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My name is Michael Hizer, and I’m a five-time cancer survivor. I’d like to believe that cancer is not the most important, nor the most interesting part of my story. However, it has shaped — and continues to influence — who I am, who I want to be, and how I live my life. There are many others like me. I am certainly not unique. Hundreds of thousands of warriors battle cancer every day, and millions of survivors go about their daily lives without complaint or expectation of special treatment.
Prior to being diagnosed at the age of 27, I had already experienced the helplessness and hopelessness of cancer. My mother dealt with breast cancer for many years, eventually succumbing to the illness a couple years before my own diagnosis. Cancer snuck up on me, the last thing on my mind when I began experiencing severe shoulder pain. As an active young man, my first assumption was that I’d simply hurt myself swinging a golf club or sleeping awkwardly. But when pain quickly moved to “can’t feel my legs”, I knew it was more serious. An unexpected trip to the ER for an MRI and CT, and I quickly discovered there was a large tumor pressing against my upper spine. It was Ewing’s Sarcoma. Surgery and 18 months of chemo and radiation followed. But thanks to some amazing doctors, nurses and science – I was eventually cured and began living my life.
That was chapter one. Over the next fifteen years, I faced two more recurrences of Ewing’s Sarcoma (a disease which affects less than 300 people per year). Along the way, the very treatment that kept me alive caused a second disease — leukemia — which meant a stem cell transplant and starting over, in a sense, from the ground up. Five battles. One life, lived in between and around all of them.
Today, I am thankful and blessed to say that my health is stable. Cancer is in remission, and while I still manage some lingering effects of everything my body has been through, I’ve learned to carry them without letting them overwhelm my daily life. To complain is a waste of time, and I try to only worry about those things over which I have some control. My philosophy is that there is always someone with a worse situation, more difficulties and a bigger hill to climb.
What I’ve come to understand, having spent the last 20+ years fighting, is that the diagnosis is rarely the hardest part of the story. It’s everything that happens after — the fear that shows up uninvited at 2am, the identity you have to rebuild, the relationships that shift, the small victories nobody else understands the weight of. That’s the part we don’t talk about enough. The difficulties in finding a job after missing months away from the workforce, meeting a partner who understands what cancer does to your body and mind, and just the general weight of the experience. But also, my fight has provided me with innumerable victories and has brought me closer to friends and family who mean the world to me.
The Survivor’s Table is my attempt to share some of what I’ve learned, and allow you to hear from others (survivors and caregivers) who have their own perspectives. It’s a place where everyone can pull up a chair, because I don’t know of anyone whose life hasn’t been touched by cancer in some way. I plan to be honest (sometimes brutally) about what this journey actually looks like, and hear from others who get it — not because they read about it, but because they lived it too. No platitudes. No pretending it’s all inspirational. Just real conversations, from one table to another.
If you’ve ever felt alone in a waiting room, or unsure how to talk about what you’re going through, or like your “after” doesn’t look the way anyone told you it would — pull up a chair. You’re in the right place.