What Serious Illness Teaches You About Time

A serious diagnosis changed the way I see time—not just as something to cherish, but something to protect for the people I love.

Before all of this, I think I experienced time the way most people do without realizing it. I assumed there would be more of it.

More time to get organized. More time to have certain conversations. More time to fix the things that felt unfinished. More time to think about the practical stuff I kept pushing off because life was busy and there always seemed to be a reason it could wait.

Serious illness changed that almost immediately.

It didn’t just make time feel “more precious.” That’s too simple and too clean of a way to say it. What it really did was take away my ability to casually assume that later would be there waiting for me. It forced me to feel time in a way I never had before.

In the beginning, time stopped feeling normal. Everything was moving too fast. Tests, scans, appointments, decisions, more bad news, more decisions. Every day seemed to bring some new piece of information that changed the picture. I wasn’t just trying to process the fact that I was sick. I was trying to keep up with how fast my life had stopped resembling the life I thought I had.

And underneath all of that was a quieter, heavier realization: I may not have as much time as I thought. And more specifically / realistically with ALK+ lung cancer, I may be living in the space between one treatment working and the day it no longer does.

That is a hard way to live mentally. Even on the days when I feel relatively okay, there is a part of my mind that knows this current version of stability may be temporary. The medication helping me now may not help me forever. A good scan can bring real relief, but that relief may only last until the next one. From the outside, “the medication is working” can sound reassuring, and it is. But inside that hope is another truth: I know it may not last forever, because this disease is terminal and progression is not a question of if, but when.

It creates a strange relationship with time. You try to live normally, stay hopeful, and be present, while also knowing that the ground beneath you may not stay stable for as long as you want it to. It is hard to fully relax when part of you is always aware that the timeline may change again, especially when you have young children and can’t help but think about how much of their lives you will get to be there for.

Even writing that still feels hard.

Because when you are forced to confront that possibility, you start looking at your life differently. You start noticing all the things that depend on your presence. All the things you carry in your head. All the systems that only work because you are the one holding them together. The bills, the passwords, the routines, the plans, the invisible mental load, the things no one else would automatically know how to step into if you suddenly couldn’t.

And that does something to you emotionally.

It makes time feel less like an idea and more like a responsibility.

Not just responsibility for how you spend it, but responsibility for what would happen to the people you love if your time became limited, or if your energy disappeared, or if you were simply too sick to keep doing everything you normally do without thinking.

That was one of the most painful parts for me. Not just fear of dying, but fear of leaving behind disorder. Fear of the practical mess. Fear of the burden. Fear that the people I love would be forced to navigate grief and chaos at the same time.

I don’t think people talk enough about that part.

We talk about love as emotion, loyalty, presence, sacrifice. But going through serious illness has made me see that love is also preparation. Love is making things easier for the people you care about if life turns against you. Love is reducing confusion. Love is writing things down. Love is organizing what no one wants to organize. Love is not leaving behind a scavenger hunt.

That realization didn’t come to me in some neat, inspirational way. It came out of fear. Out of vulnerability. Out of seeing how fragile normal life actually is once your health is no longer something you can count on.

And once you see that, it’s hard to unsee it. 

You realize how much of life is lived on delay. How often we tell ourselves we’ll handle important things later, when work calms down, when the kids are older, when life is less hectic, when there’s a better time. But serious illness has a brutal way of exposing how imaginary that bargain can be.

Sometimes there is no cleaner, calmer later.

Sometimes life interrupts first.

I think that’s what serious illness has taught me about time more than anything else: time is not just valuable because it is limited. It is valuable because so much can change before you are ready. Before you feel finished. Before you’ve said what you want to say. Before you’ve put things in order. Before the people who rely on you have any idea how much you were quietly carrying.

That changes the way you live.

At least it has changed me.

I still care about time in the ordinary sense. Time with my family. Time to be present. Time to enjoy normal things that used to feel automatic. But I also care about protecting time now—protecting my family’s time, energy, and stability if things ever get worse again.

Because one of the hardest truths I’ve learned is that when serious illness enters your life, time stops being theoretical.

It becomes real.

It becomes visible.

And it becomes impossible to waste in quite the same way again.

The First 30–60 Days After a Stage IV ALK-positive Lung Cancer Diagnosis

What the early weeks of a Stage IV ALK-positive lung cancer diagnosis actually feel like

The first 30–60 days after my diagnosis didn’t feel like a single stretch of time. It felt like everything was happening all at once—fast, fragmented, and hard to process.

There was no real pause between hearing the word cancer and having to make decisions. Serial tests, scans, consultations—it all started immediately. CT scans, MRIs, bloodwork. Each one revealing something new, and almost always something worse than what I had understood the day before. It wasn’t just about confirming a diagnosis. It was about figuring out how far it had spread, how aggressive it was, and what could be done—if anything—to slow it down.

But it wasn’t just the illness—it was everything around it.

The pace of the medical side was only one part of the experience. Running alongside it was a constant stream of logistics that didn’t slow down just because life had changed. Scheduling appointments. Coordinating between specialists. Trying to keep track of who said what, and what the next step was supposed to be. Paperwork that needed to be completed. Forms that required decisions I didn’t feel equipped to make.

At the same time, I was trying to understand an entirely new language. Medical terms, treatment options, risks, probabilities. Words like “Stage IV,” “metastasis,” and eventually “ALK-positive” became part of everyday conversations. Decisions had to be made quickly, often without feeling like I fully understood the implications. There wasn’t time to sit with anything for very long before the next step was already in motion.

And underneath all of that was a constant sense of uncertainty. Not just about the illness itself, but about everything connected to it. What needed to be done now? What could wait? What might I be missing?

Physically, my body was going through more than it ever had before. Procedures, medications, chemotherapy. After nearly a month in the hospital, I was physically weakened. I had fresh wounds from the drainage of the pericardial effusion and a PICC line for chemotherapy. I had lost a significant amount of weight in a short period of time.

Some days I felt relatively stable. Other days, everything felt unpredictable—chills, night sweats, fatigue, discomfort, the lingering effects of treatment, and the constant awareness that something serious was happening inside me.

Even something as simple as breathing had become something I paid close attention to. With any small change—a twinge, a moment of discomfort, a slight pain—it was hard not to think it was connected to the cancer.

But what stands out the most from those first 30–60 days isn’t just the medical and physical side of it—it’s the mental and emotional shift.

I cried every day until I could begin to process the gravity of everything. And even now, I still find myself tearing up at unexpected moments.

There’s a point when the reality fully sets in. Not just that you’re sick, but that your life has fundamentally changed. The future, which once felt open-ended, suddenly feels uncertain. Plans that once felt automatic begin to feel fragile.

And you start to think differently—not just about yourself, but about the people around you.

For me, that meant thinking about my wife of 11 years and my kids, my 2 kids under the age of 3 at the time.

I found myself thinking about things I had never seriously considered before. Not just “what happens to me,” but “what happens to them.” How do you prepare your family for something you don’t fully understand yourself? What do you prioritize when everything suddenly feels important? What decisions matter most—and which ones just feel urgent in the moment?

Because in those early days, everything feels urgent. So how do you spend your time? 

Life didn’t stop. There were still routines. Conversations. Moments that felt surprisingly normal. And in some ways, those moments stood out even more. Sitting together. Talking. Just being present. Things that used to feel ordinary started to feel significant.

Looking back, those first 30–60 days weren’t just about diagnosis and treatment.

They were about navigating chaos. Managing logistics. Trying to stay afloat in a constant state of overwhelm while everything—medical, personal, and practical—was moving at once.

They were about trying to make sense of something that doesn’t fully make sense, while still being responsible for decisions, coordination, and the unknowns that come with both.

I didn’t come out of that period with clarity or answers.

But I did come out with a different perspective.

A deeper awareness of how quickly things can change. A stronger focus on what actually matters. And the beginning of a mindset I’m still developing—one that’s less about control, as difficult as that is, and more about intention.

If there’s one thing those first 30–60 days made clear, it’s this:

You don’t always get to choose when or how your life changes.

But you do get to choose how you respond when change is out of your control.