, a television news producer and a journalism professor each warned me separately and unrelatedly about the backlash I’d receive if I were too vocal. Their advice was to live in fear of the mob, rather than tell the truth.

The three people who warned me about criticizing BLM were correct that there would be backlash. When my first book was published in 2018 (I wrote the book right before I was diagnosed with cancer), BLM activists reacted strongly to the book’s mildly critical comments about the organization. Some of them even showed up to question me at a book talk I gave in Ottawa. They routinely criticized me on Twitter and bad-mouthed me to other black Canadians. Their attacks nearly cost me one job that I’m aware of, and strained my relationships with many others.

Prior to cancer, the ordeal with BLM would have scared me off. I would have tried to compromise with and appease the people attacking me for telling the truth. That is the path to keeping as many doors open as possible.

But cancer changed me.

By the time I had gone into remission, I was no longer swayed by fear. Surviving lymphoma made all other opposition far less intimidating. I became a free man, liberated to unapologetically advocate for the principles that helped save my life: faith, family and community.

Equally as important, I was liberated to stand against political agendas that run counter to these principles. Especially if those political agendas falsely claim to be for the benefit of people who look like me or my father.

When God decides my time here is up, my epitaph will not read “he died with his options open.”

I hope my epitaph will say “he stood up for what he believed in.”

Gratitude

If you’d like to learn more about some of the people and places that helped save my life five years ago, check out these links:

• Kingdom House Christian Centre

• North York General Hospital