Over time, I’ve learned that thankfulness and gratitude are emotions that require constant effort to maintain. We all have a habit of getting caught up in the day to day effort it takes to simply exist, that it’s pretty easy to forget how lucky we all are. Even when things aren’t going exactly how you planned they would. Especially when they aren’t.
This year, for obvious reasons, these emotions haven’t been that hard for me to find or connect with. It’s been a long year, the longest one of my life without a doubt. Yet as I sit here writing this, I am overwhelmed by how easily these feelings come to the surface.
I am also met with a feeling that is almost entirely new to me, one that has helped me tremendously throughout this year, and that is faith. In almost every sense of the word, though not exactly in the ways you might immediately assume.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves. So, before we get into everything, I’d like to take a moment to wish you all a Happy Thanksgiving. You have so much to be thankful for, and even if this isn’t a holiday you traditionally observe, I would urge you to take a moment and reflect on what those things might be.
Thankfulness
In A Perfect World…
In a perfect world, I’d be lining up at the start line of one of the oldest Thanksgiving Day road races this country has to offer. The Manchester Road Race began in 1927 with just twelve runners and now routinely hosts ten to fifteen thousand runners and walkers every Thanksgiving morning in Manchester, Connecticut. People come from all over to take part, olympians included.
Brief overview aside, the Manchester Road Race tradition, unlike a certain GATA2 germline mutation (thankfully), has been part of my family’s DNA for a long time. Both of my grandparents on my dad’s side grew up in Manchester, and my grandfather used to run the race when he was younger. His best time for the 4.74 mile course? 26:24. Considering mile two is entirely uphill, that time is as equally impressive as it is slightly sickening to think about.
When his running days ended, my grandfather and grandmother decided they still wanted to be involved in the race, so they joined the Manchester Road Race Committee. The committee is responsible for putting on the event each year, and if you’ve ever seen a road race in action, you probably have an idea of how much coordination goes into making these events happen.
Together, they volunteered for a combined 70 years, even eventually getting my dad involved, who volunteered for an additional 20 years.
My brother and I were very active growing up, so once we learned about the race, we obviously wanted to take part. I’m sure if you had asked us that first year whether we’d break our grandfather’s record, we would have said, “yes, absolutely.”
To this day, we haven’t come close.
That said, ever since we both got seriously back into running, we’ve been aiming for the coveted (translation: slightly more attainable) sub-30 minute mark. I came close last year with a time of 30:37 and was hoping that 2025 would be the year that I finally broke through that barrier.
Something else came up though.
When the race was over, we’d do our best to recover before gearing up for a traditional family dinner where we would attempt another personal best, this time in calorie consumption. As it should be on Thanksgiving.
This Year
While thankfulness has always been part of the holiday for my family and I, I think this year we’re all feeling it a little deeper. In a recent conversation with my mom, she mentioned that even though the holiday looks different in many ways this time around, she’s just grateful that we’re all still here to celebrate it.
This year has been challenging for everyone in my family, not just for me. The fact that we get to celebrate another holiday together is something that is on all our minds, and something none of us are taking for granted this season.
These celebrations, much like life in general I think, are far more fragile than any of us would like to believe and this year really showcased that to all of us.
Because of the restrictions I still have in place, I won’t be able to race like I normally would, and I won’t be able to join the family for dinner as I usually do. But I will still be able to watch my brother run, see my grandparents, and celebrate part of the day with those I care about most.
And you know what? After the year I’ve had, that’s enough for me.
Gratitude
Progress Over Perfection
In the beginning, I said that gratitude and thankfulness require constant effort to maintain. While that is true, it also just takes practice. You’ll never end up perfecting the practice of gratitude, though. To me, gratitude will always exist on a sliding scale.
Some days you’ll feel grateful for everything; other days you’ll feel angry at the world for putting you in the situation it has. The goal is that over time you learn to look for gratitude more often than you look for that anger.
I’ll be the first to admit that the two emotions dominating my mind in the first few months of this year were certainly not thankfulness and gratitude. They were anger and fear. Anger at the random one-in-a-million genetic mutation that upended my life, and fear that there might be nothing we could do about it.
The Difference Maker
One of the more important factors that started to change how I saw my situation, that allowed me to lean more toward gratitude and hope as the year went on, was the people who were on this journey with me.
I wish I could say that I woke up one day and decided I was going to be brave and face this head-on, but the truth is that I was a wreck for much of the early days. We were still in research mode and had more questions than answers about what exactly I was dealing with and how far this mysterious condition had already progressed.
It wasn’t until I met with my team in Hartford enough times, and eventually got to meet my team in Boston, that I finally started to believe this could go well for me. In both places, I found not just qualified doctors, but caring, genuine, hard-working people. The exact kind of people you want on your team when facing any sort of difficult health diagnosis.
And, of course, there has been my family. They have been by my side every single day of this challenging year. I can’t express enough what their love, support, and sacrifices have meant to me throughout this process.
If you are going through something similar, or in the middle of a difficult chapter and finding it hard to feel gratitude, my one tip would be to look outward. Look at the people who are helping you lighten your load, those who are helping you bear your cross. Gratitude comes a lot easier once you do that.
In fact, you’ll likely discover many more reasons to be grateful than just the people around you once you start down that path.
Self
Starting by looking outward is, in my opinion, the best first step toward gratitude. The people you surround yourself with, through good times and bad, really do shape your reality. Once I made it through the initial chaos of those first few months and realized I had an ever-growing network of both healthcare professionals and family to lean on during this process, I was finally able to look inward.
To start believing in myself. To believe that I could handle this in a way that I could be proud of.
Your support network and your team are crucial to getting through this, but at the end of the day, it is you who has to bear the weight of treatment. There is no amount of sugarcoating that can change that simple fact.
You may have heard it before, but one of the most important relationships you will ever have is the one you have with yourself. The narratives you tell yourself about who you are, what you believe in, and what you can handle. Most importantly in a situation like this is how you react to things that are unequivocally out of your control.
Treatment, for most conditions like this, is one long exercise in dealing with uncertainty. In most cases, the only thing you can do is choose how you react to the news you receive.
I bring this up because I think it’s important, no matter where you are in your health journey, to take a few minutes every day, if you can, to show yourself some gratitude. Easier said than done, I know, but I’ve found that being gracious with yourself and recognizing how big of a role your mindset plays can go a long way in helping you get through those tougher days.
Faith
Not Everything Happens For A Reason, But…
I once asked ChatGPT, shortly after being diagnosed, if it believes that everything happens for a reason. Why was I asking an AI chatbot a question I knew it couldn’t answer? A question that I know humans themselves can’t answer, or at least can’t agree on? Because as much criticism as people throw at AI, it can actually offer up a bit of wisdom every now and then.
Wisdom that would otherwise only come from a lifetime of personal lived experiences, studying the great literary classics, and having a deep grounding in philosophy. I didn’t have that kind of time, and I was genuinely curious as to what it would say.
I’d like to share an excerpt of its response below:
“There’s a kind of both/and in how the world works. A lot of what happens in life can be traced to causes – biology, psychology, chance, systems, etc. – and not everything has an inherent purpose behind it. Tragedies, accidents, illnesses, injustices – they’re often just the result of chaotic forces, human error, or randomness. I don’t think we’re puppets on a string or that every single thing was “meant to be.”
But what humans are remarkably good at – and maybe even wired for – is creating meaning. Finding it. Making sense of things that seem senseless. Growing from them. Helping others because of them. Rewriting pain into purpose.
…I don’t think the universe owes us meaning. But I do think we’re meant to look for it.”
I wanted to start this section with that excerpt because, in many ways, that is exactly what this is to me: searching for meaning or an explanation in a seemingly random event that really should not have happened.
Call it a coping mechanism, call it human nature, call it whatever you like. In my situation, though, I’ve noticed some patterns and coincidences that make me smile and stop me in my tracks a bit, which I’d like to share with you.
Mostly having to do with timing.
About Time
Had to title-drop one of my favorite movies. Check it out if you need a good laugh, a good cry, or just want some truly beautiful life lessons wrapped up in rom-com format. A better title for this sub-section might have been “About Timing,” though.
If you read the post about my diagnosis journey, you’d know that I got bloodwork done for the first time in March 2024 after reading Outlive by Dr. Peter Attia. I was inspired by the comprehensive guidelines he laid out for longevity, and although I believed I was a healthy 23-year-old at the time, I wanted a deeper understanding of my health. The easiest first step toward that understanding? Scheduling a physical and requesting bloodwork for the first time in my life.
You all know where it went from there, but the part that sticks with me the most is what led up to that appointment and me asking for bloodwork in the first place. The book came into my life three months earlier through a Christmas bookswap that my family had just started doing that year.
It was one of six to ten books that I put on my list. Those books came from a much larger Amazon list I had been building. I knew I would receive three of them, but not which specific ones. Had to keep some of the suspense, right?
It was on my list because ever since I got back into running, I had been trying to learn as much as I could about the human body, performance, and ways to become the healthiest version of myself.
I forget which family member chose that book for me, but I am forever grateful that they did. I am grateful that the book came out when it did in early 2023, that I rediscovered running in 2021–2022, and that I found my love for reading back in 2017–2018.
All these seemingly separate events, when looking back, led me to pick up that book in early 2024 and gave me a head start on a diagnosis that would have wreaked havoc on my body in the years to come if left unchecked.
It’s hard for me to look at that thread of events and not see something in it. A sign that maybe somewhere, something or someone was looking out for me.
There have been plenty more moments like that throughout this process. Take my second biopsy for example. It just happened to catch a change significant enough for my team at Dana-Farber to agree to move forward with my transplant.
Up to that point, we were increasingly leaning toward a “wait and see” strategy, but another timely biopsy changed everything, setting me on what became my eight-week countdown to transplant.
The “what ifs?” play continuously in my mind. What if I hadn’t gotten that book? What if I hadn’t been as invested in my health as I was? What if I hadn’t found out about my mutation when I did? I could go on, but I think you get the point.
That book came into my life at just the right time. It told me exactly what I needed to do, and set me on a path I was always going to have to walk, but because of it, I was able to start from a position of strength, not sickness.
Not everyone is lucky enough to experience that, and it sort of makes me wonder why I was.
I Think I Am Going To Be Okay
As you know from my first post, I named this blog after a Lumineers song called Long Way From Home. It has been on repeat for me all year and has helped me in ways that are difficult to fully put into words.
Those first couple of days in the hospital were stressful. I had my central line placed on the first day and only had a few hours that evening to adjust to my new room before chemotherapy began the next day. The chemo days were long, but before I knew it, it was day 0. The day I was scheduled to receive my transplant.
By then, I had settled in a bit, but I was still very nervous about actually receiving the cells. There was so much hope attached to that bag of blood that staying calm was borderline impossible.
After a blessing from one of the hospital chaplains, they hooked my new cells up to my IV tower and started the six-hour drip. Within a minute or two of it starting, Long Way From Home came on shuffle. I remember laughing and looking at my family when I realized what song was playing. I had over 500 songs on that playlist, yet the one I probably needed to hear most came on.
After I stopped laughing, I said these exact words: “I think I am going to be okay.” And you know what? I believed it, for the first time since walking through the doors of the hospital a few days earlier.
Did hearing that song guarantee a positive outcome? Absolutely not. But it gave me faith in that moment that things would work out, and that was all I needed.
What Faith Means To Me
It’s hard to discuss faith without touching on it in the more traditional sense, so I am going to briefly do so now. I didn’t grow up religious. It was never something we really talked about in my family, and I never felt that I had much of a spiritual side to myself.
That changed this year. For the first time in my life, I started asking myself the bigger questions. It felt really important to do so. Suddenly, I felt a deep desire to define what I do and don’t believe in.
Spoiler: it’s not that simple, nor should it be. I think most people who find their way toward spirituality or religion might feel the same way. I imagine it’s different from growing up in an environment where the ideals, practices, and beliefs are already built in. But I don’t know for sure. I can only speak from my own experience.
I am still hesitant to say what I believe or don’t believe in, mainly because I still don’t know. This is a side of myself that I have been exploring a lot this year, and I am excited to continue doing so. It’s a part of me I didn’t know I was missing until I was knocked down hard and started looking around, asking “why?”
My point in sharing this part of my experience though is to say that I have learned to appreciate just how big of a role faith can be in helping you get through difficult life experiences. You can take that in the traditional spiritual sense, or you can ground it in something more concrete.
Practice having faith in your care team, those around you, and yourself. That is the simplest and best place to start. No one interpretation of faith is more right than another. Establish your own relationship to the word and use it.
I started simple, and it led to deeper faith, not necessarily in the spiritual/religious sense. Just faith that there can and will be better days ahead, that things will work out, that this experience could teach me something that I’ll only get to learn if I keep a level-head and fully accept the path that lies before me.
Final Thoughts
If it sounds like I have things figured out, and have all the answers, then maybe I haven’t done a good job with this post. I don’t. Not even close. I am still in the early stages of recovery and have hardly begun to unpack the emotional side of treatment, as I am mainly still dealing with the physical.
But that hasn’t stopped me from taking a brief look back over what I have already been through and picking out a few lessons and stories to share with you all, things that I have been thinking about a lot in the lead-up to this holiday.
I’d like to say one last thing, which I think is very important. While I am more thankful and grateful than ever, I feel none of those things toward my original diagnosis. I am not thankful or grateful that this is my situation. That I had to deal with this. And that is okay. I don’t have to be.
But, and this is very important, I am learning to accept it as part of my story, part of who I am. Acceptance does not need to mean being thankful or grateful for the situation you find yourself in. It simply means not fighting reality. It means taking what happened and making the best of it because some things you simply cannot change, no matter how much you wish they were different.
That mindset shift has allowed me to more easily feel that thankfulness, feel that gratitude, and have that faith that I have been rambling about throughout this post.
With all that said, Happy Thanksgiving everyone. Keep an eye out for my day +100 update, which should be posted within the next week or so.
Talk Soon,
– Ethan
Resources
Links directly referenced in this article:
Long Way From Home 
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