10 days from now, my husband’s cancer should be gone. I’m thrilled for that. I’m also a little shell-shocked by (and grateful for) how fast everything has moved. It’s been very different from my family’s last experience with cancer.

When I was 13, my grandmother, who I lived with, hurt her back at her housekeeping job. She put off going to see a doctor for weeks until the pain was unbearable. While scanning her back for the source of the pain, the doctors found breast cancer.

That was decades ago, when treatment was evolving but not nearly as effective as it is now. It was also already stage 4 and spreading quickly. She fought hard, but only lived another year. As I’m sure you can imagine, my family collectively holds its breath when we hear The C Word now.

My grandmother, San Juana AKA “Janie”, was one of the most vibrant, full of life people I’ve ever known. She loved to dance. Almost every weekend, she’d get dressed up and drive into the nearest real city to go dancing at a club with her friends or occasional boyfriends. She was a huge fan of Whoopi Goldberg’s movies, especially Sister Act and The Color Purple. She was a hard worker, sometimes as a daycare teacher, sometimes in the cotton fields, and sometimes cleaning houses. She married my grandfather twice and had four children with him.

She taught me how to read. Her favorite books to read together were the Amelia Bedelia series, and she’d act out her parts so enthusiastically, toddler me would sometimes laugh until he was sick.

She had a rebellious streak. Her very traditional mother lived with us as well, and the expectation to be a Good Mexican Daughter hung heavy over her head. Her mother hated the outfits she wore out dancing, the men she allowed to court her, and the fact that she was friends with the town bruja. But she never let that stop her from living her life to the fullest.

Even as she lost her battle with cancer, she never lost her spirit. She had bleached blonde hair as long as I knew her, and when she lost her hair to chemo, she just bought a blonde wig and kept moving. She laughed and kept everyone around her laughing until the very end.

My husband’s story started out frighteningly similar. On Thanksgiving, he went to the emergency room for something completely unrelated to his kidneys, and they just happened to find his tumor while doing a CT scan.

Anyone who knows Chance personally knows he is not the type to go to a doctor if he can avoid it - especially not the emergency room.  I’m sure it drives him crazy that my response to a physical ailment is always, “do you want to go to the doctor?” But he said yes that night, and it may have saved him a harder road to recovery.

We’ll be just over two months past that night when he has the tumor removed next week. We’ve been joking about how in 50 years, we’ll look back on this as a blip in time and laugh about that year he very briefly had cancer. But living through it now has been very much not funny.

When you hear the word “cancer” directed at you or someone you love, it feels like the world should stop, like that word should always have a capital C -  Cancer. But the world doesn’t stop. Not even for a moment. Especially not in a country where healthcare is so tied up in employment.

We’re very fortunate that it was caught early and the whole ordeal will be over soon. But the fear and restlessness in the interim is a hell I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I don’t know how my grandmother kept laughing, but I’m in awe of that strength. And I’m in awe of my husband and the way that he’s faced this. I’m looking forward to being able to breathe easy again soon.

When I was in elementary school, my dad drove an 80s van with hideous blue velour swivel seats and curtains in the back. As a Power Rangers-obsessed child (and, if we're being honest, adult), I loved to close the curtains, spin my seat inward, and pretend I was co-piloting the Megazord when we went on long trips (the pink and yellow Rangers sat in this sideways manner, of course). 

Because autism runs in families, despite me being the first in ours to ever be formally diagnosed, these road trips always followed a very specific routine. We made the same stops every time and got the same snacks from those stops. We also listened to the same music - Elvis, Céline Dion, and Linda Ronstadt. 

Like many other queer men, I love Céline. But it was Linda who shaped my taste in music. Her fifth album, 1974's Heart Like a Wheel, was older than I was at the time that it played on repeat in that van. I certainly wasn't old enough to have any frame of reference for the lyrical material. But I could feel the ache in her voice in my bones. The twangy guitar reverberated deep in my soul. I may not have understood the words, but I understood the longing. 

My childhood was not easy. There was a lot of heartache, and a lot of hoping for things to get better and for a place to belong. As a male child in an old-school Mexican household in the 90s, these were not feelings you expressed. I held in a lot of hurt. But on those road trips, as the Céline tape wound down, my heart would rush with excitement knowing Linda's cassette was up next. For the half hour runtime of the album, I felt like someone understood the jumbled mess of pain inside of me. 

30-ish years later, my dad has been gone for a long time. But I listened to Heart Like a Wheel while I made dinner tonight. And it still takes me right back to the ugly, sideways seat in the back of his van. I can close my eyes while it plays and see him snacking on beef jerky and drumming his fingers on the wheel while he sings along. I can smell the dusty old upholstery and feel the soft velour under my fingers. As I get older and struggle to remember things about him, this is a precious gift. 

That ache inside me has never really gone away. It's changed, but it's still there. Now I try to use it to create my own art that I hope helps other people feel understood in the way that album did and still does for me.