April 19th, 2026 • 10-12 minute read
I stepped off stage at a sold-out Esplanade in Singapore—a golden theater near the Singapore River seating 1,600—and put my guitar away and whack-a-mole’d my hernia back into its place.
“This must be because of my deadlift form or something” I told myself as I played Indie Pop/R&B across the Far East. But the feeling that I was building a life I didn’t want to keep living was still there.
I was touring intermittently, teaching privately out of my apartment, and playing in a wedding band. I was stable, but every month was a crunch. I had recently dated a girl who didn’t want to move forward with our relationship because she didn’t want to start a life with a musician. Fair—I’m not sure I would have either. But at the time, I wasn’t so understanding when she left me for a data analyst.
I was living in Northern Bedford-Stuyvesant at the time, in a small duplex with a steep indoor walkup. We had no living room, and our kitchen was the size of a closet, but the rooms were big. My bedroom had a decommissioned fireplace and faced a one-way avenue that filled each morning at 7 a.m. with commuters waiting for the bus into downtown Brooklyn. The noise was inescapable.
Growing up, I heard that if you want to increase your lot in life, learn to code. So that’s what I did, and I found that I rather enjoyed it. I spent my days at my desk—coding, eating, playing guitar during breaks. At night, I would put on my least ill-fitting outfit and mosey into Fort Greene and walk amongst the yuppies. I bet that guy knows how to code or whatever—referring to the guy with a symmetrical face sitting at a small round table outside of a restaurant with a beautiful wife, dog-in-lap. Now that’s the life.
On April 10th, I had surgery for that hernia. The whole thing went to shit—and the culprit was a burrito.
I offered lunch to one of my closest friends if he’d escort me back from the hospital. He would have done it regardless, but I was really digging this spot near me in Brooklyn—a small Mexican grocery store that opened up to a cafeteria-style restaurant in the back; the kind of place that fills up with Doordash drivers—not picking up orders but eating. I hadn’t eaten since the night before. By 3pm, I was very hungry.
Maybe it was because my judgment was impaired from anesthesia. Maybe it was because my mom was 600 miles away and couldn’t stop me. Maybe I’m an idiot. Whatever the reason was, mere hours after a robot had sewn a synthetic mesh the size of a DVD into my abdominal wall, I saw no reason not to eat that whole burrito.
The next night, my abdomen started to hurt. “Maybe this is just the anesthesia wearing off,” I told my mom on the phone. She was worried.
The doctor either forgot or thought I was worthy of damnation, but I was sent home with no painkillers. The pain got worse and worse, minute by minute. Much unlike the symmetrical face and blessed life I was dreaming of—by 1 a.m., I was pacing back and forth in my underwear, clutching my stomach, and moaning. It felt like that scene in Alien looked. I realized I might actually be in danger, so I called 911.
I was carried out of my apartment in a stretcher by two burly yet baby-faced EMT’s from the outer boroughs, accompanied by a soft-spoken yet firm orthodox Jewish nurse in training. The street was completely empty, and the vegan restaurant across the street from me was lit up by the ambulance lights. I had shorts and a t-shirt on, and the spring rain was ice-cold on my skin. I was shivering uncontrollably. I had no choice but to put my life in the hands of this unlikely, yet uniquely New York team of children.
I was taken back to the same hospital I was in just a day earlier and was filled with morphine. I stopped shivering. My quest for Fort Greene yuppiedom was off to a rough start.
The doctor told me I had a post-operative ileus—which is when your intestines stop working after a traumatic abdominal event. The partially digested burrito was exerting outward pressure on my internal stitches—so, I was almost right about the Alien theory. I spent the night at the hospital getting ignored by attractive and overworked ER nurses who were probably more concerned with drug overdoses than burrito overdoses.
I got back to coding as soon as I could, heroically tip-tapping away at my laptop from my bed, propped up by a 2-part medical bed wedge that I bought for my recovery. All of that—the hernia, the burrito—was evidently just a silly, yet somewhat scary inconvenience. While I hadn’t been back to Fort Greene, I knew it was still there, waiting for me to earn its fruits.
On Friday, May 24th, while I was coding in bed, my right side started seizing up. Unlike the diffuse abdominal muscle pain I’d gotten used to over the last month and a half, it was a deep, grinding feeling. Something was wrong. My very first post-op subway ride was back to the ER.
When the doctor told me I have appendicitis, the first thing I did was laugh. The detour toward my future is evidently going to be a little longer than I expected. But no problem—appendicitis is just a rite of passage—like getting your wisdom teeth out or your Bar Mitzvah. It will definitely be a good story to tell.
The surgeon didn’t seem to think it was so funny. She told me that to perform surgery, they might have to go through the plastic disk in my abdomen, effectively undoing the hernia surgery. “Would that mean I would have to get another hernia surgery?” I asked. She couldn’t rule it out. They put me on antibiotics to see if we could avoid surgery altogether and I was discharged two days later.
I walked to the top of Fort Greene Park in a haze. It was a perfect Brooklyn summer day: young people skateboarding around the Prison Ship Martyrs Monument, couples running up and down the stairs, and families sitting on the grass. But the whole scene was imbued with a foreboding heaviness—my place among it all felt tenuous.
If I did, in fact, need to go through this diabolical combo of an appendectomy and second hernia repair, I knew I couldn’t do it alone. I booked a red eye back home to Ann Arbor, Michigan that night. My body was not done with me yet.
I landed in Ann Arbor at my mom’s house. Growing up, I was the problem child—whether it was truancy in middle school or substance abuse in high school. She was the life raft I clung to, so she was no stranger to catching me when I fell hard. She was 5’1’’, almost 70 years old, and somehow had more strength to give than anyone I knew.
I spent the next week or so coding from my mom’s couch and wondering if every sensation in my abdomen meant go-time. On Saturday, June 8th, it was go-time. She drove me to the Michigan Medicine ER, where I was introduced to Dr. P, a general surgeon.
I went under not knowing what waited for me on the other side—whether Dr. P would be able to leave my poor abdomen intact or not. As I emerged from the anesthesia, I was informed that she was able to remove my appendix without issue. Everyone was relieved.
I was back home, and the worst was avoided. Within a couple of days, I was walking slowly, barefoot across my mom’s backyard, almost excited at the opportunity to reinvent my gait. Despite yet another scar, the slowness felt nice.
I wasn’t exactly new to moderate medical misfortune—I’d had numerous surgeries and procedures in the past, more than most people I knew—for issues ranging from inconvenient to slightly concerning. This was just the next on the list. I spoke about the whole thing with an air of this is a pretty wild turn of events, am-I-right?
I was still looking toward and living for the future. I couldn’t wait to get back to New York.
Just a few days later, while getting out of the shower, I noticed that my right testicle had swelled up to the size of a plastic Easter egg. I messaged Dr. P to ask if it was normal. She ordered an ultrasound for the next day.
On my way home from the radiologist, I got a call from my urologist. He asked me to come to his office. There, he turned his Dell monitor toward me and showed a black and white image. The screen was eclipsed by a dark oval in the center. My right testicle had been completely replaced by a large, vascularized mass, measuring 4.9 x 3.2 x 4.4 cm. It had probably been there for some time, and the appendectomy caused it to swell. “We need to get you into surgery as soon as possible. Preferably tomorrow.”
My young adulthood had been punctuated with deep urges to go completely fetal—urges to surrender so completely that the real adults in the room would step in and fix whatever was wrong. Watching movies almost never draws real tears for me, except for seeing guys my age and younger being bombed out in a foxhole, crying for their mothers.
“Testicular cancer has a greater than 90% cure rate. If you had to get any cancer, you’d want this one.” My doctor assured me, right before that urge fully welled to the surface. I gathered myself, told the doctor I was ready to do this, and left to call my parents and friends.
Less than a week after my appendectomy, I was back in the operating room.
Getting diagnosed with testicular cancer forced me to a screeching halt. I gave myself until Fall to return to NYC.
But as September grew closer, I began to accelerate. I was applying to jobs in NYC, exercising as much as my body would allow, and reconstructing a mental image of what my future could look like. Maybe it wasn’t going to be as simple as learn to code, get the girl, achieve final form—but I still needed something to work toward. I was getting ready to lay claim to the city for real this time.
All summer, my tests showed the surgery was effective. But I had one more before I returned to New York.
The plan was to get a blood test on Thursday, receive the results on Friday, and leave for New York on Monday.
I was washing my hands at 9 a.m. Friday when I got a call from my doctor. I saw the hospital number on my phone, which was resting on the sink. My hands still wet, I accepted the call and put it on speaker. I heard the distorted and hurried voice of my oncologist, “Hi Daniel. So, your hCG went back up, indicating the cancer has spread. The next course of action is chemotherapy. The schedulers will call you to get everything set up for the next few months.”
My vision narrowed. I felt the aperture of my life fully constrict. Everything I had spent my young adult life concerned with—meaning through work, approval from friends, partners, and strangers—ceased to exist in a single instant. My usually loud inner monologue became an empty void—leaving what was right in front of me: My childhood home; this weakened and scarred body beneath me; and this simple urge to not die yet.
I still did get to return to New York on Monday. Not to live, but to leave. My lease was ending in the Fall, and I had to move out before starting treatment.
Alone, I drove in that night through lower Manhattan on my way to the Williamsburg Bridge. Packs of stylish, charismatic twenty-somethings were everywhere going in and out of bars and smoking cigarettes on the sidewalks. They looked straight out of central casting. The kind of people, living the kind of life, that used to fill me with envy. But now, I felt none of it. I reached the bridge and looked around me. The city was so beautiful, and I cried.
The next few days were spent packing up my apartment and saying goodbye to friends. I wondered if some of them thought it might be the last time they would ever see me.
The world was shifting beneath my feet—the leaves changing outside my window, the 2024 presidential election. All my plans had fallen apart in front of my eyes—my musical career, my life in New York, and my health.
Some weeks, I spent over 40 hours in infusion. I lost 30 pounds. All my hair fell out. I developed tinnitus and sometimes couldn’t even keep water down. I had no room for earthly desires to distract me. No energy for reflection to ground me. No plans to return to New York—no plans at all.
One morning, the veins in my forearm were so receded and scarred that the nurse couldn’t get a line. They called in a nurse named Taylor, the best IV starter in the Mott overflow infusion area. She couldn’t get it either. Eventually they called in the VAS team—a group of specialized nurses who roam the hospital with a portable ultrasound machine, finding and setting IV’s deep below the skin. “Why is this happening to me?” I thought. It was 9:00 a.m., and I already had four IV attempts.
The pain in my arm and the complete and total dissolution of my future as I knew it was almost too much to bear in that moment. But the VAS team needed me to be incredibly still. The only option I had was to resign completely—to leave it to my body and to modern medicine. On the final attempt, my body felt the pain—but I had already let go.
A girl I knew from an old summer job had reached out to me during my treatment, telling me that she had been fighting stage 4 breast cancer for a long time. We struck up a little friendship over text—long texts about our diagnoses, treatment, and tips and tricks to get through the day. I was grateful for my prognosis. She was grateful for the times she was able to stand in the shower.
As I was emerging out of the most difficult part of my cancer battle, I sent her a text, wishing her a Happy Holidays. It didn’t feel quite right, knowing how dire her situation was, but I wanted to say something. She didn’t respond. I waited a couple of weeks. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I Googled her name and found her obituary—she was 34.
A little while after I finished treatment, I went out to a pub in Ann Arbor with two of my closest friends, who were in from New York. I had known them for a decade, since before they even knew each other. Now, they were engaged. They asked me if there was anything I learned out of that whole experience. An old part of me wanted for a moment to have something profound to say—to be able to compress my entire experience into a single brilliant nugget of wisdom that would carry me forward into this new chapter, while enriching the lives of everyone fortunate enough to hear it. But I drew a blank. “Not really. It just sucked, man.”