I received my diagnosis on a Friday. August 23rd. Mandibular osteosarcoma, a cancer so rare it accounts for just 0.06% of all cancer diagnoses. The words landed like a weight I hadn’t been asked to carry, and yet there was no option but to pick it up and start moving.

There was no time to grieve. The next chapter had already begun.

Two Teams, Two Plans, Three Days to Decide

The Tuesday after my diagnosis, August 27th, I sat down with the interdisciplinary team at Emory University in Atlanta. The head and neck sarcoma specialist laid out a clear treatment plan: six full rounds of chemotherapy using two drugs, doxorubicin and ifosfamide, followed by surgery at UAB in Birmingham, Alabama. Six rounds. All chemo first. Then the knife.

Two days later, I was on a plane.

On August 29th, I flew to Mayo Clinic in Arizona, a designated sarcoma center of excellence, to get a second opinion from their interdisciplinary team. I was hoping they’d confirm what Emory had told me. A second voice saying the same thing would have made the decision easy. That’s not what happened.

Mayo’s team proposed a different approach entirely: three rounds of chemotherapy upfront using doxorubicin and cisplatin, followed by the surgery. That surgery was a fibular flap reconstruction in which surgeons would remove my jaw and rebuild it using bone from my fibula. After recovering, I would then complete three final rounds of chemo to finish the protocol. A split approach. Chemo, surgery, chemo.

I was scheduled to start treatment on Monday, September 2nd.

That left me Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.

Three days to decide between two world-class institutions with two different recommendations for a cancer so rare there was almost no data to guide me. I consulted three additional oncologists over that weekend. I read two clinical studies comparing outcomes of doxorubicin and ifosfamide versus doxorubicin and cisplatin specifically for mandibular osteosarcoma patients. I absorbed everything I could.

And then I had to accept something that no one who’s been handed a cancer diagnosis wants to accept: there was no clear right answer. The data simply didn’t exist in sufficient volume to point decisively in either direction. Mandibular osteosarcoma is too rare, the sample sizes too small, the variables too many.

So I made a different kind of decision.

I chose Emory’s protocol, not because the data told me to, but because Emory was in my backyard. Because proximity to my family, to Katy, to Dana and West, mattered. Because every day counted, and I knew what could not happen: paralysis. Overanalyzing a decision that no amount of analysis could fully resolve would only delay treatment, and delay was the one thing I absolutely could not afford. Any decision, made with conviction, was better than the right answer arrived at too late.

I started chemotherapy on September 2nd.

The Red Devil and the Fog

Six rounds of chemo. Each round spanning a full week of infusions, with doxorubicin administered Monday through Wednesday and ifosfamide every day for all five days.

Doxorubicin has a nickname in oncology circles: the Red Devil. It earns the name. The drug is a vivid, unsettling red, and watching a bag of it drain through an IV line directly into your chest is a surreal and sobering thing. It has a taste, a strange metallic signature you sense in your mouth as it enters your bloodstream. By Wednesday of each round, I was always deeply relieved to know my doxorubicin infusion was finished for the week. The nausea it produced was unlike anything I had experienced.

Ifosfamide worked differently. Its most disorienting side effect was cognitive, what some call “chemo brain,” though that phrase doesn’t fully capture the experience. I would repeat myself, sometimes multiple times in the span of minutes. I struggled to track who was in the room with me. By Thursday and Friday of each week, when all of the drugs had compounded in my system, the confusion was at its worst. It was deeply unsettling to feel my own mind become unreliable.

The first two rounds were difficult, but manageable. I moved through them with more energy than I expected.

The third round broke something open.

Monday and Tuesday were bearable. But Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of Round 3 knocked me flat in a way nothing had before. I was exhausted beyond what I knew exhaustion could feel like. I was nauseous. I was confused. I felt, for the first time, genuinely sick. Not just unwell, but profoundly, frighteningly ill. I remember waking up that Thursday morning, knowing I had to go back to the hospital for another infusion, and thinking: I don’t know how I’m going to do this.

That was the moment Katy stepped in.

She reminded me why I was doing it. Not in a grand speech, but in the quiet, steady, powerfully reassuring way that is uniquely hers. She reminded me that I was fighting for her. For Dana. For West. She reminded me that I was strong and that I was capable, and that God was with me through all of it. It was enough to get me out of bed. It was enough to get me back to that chair.

Rounds 3 and 4 were, without question, the hardest. The chemotherapy had accumulated enough in my system by that point to compound, with each dose layering on top of the last and amplifying every side effect. And because it was still relatively new, my body and mind hadn’t yet found a way to brace for what was coming.

Rounds 5 and 6 were different. Not easy, because nothing about chemotherapy is easy, but more navigable. By then, I knew what to expect. I could mentally prepare before each infusion. And crucially, I could see the end. The light at the end of the tunnel is a real thing. It changes what you’re capable of enduring.

The As Good or Better Challenge

Early in treatment, after my first round, I made a decision about who I was going to be through this process. I had always been an active person. Fitness wasn’t just a habit; it was part of my identity. I knew that staying physically active would matter, both for flushing the toxins out of my body and for protecting my mental health. Movement gave me something chemo threatened to take away: a sense of control.

So I started something I called the As Good or Better Challenge.

I created a group text with a group of close friends. Every day, I posted my workout, whatever I had managed to do that day, whether it was a full session or something scaled back by exhaustion. Then I challenged everyone in the group to do the same workout and post their times.

The premise was simple: if you couldn’t match the output of the guy going through chemotherapy, that said a lot more about you than it did about me.

It kept me accountable on the days I didn’t want to move. It kept me connected to a community of people who were cheering for me even when they couldn’t be in the room. And on the hardest days, the days when the idea of doing anything felt impossible, it gave me just enough motivation to lace up my shoes and prove something to myself.

New Year’s Eve on the Fifteenth Floor

My sixth and final round was unlike the others. Because it fell over New Year’s Eve, I had to complete it as an inpatient. On Monday, December 30th, I checked into the fifteenth floor of the Emory Winship Cancer Institute. I would be there through Friday, January 3rd.

On New Year’s Eve, I sat in that hospital room with Katy. We watched the fireworks rise over the Atlanta skyline from our window fifteen floors up.

And I remember thinking: I wonder if I’ll be here to see this next year.

It wasn’t a despairing thought, exactly. It was honest. Sitting in a cancer ward on the last night of the year has a way of stripping everything down to what’s real. I held onto Katy’s hand and let the moment be what it was: sobering, sacred, and something I will never forget.

By the time that final round was complete, something else had shifted. The tumor in my jaw, the thing that had throbbed daily since I first became aware of it, had gone quiet. By the end of six rounds of chemotherapy, the pain had nearly disappeared. The tumor was calcifying, which is common with osteosarcoma when treatment is working. My oncologist pointed to it as a promising sign. It was one of the first tangible signals I had received that the fight was going the way it needed to.

What I Couldn’t See, and Learning to Live With That

There was one ongoing source of frustration throughout my treatment that I have to be honest about.

My care team did regular CT scans of my head and neck throughout chemo. They did not scan my chest. And I knew, because I had done the research, that if osteosarcoma were going to spread, the lungs would be the first destination.

When I pressed my oncologist on this, the answer was clinical but clear: even if the cancer had spread to my chest, it would not change the treatment protocol. And more concerning, if a chest scan revealed something and other specialists became involved, pulmonology for instance, they might recommend surgical intervention in the lungs, which could delay my chemotherapy. The risk of disruption outweighed the information the scan would provide.

Intellectually, I understood the reasoning. But I am someone who has always operated best with full information. The uncertainty, not knowing whether the cancer was still contained to my jaw or had moved somewhere else entirely, produced a low, persistent anxiety that followed me through every round.

I managed it the only way I could. I stayed ruthlessly focused on the variables within my control: my physical activity, my nutrition, my attitude. I couldn’t control what might be happening inside my body, but I could control how I showed up every single day. That discipline kept me grounded when the unknowing threatened to swallow me.

What I Carried Out

When I completed my final round of chemotherapy in early January, I felt two things simultaneously: relief and accomplishment.

The relief was physical. The accumulation of toxins, the fatigue, the nausea, the fog, it could begin to lift. The war wasn’t over, but one of its hardest battles was.

The accomplishment was something deeper. I had gone into this knowing that chemotherapy would change me. I had accepted that going in, not as a resignation but as a truth. What I didn’t fully anticipate was the nature of the change.

I came out with a gratitude I hadn’t previously been capable of. Not the kind of gratitude you perform, but the kind that settles into your bones. Every morning I look at Dana and West and feel it, a deep and unhurried thankfulness that I am still here. Even on the frustrating days. Especially on the frustrating days.

And Katy.

Going through cancer with someone changes the nature of your love. Before my diagnosis, I loved my wife without question. But what I discovered on the other side of treatment is that I hadn’t yet known the full depth of what I felt for her. When someone shows up for you in the way that Katy showed up for me, quietly, consistently, with an encouraging strength that never wavered, it forges something new. A bond that doesn’t have a clean word for it.

She was there in the hospital room on New Year’s Eve. She was there on the Thursday morning when I couldn’t see how I was going to walk back into that building. She was there in the way only she can be, soft and steady, and somehow enough to change the course of a day.

I am so unbelievably grateful that God placed her beside me for this.

I began chemotherapy on September 2nd. I completed it in the first week of January. In between, I learned more about endurance, love, faith, and what it means to fight for your life than I had learned in all the years before it.

I am better than before. I know that now. And I am grateful for every hard thing it took to get here.

Not because I don’t know what to say, but because some moments feel too real to dress up. So I’m just going to tell you what happened.

August 2024. I had just been diagnosed with osteosarcoma. I was sitting in a hospital room with my best friend Grant, waiting on CT results that were going to tell us a lot about what my life was about to look like. Katy wasn’t there yet. It was just me and him.

The panic attack had already come and gone by that point. If you’ve ever had one you know there’s nothing you can do but let it move through you. Your chest, your hands, your breathing. It just takes what it takes and then it’s done.

And when it was done, what was left was this strange stillness. The kind that only comes after something that intense. Like everything had gone quiet all at once.

I looked over at Grant and said, “We’re all going to eventually die.”

Just like that. Quiet. No drama. I wasn’t spiraling, I wasn’t being dark. It just came out because it was the most true thing I had ever felt in my life up to that point.

Here’s the thing. I was 37. I had thought about death before. I think most people have. You go to a funeral, you have a close call, you lie awake at 2am and your brain goes somewhere you didn’t invite it. You think about it, you feel something, and then you kind of tuck it back away and go on with your day.

This was not that.

This was the first time in my life I actually felt the weight of my own mortality. Like really felt it. Not as a concept, not as something that happens to other people eventually, but as something that was actively, possibly, happening to me. Sitting in that room with a wife at home and a five year old and a two year old and a body that might be trying to check out before I was anywhere close to ready.

It hit different. I don’t know how else to say it.

Grant didn’t try to fix it or talk me out of it or pivot to something lighter. He just sat there with me in it. And that’s exactly what I needed. There are moments in life that aren’t asking to be solved. They just need someone willing to sit in them with you. Grant was that person that day. He was the one in the room. And honestly I don’t know that our friendship will ever be the same, and I mean that in the best possible way. There are people you go through something like that with and it just bonds you in a way that nothing else really can. I’m grateful for him more than I know how to say.

Then Katy walked in.

She was calm. Really calm. Not performing calm, not holding it together by a thread, just genuinely steady. Loving. She walked through that door and I felt something in me exhale that I didn’t even realize had been holding.

She couldn’t fix anything either. The results weren’t in yet, the road ahead was still completely unknown, there was nothing to solve. But she was safe. That’s the word. She has always been a safe place for me in my most vulnerable moments and that day she proved it in a way I’ll never forget.

That showed up in a hundred different ways over the months that followed. During treatment you hear things. You hear about other people’s journeys, people who didn’t make it, people whose stories went sideways, and your brain does what brains do. It grabs onto those stories and starts trying to make them yours. I’d get worked up. Scared. I could feel the spiral starting.

And every single time, Katy’s response was the same.

“That’s not your story.”

Every time. Calm, steady, certain. Not dismissive, not toxic positivity, just a simple and firm redirection back to what was actually true. That’s not your story. And I don’t know how to fully explain what those four words did for me, but they became my mantra. Any time my mind started to get the best of me, any time I caught myself going down a road that wasn’t mine to walk down, I’d come back to that. That’s not your story.

She gave me that. I think about how many times that phrase quite literally saved me from myself during that season.

I think you don’t really know what your marriage is made of until it gets tested. And what I found out is that I married somebody really extraordinary. When I had nothing left to give, nothing left to perform, she was just there. Steady. Safe.

I don’t take that for granted.

The Sunday after my diagnosis I went to Christ Church. I almost stayed home. Part of me wanted to just close the blinds and sit in it alone. But I went.

The sermon was on James 1:2-4, and the pastor wove in John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your Cancer throughout. I didn’t know it at the time but that combination of the text and Piper’s framework was exactly what I needed to hear that morning.

“Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness. And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”

I had read that passage before. Nodded at it before. But I had never heard it from inside a trial. That’s a completely different experience.

Piper’s piece lands in the same place from a different angle. He wrote it after his own cancer diagnosis and the whole thing is built around one idea: suffering can be wasted. You can go through something devastating and come out the other side having gotten nothing from it, learned nothing, become nothing different.

Or you can refuse to let that happen.

Sitting in that pew, between James and Piper, I felt something shift. Because that framing gave me something I desperately needed, which was a sense of agency. I couldn’t control the diagnosis. I couldn’t control what the scans showed or what the treatment was going to be. But I could control whether it meant something. I could decide, right now, that this was not going to be wasted.

I sat there and thought, I can do this if it’s making something. I don’t think I can do this if it’s just happening to me.

That felt like freedom. Which is a strange thing to feel when your life is falling apart but there it is.

The results came back. Then came the plan. Six rounds of chemo. A ten hour surgery to rebuild my jaw. A year of my life given entirely to fighting.

It was hard in ways I’m still finding words for.

But I kept coming back to that moment in the waiting room with Grant. That quiet, wide open moment after the panic had passed when I finally, truly, felt what it means to be a finite person. It was terrifying. It was also, in a strange way, clarifying. Because once you actually feel that, once the comfortable distance between you and your own mortality collapses, you stop treating your life like a rehearsal.

You start paying attention to what’s actually in front of you. The people in your house. The days you’ve been given. The version of yourself you’re becoming right now, in whatever you’re walking through.

James calls the end result of all this “perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.” I’m nowhere near that. But I understand now what it costs to get there. And I understand why it’s worth it.

We’re all going to eventually die.

So let’s not waste the time we have.

If any of this is landing for you, if you’re in your own version of a waiting room right now, I’d love to hear from you. Just reply. You’re not in it alone.

A note before you read: I’m including photos in this piece that document the progression of what you’re about to read. They are not easy to look at. But this story isn’t easy, and I think it’s important that you see it.

It Started With a Bump

It is strange, the way something catastrophic can begin as almost nothing.

In the summer of 2024, I noticed a small swollen spot on the outside of my gum. The kind of thing you might dismiss as a canker sore, a minor irritation, something that would pass in a few days. It didn’t hurt in any alarming way. It was just there.

And then it turned black.

That was the first moment I felt something shift inside me. Not pain exactly, but a low-grade alarm. The darkening happened quickly, and almost immediately the spot began to expand. What had been a small, localized swelling on the outside of my gum started moving, crossing to the inside of my jaw with a kind of urgency that I didn’t have language for yet. Within five days, it had spread from the exterior of my gum to the interior. Whatever this was, it was not waiting.

The Runaround

What followed was the medical equivalent of being bounced around a pinball machine.

I went to my dentist. Then to a periodontist. The periodontist performed multiple root scaling procedures, a deep cleaning process where instruments are used to scrape tartar and bacteria from below the gumline, searching for an infection, an abscess, something that would explain what was happening. He found nothing. No infection. No clear culprit. He did the only thing he knew how to do: he referred me to an endodontist.

Meanwhile, the spot kept growing.

I could feel it spreading. The original area of concern was around tooth #30, my lower right first molar. That’s where the dentists focused, where the pain seemed anchored. But the body doesn’t respect the neat diagrams on dental charts. I started feeling it in tooth #29 and tooth #31 as well, the teeth bracketing the original site. The pain was no longer local. It was migrating.

And then there was the sensation that I still find difficult to describe: when I worked out, I could feel my heartbeat throughout my entire jaw. Not metaphorically. Literally. As if my heart had relocated to the right side of my face. Every pump of blood was a pulse I could feel in my jaw, a throbbing rhythm that shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a significant clinical signal. Highly vascular tumors can produce exactly this kind of sensation. My body was trying to tell me something. No one was listening yet.

The Spot That Hardened

The swelling continued to change in character. When it first appeared, it had the soft quality of inflammation, the kind of puffiness you associate with a bite or a bruised gum. But as the weeks passed, it became harder. Not swollen, exactly. Dense. What had once yielded slightly to pressure now felt like something solid was growing beneath the surface of my jaw.

The spot grew larger. And harder. And larger still.

The Procedures That Should Never Have Happened

Here is where the story becomes almost unbearable to tell. Not because of what I went through, but because of what was happening beneath the surface that no one yet understood.

Tori Removal. At some point during this odyssey, providers noticed what appeared to be tori, bony growths that sometimes develop on the jaw or the roof of the mouth. Tori are benign protrusions of extra bone, a fairly common finding, and in some cases they can cause pain or discomfort in the surrounding teeth and jaw. That was the working theory: that the tori were the source of my pain, and that removing them might finally bring relief. It seemed logical given everything they had already tried. So they recommended surgery.

In a tori removal procedure, surgeons use rotary instruments to shave down these bony outgrowths, reducing them until the jaw is smooth again. It is a real and recognized procedure. In the right circumstances, it is appropriate care.

But here is what no one knew: what they were shaving was not a benign bony overgrowth.

It was an active osteosarcoma tumor.

Osteosarcoma is a cancer that originates in bone-forming cells. It is aggressive and dangerous. And when a surgeon takes instruments to shave down what they believe is a harmless torus, working millimeters away from a live tumor, they risk something called seeding, the accidental spreading of cancer cells into surrounding tissue, the surgical margins, or even the bloodstream.

Seeding is exactly what it sounds like: you disturb a cluster of malignant cells, and those cells scatter. They find new places to take root. What might have been a contained tumor becomes a disseminated threat. In the world of oncology, seeding during surgery is one of the most feared iatrogenic complications, meaning an injury caused by medical treatment itself. It can turn an operable cancer into an inoperable one. It can change a patient’s prognosis entirely.

The tori removal was, quite literally, one of the worst things they could have done to me, and they recommended it with the best intentions in the world.

I want to be clear: this is not a statement of blame. These providers were doing their best with the information they had. None of them had any reason to suspect what was actually growing in my jaw. But I also want to be honest about the reality. Multiple procedures were performed on my jaw while an aggressive bone cancer was actively growing inside it, and one of those procedures brought instruments within millimeters of that tumor.

The procedure itself was also, for the record, extraordinarily painful. The recovery was brutal in a way I hadn’t anticipated. And it accomplished nothing medically useful.

There was more. After the periodontist and the tori removal, the working theory shifted to the molar itself, tooth #30. I was given a root canal. When that didn’t resolve things, a follow-up root canal. When that didn’t resolve things, the tooth was extracted entirely.

When they pulled tooth #30, the oral surgeon noted something worth pausing on: the tooth was fine. There was nothing wrong with it. No decay, no infection that would have explained my symptoms. It was a healthy tooth that had been rooted, re-rooted, and ultimately extracted for no clinical reason.

The problem was never the tooth. The problem was the bone.

The First Person Who Said Something Different

In the midst of all of this, I saw Dr. Megan King, an endodontist in Buckhead.

She was the first person in this entire process who paused.

She had access to an in-office non-contrast CT scan, a type of imaging that gives a three-dimensional view of the jaw and surrounding bone without the use of contrast dye. When she looked at my scan, she saw something that the other providers hadn’t flagged: a thickening on the right side of my jaw. The bone looked different there. Denser, irregular. Not the profile of a normal jaw.

She didn’t diagnose me. She was careful not to overreach. But she said something that I have thought about many times since: “If it were me, I’d get the bone biopsied.”

That sentence changed everything.

It was the first red flag. The first moment in this entire process when a provider looked at what was happening in my jaw and said, in essence: this might not be what we think it is. She didn’t know it was cancer. But she knew something was wrong. And she knew the right next step.

A bone biopsy was ordered.

What Came Next

The results came back: osteosarcoma. A primary bone cancer originating in the right side of my jaw.

What followed, six rounds of aggressive chemotherapy, a ten-hour fibular flap reconstruction surgery in which surgeons rebuilt my jaw using a segment of bone harvested from my leg, the weeks of recovery, the physical and spiritual weight of all of it, is a longer story for another day.

But this part of the story matters, because it is the part that almost wasn’t told at all.

This is the part where the wrong procedures happened in the wrong order. Where instruments came millimeters from a tumor that no one knew was there. Where the cells that were trying to kill me were being actively disturbed by people who were trying to help me.

And it is the part where one doctor, Dr. Megan King, an endodontist in Buckhead who looked at a scan and trusted what she saw, said five words that sent me down a different path.

Get the bone biopsied.

I am sharing this story not to frighten you, and not to indict anyone who treated me during this time. I am sharing it because I believe in radical transparency about what this journey has actually looked like: the missteps, the confusion, the pain, and ultimately, the diagnosis that set everything else in motion. If you are experiencing unexplained jaw pain, swelling that is hardening, or symptoms that are progressing faster than providers can explain them, be your own advocate. Ask for imaging. Ask the hard questions. And if someone tells you something feels off, listen.

More of this story, the chemo, the surgery, what it means to rebuild your jaw and your life, is coming.

— Beau

I thought I knew what fear felt like. I had faced hard things before. I had delivered bad news and received it. I had sat in uncomfortable rooms and gotten through them.

Nothing in my life had come close to preparing me for this one.

Katy and I drove to Emory Winship Cancer Institute a few days after my diagnosis. I don’t remember much about the drive. I remember being numb. My head was completely spinning. I felt scared and nauseated, every nerve in my body on fire, and yet somehow my feet kept moving, one in front of the other, down the hallway toward a room where strangers were about to tell me what my future looked like.

It felt like walking before a judge, jury, and executioner to be given my fate.

Katy was a rock. Strong, quiet resolve beside me the entire time. While every nerve in my body felt like it was shorting out, she was steady. I don’t think she knows how much that steadiness held me together in those moments. I hope she does now.

I am a Di on the DISC scale. Highly direct, highly action oriented. The moment I received my diagnosis, I started writing down questions in my notes app. Every gap in my knowledge, every scenario I needed to understand, every decision point I could anticipate. By the time we sat in that room at Emory Winship, I had fifty of them. Not because I was calm. Because preparation was the only thing I could control, and control was the only thing standing between me and complete panic.

I held that phone and I waited.

The door opened and Dr. William Read walked in.

The first words out of his mouth were: “This is curable.”

Not hello. Not a handshake and small talk. Not easing into it. Just the thing I needed to hear most, delivered first, without ceremony.

I have never been so grateful for an opening sentence in my life.

I want to try to describe Dr. Read because I think it matters. He is one of the most interesting people I have ever met. Part Dr. Doolittle, part mad scientist, entirely himself. Kind, thoughtful, and relentlessly direct. He walks into a room with a kind of quiet confidence that doesn’t perform itself, and he speaks to you like you are capable of handling the truth, which in my experience is the rarest and most valuable quality a doctor can have.

For me, in that moment, he was exactly the right human being.

I do not want pleasantries when the stakes are high. I do not want anyone to ease me in or soften the edges out of politeness. I want the details, all of them, as quickly as possible, and then I want to work through every question on my list until there are no gaps left. Dr. Read understood that without me having to explain it. He sat down, told me what I had, told me what we were going to do about it, and then he made time for every single question I had written down.

Fifty questions. He answered every one.

I am not sure I have ever felt more seen by a medical professional in my life. And I work in healthcare. I know how rare that is.

Here is what he told me.

I had Osteosarcoma of the Mandible. It occurs in 0.06% of all cancer cases. I was young. I was otherwise healthy. My chance of being completely cured was 75 percent.

The plan: six rounds of chemotherapy using Doxorubicin and Ifosfamide, two of the most aggressive drugs used to treat this disease. Every third week, Monday through Friday, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon. After all six rounds, surgery to remove the majority of the right side of my jaw and reconstruct it using a graft from my fibula. A ten-hour surgery. Seven days inpatient. Then recovery.

I knew what every one of those words meant clinically. I had spent years in healthcare. I had stood in operating rooms while surgeons worked on pediatric osteosarcoma patients. I had watched this disease up close in people far younger than me.

And still, sitting in that chair, I felt like someone had handed me a map to a country I had never set foot in.

But here is what shifted in that room.

Before Dr. Read walked through the door, I had a diagnosis and no direction. Terrifying. After he walked through the door, I had a diagnosis and a game plan. Completely different.

I am a very action oriented person. I do not do well in ambiguity. What I do well is execution. Give me a problem, give me a plan, and I will run through a wall to get it done. The moment Dr. Read laid out the treatment protocol, something clicked in my brain. My mind shifted from panic mode into go mode. Not because the news was good, it wasn’t entirely, but because now there was something to work with. Now there was a direction to move in.

With that plan, and those answers, came a peace I had not felt since before the diagnosis.

I have thought a lot about why that peace came so quickly, and I do not think it was entirely about the plan itself.

I think some of it was God.

Looking back on that day, I can see His fingerprints all over it. The right doctor, with the right personality, in the right hospital, showing up at exactly the moment I needed someone to tell me the truth without flinching. Dr. Read is no doubt doing exactly what God created him to do. He is too good at it, too perfectly suited for it, for it to be anything other than a calling.

I needed someone to cut through the fear and give me something solid to stand on. God sent me Dr. Read.

That is not a small thing. That is everything.

We walked out of Emory Winship that afternoon with answers. A plan. A percentage. A name to put on the enemy and a strategy for defeating it.

I was still scared. I want to be honest about that. A peace that passes understanding does not mean the absence of fear. It means the presence of something stronger than fear running underneath it, holding the floor steady even when everything above it is shaking.

But I was no longer spinning. I was moving forward.

For someone like me, moving forward is survival.

Whatever room you are sitting in right now, whatever verdict you are waiting to hear, whatever judge, jury, and executioner you feel like you are walking toward: I hope someone opens that door and gives you something solid to stand on. I hope they are direct. I hope they are kind. I hope they make time for every question on your list.

And I hope, underneath all of it, you feel what I felt when I walked out of that building into the afternoon sun with my wife beside me.

Not finished. Not fixed. But moving.

That is enough.

Bea

u

My oral surgeon looked at my scans and told me there was no concern for cancer. No reason to biopsy the bone.

I had spent five months being shuffled between providers: a dentist, a periodontist, and finally an oral surgeon here in Atlanta who put me through tori removal, root canals, and a tooth extraction. Nobody could tell me what was wrong. When we finally reviewed my CT scans together before what was supposed to be a routine procedure, he pointed to the thicker bone density on the right side of my jaw and said it was probably from teeth grinding or favoring one side while eating.

I had been in pain for five months. And by the time we were scheduled for the biopsy, things had progressed to the point where I could feel my heartbeat pulsing through my jaw every time my heart rate elevated. Something was wrong. I knew it. I disagreed.

I pushed for a bone biopsy. He pushed back hard. He said there was no reason to do that, that we needed all the bone possible because he had to place an implant. He was only planning to biopsy the tissue. I held firm. He agreed to “see how it looks” during the procedure. I’ll never forget the moment he held up the petri dish afterward and said, almost as an aside: “I got that bone you asked for.”

Two weeks later the results came back. The tissue, the only thing my surgeon had planned to biopsy, came back completely clear. No cancer. The bone came back positive for Osteosarcoma of the Mandible, a cancer so rare it occurs in 0.06% of all cases.

Let that sink in for a moment. If I had accepted his reasoning, we would have walked away with a clean pathology report on the tissue, declared the problem solved, and placed an implant directly into a cancerous tumor. I probably would have died.

I’ve spent a lot of my life being told I was too stubborn. Too hard-headed. That I needed to learn to listen better and push back less. Maybe. But that stubborn, hard-headed personality that God blessed me with from an early age, the one that got me into plenty of trouble growing up, is probably the reason I’m still here to write this.

God doesn’t waste anything. Not even the parts of you that drove your parents crazy.

I was at the office when the call came. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t feel my hands or feet. I started throwing up. My five-year-old daughter Dana was home sick that day, and I barely held myself together long enough to go inside, tell her I loved her, and walk back out to the driveway where I collapsed. I couldn’t stand. My best friend Grant dropped everything and drove to my house. Because Dana was home, I got in his car and we just drove. I had to get out of there so she wouldn’t see me fall apart.

My dog had died from Osteosarcoma in 2012. My great uncle Billy passed from it in 2016. And earlier in my career, I had spent years in the operating room as a surgical rep for Stryker Orthopedics, where we worked on replacing the joints of pediatric patients who had been diagnosed with the same disease. I had stood in those rooms. I had watched what this cancer does to a body up close. I knew more than most people what this diagnosis meant and how real of a death sentence it could be.

All of that hit me at once in that driveway.

And in that moment, with my mind running at full speed through everything I knew and everything I feared, all I could think about were my wife Katy and my two kids, Dana who was five and West who was two, and what this meant for them.

That fear, the fear of not being there for them, is what has driven everything since.

A few days later, Katy and I sat in the most sterile room I’ve ever been in. No windows. A buzzing medical machine. White everything. We were at the Emory Winship Cancer Institute, waiting to meet the interdisciplinary team that would determine my treatment plan. It felt like sitting in a movie scene, waiting to hear our fate.

That ominous feeling vanished the moment Dr. William Read walked through the door.

The first words out of his mouth were: “Hi, I’m Dr. Read and what you have is curable.”

I have never been so grateful for an opening sentence in my life.

He explained the plan: six rounds of chemotherapy using Doxorubicin and Ifosfamide, two of the most aggressive drugs used to treat this disease. Every third week, Monday through Friday, nine in the morning to five in the afternoon, sitting in an infusion chair while they ran the hardest possible treatment through my body. After completing all six rounds, I would move on to surgery, removing the majority of the right side of my jaw and reconstructing it using a graft from my fibula. A ten-hour surgery. Seven days inpatient. Then recovery.

I work in healthcare. I knew what every one of those words meant clinically. And yet I sat in that chair and felt like someone had handed me a map to a country I had never set foot in.

What I didn’t expect was how clearly I would be able to see God moving through all of it.

In the days after my diagnosis, I watched Him connect dots in ways that I cannot explain as coincidence. A surgical oncologist I had worked with years earlier who answered his phone immediately and got me into the ER for CT scans within hours. A head and neck surgeon from Mayo Clinic, one of the best in the country for exactly my type of cancer, who happened to be standing next to my best friend when I called to tell him the news. A functional medicine practice whose founders turned out to be my brother-in-law’s next-door neighbors. A Sunday sermon, two days after my diagnosis, on finding joy in the middle of darkness, preached as if it had been written specifically for me, for that exact morning.

I have had a relationship with God for most of my life. But I would be lying if I said it had always been what it should have been. There were seasons of closeness and seasons of drift. This diagnosis ended the drift permanently.

In those hospital rooms, in the fear, in the fog of chemotherapy, in the early mornings when I couldn’t sleep and the lights wouldn’t turn off, I found God not as a distant concept but as a present, active force in my life. I prayed harder than I ever have. I cried out to Him in ways I never had before. And what I found on the other side of those prayers was not always the absence of fear, but a peace that I genuinely cannot explain any other way.

James 1:2-4 became the anchor I returned to again and again: “Consider it pure joy, my brothers and sisters, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith produces perseverance. Let perseverance finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything.”

Pure joy in trials. I wrestled with that. Some days I still do. But I have come to believe it, not as a platitude, but as something I have actually lived. The testing produced something in me that comfort never could have. And I am more grateful for that than I know how to say.

What followed treatment was one of the hardest things I have ever experienced and somehow, the most transformative.

My faith deepened in ways I didn’t expect. My sense of purpose sharpened. My gratitude for the ordinary moments, bedtime with my kids, a morning run, a conversation with Katy, became something I can’t put a price on. I discovered that the parts of your health nobody talks about during cancer treatment, your sleep, your nutrition, your movement, your metabolic health, your mental state, matter more than I ever could have imagined. I discovered what it means to truly fight for something.

And I discovered something I want to spend the rest of my life telling people:

You can walk into the fire and come out more than you were before.

Not just surviving. Not just getting back to who you were. Something greater.

That’s what this Substack is about.

I’m writing from active recovery, not from the finished side of a tidy story. I don’t have a neat ending yet. Some days are harder than others. But I believe the most honest and useful voice is the one still in it, still figuring it out, still sitting in his son’s room at night watching him breathe and thinking about how much he has to live for.

If something has permanently changed your life, a diagnosis, a loss, a failure you didn’t see coming, I wrote this for you.

The takeaway from that petri dish moment has become the foundation of everything I now believe: advocate for yourself, hold firm, trust God in the fire, and know that on the other side of the hardest thing you’ve ever faced, there is a version of you that is better than before.

Let’s find out who that is together.

Beau