It’s always been inevitable that it would get hard at some point.

I knew very little about cancer when I was diagnosed. It was something that happened to people. Some got through it, others didn’t. I lost my grandmother to it four days before my fourteenth birthday. My wife’s aunt was diagnosed about ten years ago. She came out on the right side of it and is still going strong.

That’s it. That was the extent of what I knew about cancer.

Getting diagnosed in February 2023 didn’t change a lot. It was now something I was dealing with. A lot of what was said when the news was delivered was scary. However, I am equipped with permanent blinders that allowed me to navigate the early stages of the process with a single focused mindset. It was simple – just tell me what I need to do and I’ll do it. Tell me where to be and when to be there – I’ll show up.

For the better part of three years, that has been the standard. From what I’ve been told by the doctors, the cancer I’ve been afflicted with is both rare and hard to treat. We’ve run through several different angles of attack on it. Like many other cases, these treatments work for a while and then lose their effectiveness. When that happens, we try a new approach.

I became eligible for a phase one trial last fall. That’s where a new drug is approved for human testing. After discussing options with my oncologist, we decided to enroll and see if it could make a difference. It turns out that was a double-edged sword. Yes, while on the study the disease did not progress. However, the side effects were severe. When the dose was reduced to make the side effects manageable, tumor markers rose along with some chronic pain in my back that also affected my sciatic nerves.

With the rising markers and pain, I opted out of the trial to go back to traditional care. I immediately resumed the treatment plan from before the trial and went through ten rounds of radiation to target my back and nerve issues.

And that’s where we are now.

I opened this piece by declaring it was inevitable that at some point it would get hard. I believe, for me, it was relatively easy until late last summer. That’s when it started getting harder. And from that point, the difficulty has steadily increased. It has taken us to a point where I feel, for the first time, this really is hard. Because it’s difficult to stay comfortable. It’s challenging to focus. It’s hard to admit there are things I can no longer or should not try to do. It’s distressing to watch my wife see me experiencing pain when there is nothing she can do to help.

Since I started writing about my experience, I’ve made it a point to project positivity and a can-do attitude. I’ve made declaration after declaration about absorbing reality and finding a way to spin it so it works for me. And now I find that to be as challenging as it has ever been.

I’ve always loved motivational messages. I’ve written how I liked the “No Fear” shirts from the 1990’s. I embodied the sayings on the back of the shirts with the two I remember most reading, “You Let Up, You Lose” and “A Champion Is Someone Who Gets Up, Even When They Can’t.” Those have stuck with me for over three decades.

I’ve taken a position where I want to be a steward for messages like that. I had the idea of creating motivational shirts early in the cancer story. Those were about getting out of the house and going to the gym. Putting in work to make your body stronger.

Over time, the ideas evolved some more. The poem, “Don’t Quit” has been part of my life as long as the No Fear shirts. I wanted that on a shirt. A message to every fighter to keep fighting. What you’re fighting doesn’t matter. Neither does how you fight it. Just a message to keep at whatever it is that a person wants to accomplish. I had heard you “only fail if you quit” so the message felt obvious to me.

The next layer of the idea came after my wife gifted me a Morse Code bracelet. The beads symbolized dots and dashes to spell out “Keep F**king Going.” I loved it. It was a message I needed at the time, but even more so, one that I wanted to spread to others.

And then a few different things happened around the same time. First, I had the idea to combine the spirit of the bracelet with the shirt ideas. With my wife doing the designing, we would create motivational sayings and insert a Morse Code line to spice it up, make it rebellious and give it an edge. So, the shirt reads “Don’t Quit” but the broken line in between the words made it say something just a little bit different. Additionally, the DO in Don’t and the IT are colored differently to send a third message of “Do It.”

We have created a few of those now including Don’t … Quit, Keep… Going, Let’s… Go and Raise the …. Bar and Stay…Focused. They are available in our Coded Designs shop as well as here on my site with all products listed below.

To stand by our work, I’ve made it a point to have and wear the shirts. What I did not expect is how much I would start to need the reminder.

At this point, the pain is constant. Some tumor markers have risen beyond any previous levels. My resilience has been pushed to the brink. Now, when I put the shirt on, it’s not just a proud display of a product we created, it’s a message back to myself of my past, present and future. It goes back to the standards that I’ve set and the integrity I claim to possess.

We have all likely experienced situations where it’s easy to say what to do and so much harder to actually do it. That’s where I’m living right now. The words are what I should do, but without living up to them, they are just words. For me, that means showing up and doing what I can with what I have.

I never thought I’d be in a place where I’d need to remind myself not to quit or to keep going, but here I am. Fighting through pain and trying to build something that spreads the right message and has the potential to help my family while I struggle to produce and be productive.

And here’s the big reminder. A Fight For Your Life isn’t only about health and staying on this side of the dirt. It is any fight that you take on to live better. To achieve goals. To keep your family safe. To keep your business afloat. To face depression. To get healthy. Those are all fights to take back your life and live on your terms.

There are times when life is going to get harder than you ever imagined it could. And then it might get even harder. The question then is this: Do you have what it takes to keep fighting? To keep going? To not quit? Even though there is no guarantee of success, can you continue to push forward?

Because that is what makes the difference.