HIT BY A BUS

Friday the 9th was interesting in the same way a crime scene is interesting—lots of details, no good outcomes, and everyone involved pretending this is normal.

I went to the oncology consult. The doctor was excellent, which is to say calm, efficient, and completely uninterested in lying to me for the sake of my feelings. He skipped the pleasantries, skipped the hope, and went straight for the jugular.

“It’s a matter of time.”

Not if. When.

That’s the kind of sentence that doesn’t echo. It detonates. Yeah, charlie is coming back. The rat bastard isn’t dead—he’s just been waiting in the alley, smoking my cigarettes, checking his watch.

Here’s the recap, in case anyone missed the earlier chapters of this slow-motion mugging.

I had uveal melanoma. Cancer. The fancy kind that doesn’t need a second opinion because it makes itself painfully clear. That ended with the enucleation of my right eye — medical Latin for “we scooped it out like bad guacamole with a dull spoon.” Old news. Covered territory. I already paid for that experience with pain, recovery, and a lifetime of bumping into doorframes. What’s new—fresh out of hell—is the classification.

Class II. PRAME-positive.

PRAME-positive sounds like a marketing term. It should come with balloons. It does not. It’s a red stamp that says this thing plans to come back armed. High-risk recurrence. Over 50% in five years. Over 40% in three.

Those numbers aren’t statistics. They’re a loaded gun on the table.

The genetic testing says there’s a good chance charlie shows back up in about three years, like an old enemy who knows your address and doesn’t bother knocking anymore. Not my first rodeo, but somehow it still feels personal. Deeply. Aggressively personal. We talked. We reviewed. We “consulted.” The kind of conversation where everyone nods because no one has anything better to say. Then I walked out.

And that’s when the bus hit.

I wasn’t bleeding. Nothing was broken. But my brain was flattened. Pancaked. Reduced to a dull ringing where ambition used to live. I’ve got a timeline now. A short one. A ticking clock that doesn’t care about plans, goals, or whether I was finally getting things figured out. But now I find myself dazed, disconnected. Operating on some strange autopilot where time feels both extremely limited and aggressively pointless. I’ve got a window now — I'm waiting for the next event — like a countdown clock ticking in the background, a Geiger counter you can’t shut off.

Long-term planning feels ambitious. Almost rude. But—miracle of modern medicine—we do have a plan.

The plan is surveillance. Relentless, paranoid, Big-Brother-level surveillance. Scans. Lots of scans.

Scans Every 3 months for the first 2–3 years Scan Every 4–6 months for the next two years Scans Every 6–12 months out to 10 years and beyond

That’s what I’m talking about. Ten years and beyond. Gotta love the optimism.

We’re talking CT scans with contrast. No PET scans. We’re watching the lungs and liver like hawks—charlie’s favorite places to squat, like a disease-ridden Airbnb guest who refuses to leave.

So now I’m left wondering what the hell the point of “living healthy” was supposed to be. Did it matter? Did it help? Or was this just the universe’s way of saying nice try? Maybe the yoga crowd is onto something. Or maybe my decades of enthusiastic misbehavior finally cashed in its chips and sent me the bill.

Hard to say.

Either way, the universe has made its position clear. And I’m still here—one eye short, statistically compromised, and deeply unimpressed.

So I suppose I just keep on keeping on. Because what the hell else are you going to do?

Laissez Les Bons Temps Rouler

That's my plan