Most of you probably know that I had a pretty big run-in with cancer in 2016. I had a number of multi-day bouts with abdominal pain that I kinda' "guyed" through, until about the fourth or fifth one, when I couldn't minimize it any longer and consulted my physician. We were trying to figure it out (ultra-sound, Prilosec, etc.) when I was hit with a more acute episode. I went into the hospital that morning (March 3rd, 2016) after a sleepless night and got a runway-worthy quantity of different pictures taken of me, culminating in an emergency room doctor's declaration that "There's a mass on your pancreas." Eight months later, I was released from cancer treatment, hairless and weighing 145 pounds. What happened in between was the most interesting period of my life. But I walked out of Abramson Cancer Center - 42 hospital nights, over 600 hundred hours of intravenous chemo, and about 1500 pills later - of my own volition, carrying my own bags ... and pretty much never looked back. 

I made it; I was cured.  If I had gotten the same cancer ("double hit" diffuse large B-cell lymphoma) a decade earlier, I almost certainly would not have survived.  I was the beneficiary of a lot of intervening research that led to a different chemo "cocktail" for double-hitters (relative to what normal DLBCL patients get). 

That is why I am riding in the 2024 Ride for Roswell on June 22. R4R is my first "giving back" foray. It supports a major cancer center in western New York, to which I've donated for several years, via my grad school buddy Brian's R4R participation. This year he asked me to join him. I'll be riding 45 miles in western NY state with a bunch of other survivors and supporters.