“Who am I going to be when this is done?” This is a question Sylas Sandoval asks frequently these days.
He knew who he was before being diagnosed with lymphoma. At 33, he’s enjoyed a life of success: quarterback at Hilltop High, UCSD graduate, family man, business owner, former youth pastor, avid golfer. Now, his new reality strikes him with overwhelming force. “I actually have cancer. This isn’t a dream.”
It’s hard to assimilate the speed with which Sylas’s life changed. After a golf tournament in March, he couldn’t shake muscle soreness. He’d had signs of sickness – night sweats, heartburn, an odd lump in his neck. After work each day, he’d nap, and despite his fit physique, even a three-minute shower exhausted him. With such a blessed life, however, the possibility of serious illness didn’t cross his mind.
His original diagnosis was innocuous: golfer’s elbow. A second exam sent him to the ER. Even after being officially diagnosed with an aggressive form of lymphoma, he was calm. “I knew Anthony Rizzo of the Cubs had it and beat it, so I’d be fine.” He assumed he’d need the shortest treatment course possible.
Sylas began chemotherapy almost immediately. He knew to expect nausea and hair loss, but even after spending 96 hours hospitalized, attached to an IV bag of orange poison, he left the hospital thinking, “This isn’t that bad.”
“Little did I know the storm was about to hit.”
Within a day, Sylas was hospitalized again, this time with a fever of 102.5. More than frightened, he was distressed. He’d barely seen his children since beginning treatment. Over Facetime, he watched them cry for Daddy to come home. “When I got off the phone, I lost it. I didn’t cry at my wedding. I didn’t cry at the birth of my children. But I was bawling. I felt so bad for my wife and kids that I wasn’t there with them.”
Subsequent exams brought bad news. One mass was growing, and he required prompt surgery for the fluid gathering around his heart. Over the next eleven days, events took a turn for the worse. “I’d always been so healthy, but I just couldn’t stop things from going medically wrong.” His family and friends were scared. Adding to his despair was the inability to see his family, except through Facetime. Doubt began to creep in. “When is something going to go right with my body? If this is only round one of chemotherapy, how am I going to make it through five more rounds?”
One bright moment came after ten frightening days in a hospital bed, much of it spent in the ICU. Sylas was allowed a brief trip outside for sunshine therapy. “It was the greatest thing ever,” he recalls. “I didn’t even care that I was outside in my hospital gown.” Better still was the day his family came to pick him up from the hospital.
Sylas is adjusting to challenges he’s never encountered. His second round of chemotherapy provoked anxiety, a feeling new to him. Unlike the first optimistic round, he knew what to expect and how many things could go wrong.
His children, ages three and five, struggle to adapt. Sylas and his wife have been intentional about using the word “cancer,” but the kids don’t know their daddy could die. They’re young enough, he hopes, to miss the significance of this. He tries to maintain a sense of normalcy, a difficult task for a man who’s always roughhoused with his son but now spends days curled up on the couch. Still, he doesn’t wrestle with bitterness; he would far rather have cancer than watch his wife or children go through it.
Sylas can’t do the things he most loves at the moment: be around people, build things with his hands, play golf. His focus is on staying alive. “Right now, I’m my kids’ dad and Brigette’s husband. I want to be there for them for the next 50 years.”
As he looks ahead, Sylas wonders how the journey will evolve. It’s easy to imagine that life as he knew it will resume. He knows that’s unlikely though. Illness has already changed him, in many ways for the better. He’s more patient, and more attentive. “You walk by so many people all the time and have no idea what they’re going through. I see people; they don’t know I have cancer, and I wonder if they have something I can’t see.”
Even as he worries about the future, the ability to provide for his family, the joy of seeing his children grow, he recognizes that he now has a degree of empathy he didn’t have before, the kind that comes from knowing pain. “If it makes me a more compassionate person, then I won’t regret having cancer.”
