Being an Identical Twin
- Jess Candle
- 5 days ago
- 24 min read
INTRODUCTION
[A gathering of ITA (Identical Twins Anonymous) at a nondescript warehouse in Salt Lake City, Utah, around 700 South and 700 West. I and my identical twin brother Eric stand in front, wearing matching superhero pajamas like at age ten. In the audience are about twenty-five sets of identical twins, female and male, of various ages, also dressed in matching pajamas. A team of social workers at a back table, offering discounted counseling services. Another table with warm juice and weird meringue cookies. An overweight security guard with heavy square shoes purchased from a large box retailer on sale paces near a rear door. He regularly scratches his bottom and sniffs his hand and then takes another meringue cookie.]
Hello. HELLO for those in the back! HELLO! Can you hear me? My name is Scott Smith. And I am an identical twin. I am fifty-four years old. Thank you for inviting me to Identical Twins Anonymous aka ITA so that my twin and I can address the childhood trauma of being identical twins, something we had no control over or responsibility for: this opportunity to address the trauma now arriving more than thirty years after the fact. My identical twin is Eric. See him? He's just over there. Yes, his last name is Smith. He's also 54 years old. We share a birthday. How did you guess? Yes, we look a lot alike. Can our wives tell us apart? Yes! We have similar voices and mannerisms. We have a similar walk and gait. We hold and move our bodies similarly. We have a lot of similar skills and interests, some of the same fears and values. I look forward to meeting all of you and learning from you. Hopefully we can heal together, somehow, someway. Yes, we were all freaks in elementary school and everyone gawked at us like a traveling circus, but we made it to adulthood, we learned a few things along the way. There's cookies and drinks on the table in the back to the left, help yourself. You'll all get your turn. After me and Eric, we'll hear from the Wilson twins, the Franklin twins, the Jefferson twins, all the twins. In our junior high school, where Eric and I went in the late 80's, South Davis Junior High School in Bountiful, Utah, there were fifteen sets of twins, FIFTEEN! Fifteen! One time a lady from the Davis County Clipper, that small local newspaper, came to our school and took a group photograph of all the fifteen twins, and we were all in the paper in a group shot. The story was called something like "Fifteen Sets of Twins." I don't think they established why there were so many twins in Bountiful, just that there were. My Mom was proud of that photograph. She loved having twins. She loved that Eric and I were twins. Her kids, her sons, her twin sons.
OK, my people, my twin people, my tribe of identical twins, what was the most common question peopled asked you or your twin, when you were kids?
[Different twins in the audience raise their hands and provide, in turn, the answers below. Scott writes the answers on a blackboard, for all to see. As each response is given, the other twins in the room nod gravely to indicate they are familiar with the question.]
"What's it like being a twin?"
"Have you always been a twin?"
"Did you come out first or second?"
"Which one of you is older?"
"By how long?"
"Did your parents have to have sex twice to make twins?"
"Like sex on top of sex to split the egg in two?"
"Are you the kind where the egg split or the kind with two eggs?"
"So the egg split so that's why you are so small?"
"Did you ever do the thing where you would switch classes? That would be so funny? Like one does math and the other English."
"Did you ever think of trying to switch classes?"
"Which one of you does your parents love more?"
"Can your parents tell you apart?"
"Did you ever trick your parents?"
"How do you know which one you are?"
"Does your mom ever get you guys confused?"
"Did your mom ever dress you up the same?"
"Do you like the same clothes?"
"Are there other twins in your family?"
"Is it genetic?"
"Like which one of you is stronger?"
"Which one can do more pushups?"
"So one of you is good and sports and kind of dumb and the other is a good student but bad at sports?
Great job everyone, great contributions. Yes, Eric and I got those questions, ALL THE TIME!
When you get older they ask you slightly different questions, "Do you like the same girls?" or "Have you been on a double date before?" "What about with other twins? That would be funny." "Can you read his mind?" "Do you guys have twin ESP?" "Do you know what he's thinking without him saying?" "Does your wife get along with his wife?" When you're younger, everyone is focused on the physical fact that you look the same, but as you get older, people wonder more about the psychological aspect of being a twin. Then when you are an adult, people lose interest in the fact that you are a twin at all, thank goodness. Most of the people in my life now don't even know I am a twin. It doesn't come up. Just like I don't know if they are a twin or not.
IDENTICAL TWINS AS KIDS
Each time a person asks one of these questions, they think they are the most clever person who ever lived. They think they are the first to think of it. Before the first day of third grade when Teddy Garcia asked me if I was older than Eric, I really think Teddy thought he was Einstein. He really did. He really thought he had come up with a real zinger, a new question, to shock and change the universe.
Teddy: "Which one is older, you or Eric?"
Me: "Eric."
Teddy: "That sucks, by how much."
Me: "Five seconds."
Teddy: "Nun-huh, impossible."
Me: "We were born C-section."
Teddy: "What's that?"
In elementary school the question was always which was older, because when you are eight years old there are only three things that matter, how old you are, when your birthday is, and what grade you are in. Remember how important it was in elementary school, how old you were, when your birthday was? That was weird.
I never cared that Eric was older than I was. It didn't matter to him, it didn't matter to me. It didn't matter to our parents. I didn't know that was relevant to me or to him or to anyone. I guess I didn't for a long time understand the concept of "older" or "younger," that there would be some meaning or value or quality or trait associated with whether a person had come out of his mother a few moments before or after another person. It seemed weird that being "older" would be valued or prized, when the person had done nothing special to earn that status. Whether you were younger or older or middle, it seemed like whichever way you looked at it, you had been carried and born by your mom. I was probably in high school or even college before I viewed Eric, the first born, as having special duties associated with his status.
For example, when Eric and I were in college, I have a memory that my mom wanted or expected Eric, as the eldest son, to learn more about our uncle Mike (mom's brother) who had passed in 1988, and that she had a larger expectation for Eric about doing or verifying his genealogy in terms of the LDS faith. Of course maybe that was for a different reason, such as Eric having shown a greater interest in that topic than I had.
As we got older, this "role" of the older brother in matters of church authority seemed to widen and strengthen and created more of a difference in the way our parents perceived us or utilized our influence within the family. There is much to say about this and I may say more later but I am still setting up this whole piece and don't want to steer into a ditch before we even get started.
SPECIAL PROBLEMS OF IDENTITY
I was never not nor was Eric never not a twin. I have always been myself, Scott, and none other and nothing else. People always asked us as kids at school, in the neighborhood, at church, "what's it like being a twin?" It took me many years to learn to respond, "What's it like not being a twin?" Eric and I didn't know any other way of being. It seemed like most of our friends were jealous that we were twins. Certainly it was a curiosity that brought attention to the situation, and I think some people wanted that attention, but mostly I think our friends thought it would be cool to have a brother and best friend who looked like them. And that does sound nice.
For me, as a child, being a twin was primarily a burden, and it wasn't until decades later that I appreciated our special relationship and what it had taught me (and continues to).
As a kid, the main problem for me with being an identical twin was the problem of double or compound empathy. If someone did something to hurt Eric, it would hurt me very bad emotionally because it was like it had happened to me, but had also happened to my brother, so in essence it hurt twice as much. If Eric were bullied or teased, I found that to be exceedingly painful.
One day as teens we played in a neighbor's yard across the street, shooting baskets or playing kickball with a volleyball. Their dickhead son Mike, a few years older, a lot bigger than we were, came out and was teasing Eric, pushing him around a bit, for no reason. It hurt extra bad to see Eric getting teased because I felt bad for him as my brother and then I felt bad also as if I were Eric. To this day whenever I think of the dickhead neighbor kid Mike, who was 3-4 years older than we were, it makes me angry. Mike's dad was the Bishop of our ward for a time, and later a Stake President and then eventually much higher up in the LDS church organization. I like to remember that this LDS big wig's son Mike was a dickhead and maybe if the dad had spent more time at home and less time at church, maybe the son would have been less of a dickhead. Something to think about.
SUPERMAJORITY
My mother at times complained that Eric and I had an automatic "supermajority" in everything. For example if the family were debating a topic, Eric and I would most often agree with each other, while everyone else would see the topic differently. I pointed out to Mom that there were six in our family, so that if Eric and I agreed, we could still be outvoted 4-2. She disagreed and said being identical was different than that, she said the energy of two people having the exact same opinion from a very deep place sort of gave an unfair advantage to me and Eric. That is, even if there were four people on the other side of the argument, those four did not necessarily have the same depth of commitment to their opinion -- perhaps it was just a majority of convenience instead of a true molding of the minds. Mom warned us a lot about our supermajority power and she warned us we needed to avoid ganging up on people. I understood her concern and took it to heart and have always tried to be aware of the special "power" of being a twin and I have tried to avoid the idea of "ganging up" on others by using my twin as a reference point for someone who agrees with me.
YESTERDAY
Just yesterday Eric and I had to go to the bank together to take care of some estate paperwork resulting from the death of our step-mother Kathleen. We were at the Wells Fargo in Bountiful by where that crappy mall 5 Points used to be. The guy helping us at the bank asked if we were twins and when we said yes, he asked us if we had engaged in childhood pranks such as switching classes in junior high. Eric and I both pretended that this was the first time we had heard this question. Eventually we said we never did this because we were never looking for trouble so had avoided anything to get attention or trouble.
Then I said, "Yeah, now that I think of it, it would have been a good idea for Eric to take the English tests and me the Math tests. That way each person would only have to study for one test. And that would have worked, too, because our mom made sure we never had the same classes (at the same time), so in junior high or high school that trick would have worked well.
"Of course," retorted the bank guy, "you'd have to trust your brother, you'd have to trust that he wouldn't screw it up for you." I think he meant that Eric would do well on his own English test and then intentionally screw up on mine.
Now this was too much, I thought. This bank guy has no idea what he's talking about. No idea. No clue. No hint of a clue. First, when I was a kid, I was my brother, my brother was me, there was no difference. So whatever Eric would have scored on his English test was the same as for me. And whatever I scored on my Math test would have been the same as for him. Literally, no difference. And even if we had recognized a difference, there could never be any thought of betrayal. Never, never the slightest thought. It never crossed my mind, bank guy. IT NEVER CROSSED MY MIND NOT ONCE! If anything, I would have done better for Eric than for myself! We had each other's backs!
And then I got wondering -- all you people reading this, who aren't twins, maybe that's why you aren't twins, and Eric and I are twins. Because it would never occur to us to betray the other. When we were kids there was no idea of one being better or even different, or one pulling ahead and one being behind. We deserved to be twins because we knew something about being equal, we knew something about not tearing the other one down, and we didn't compete with each other. We had no jealousy of envy like that. None.
Maybe that's why you were not born a twin, because you couldn't handle it, you wouldn't know how to do it. You would betray your brother on the English test. See, no wonder you ain't a twin, bank guy.
ESP
In the 70's and 80's, the adults were always talking about ESP, the sixth sense. Mom was a psychologist and liked to talk about this. One type of ESP she said was being able to read another person's mind. Eric and I would try this. We would lay down on the floor, face down, side by side, and one person would try to send a message through brain power, and the other person tried to receive it. We could never get this to work no matter how hard we tried.
BUT..........
Several months ago we were at dinner at our step-mom's house. Eric and I were seated towards one end of the table, surrounded by other family members. We were sort of talking generally about being twins, probably because Eric and his wife also have identical twins (girls) so the topic comes up plenty.
All of the sudden, in the midst of this discussion, Eric shouts, "Scott think of a word." This had absolutely not been planned out in advance, and was done spur of the moment. As soon as Eric shouted his command, the word "banana" appeared concretely in my mind. Several quiet seconds ticked by. Our curious and eager family members looked on intently. The word "banana" had entered my mind so concretely that I knew that I had thought of the word Eric was also thinking of. And Eric, from the look on his face, knew also that we had both conjured up the same word. So we let the time elapse and build up.
Finally, Eric went to the kitchen alone and scratched something on a piece of paper and put the paper in his pocket. When he returned to the dining table, I announced "banana" and Eric removed the paper from his pants where the word "banana" was written. Everyone was stunned. We laughed and laughed.
We have not tried to re-create this scene. That was real. The was the first and last and only episode of ESP Eric and I have shared. And it was real.
DATING
Being identical twins delayed our entry into the dating world, and made dating more difficult in the beginning years. As identical twins, if Eric took an interest in something, I would fairly quickly get interested in the same topic and begin to see the topic through Eric's eyes. for example during our first year of college, Eric began liking and watching MLB, and he became a fan of the Oakland A's. He was away at college and I was home. As soon as he came home and explained his new passion to me, it wasn't a week later that I loved MLB and also loved the Oakland A's. We quickly adapted to each other and accommodated each other in a profound way. We had tremendous trust that if the other person found something that he valued, then the other twin would necessarily also come to value that for the same reasons. It was so easy to understand Eric at a deep and instant level that when I started dating I wondered why the girl I was with didn't have the same empathy for me as Eric did, or why when there was a difference of activity or opinion, we could not close the gap as quickly as Eric and I could. For a long time, years and years and years, I worried that being an identical twin would get in the way of marriage or a real life with a woman. When I went on a date I wanted it to be automatic and easy, in the same way it was easy and automatic to be around Eric. I thought there was something "wrong" with the woman or the date if it wasn't as easy and natural as being around my twin.
One time Eric and I did go on a double date, with two sisters. This must have been about 1998. The sisters were not twins but lived with each other and their family in the Avenues in Salt Lake City, and were close to each other, with similar personalities. For the date the four of us went on a tour of the silver mine up in Park City, Utah. Great date idea by the way! Try it! We took the elevator clear down into the mine and followed the tour guide around. We learned that back in the day, horses had to be taken down the elevator shafts essentially in an upside down or sideways suspended position. Once in the mine the horses would pull carts of silver and other materials around. The horses would automatically stop working at 5 p.m. every day and there nothing on hell or earth that could make the horses work another minute.
After being down in the mine for a month or so, the horses would be sent back up to the surface for a break. Again, the horse would have to be stuffed into the elevator on its side or some other suspended position; otherwise the horse would not fit. Going up, the horse's eyes would be taped shut with multiple layers of cloth and tape. Once arrived at the surface, the tape and cloth on the horse's eyes would be slowly removed over days. The tour guide said that if you just took the horse up without doing this, it would go blind from the light on the surface. The tour guide also said that many horses would simply die of trauma or shock or fright at being stuffed into the elevators and lifted up. What a way to die as a horse! Stuffed into a tiny elevator!
The two sisters were blond and cute and they made each other laugh easily and we made them laugh and they made us laugh. There was good chemistry all around and we could appreciate the relationship they had as sisters and they could appreciate the relationship we had as brothers.
It was difficult to be down in the mine several hundred feet below the surface and to know that if anything happened down there you were totally screwed and vulnerable. When the tour was over and we went up the elevator and surfaced I was relieved to be back at normal altitude on solid land.
It was time for dinner and the sisters and me and Eric walked around Park City Main Street looking for a suitable destination. Eric and I were pleasantly surprised that the girls wanted to eat ribs and barbeque for dinner. That's always a difficult and delicate portion of the date -- the part when the guy tries to figure out if the date will eat meat, or if she wants a miniature salad, or if she isn't hungry at all, or if she's sick of the whole thing and just wants to go home. It was a relief that these two sisters were so direct about wanting ribs. We had a nice dinner the four of us. It was easy to talk to them and laugh. I think we were technically paired up on the date, like I was assigned to one of them and the other one of them was assigned to Eric. But maybe not, maybe it was just a "date" of four people where each of us was on a date with two of the other gender. I don't know.
We dropped them off at their house in the Avenues afterward. It was a fun date but that was the last time we spent time with those girls. They never called us and we never called them. I think the date was so normal and functional that we didn't know what to do about it. Like a normal date, fun, without drama, and Eric and I didn't know how to react to that, didn't know how to follow-up on that. That was a mistake.
Now that I am remembering the sisters, I think I was paired up with the taller of the two, and Eric the shorter of the two. The taller one must have also been older. I don't know it was decided which one was on a date with which of the other. I think the one that Eric was on a date with was slightly cuter but both were plenty cute. Maybe my date was disappointed by me in comparison to Eric, or perhaps it was the opposite. I don't know.
DIVERGENCE
One of the main differences between me and my identical twin Eric, is that he pursues things that are safe while I pursue things that are exciting. It's not that binary but it's a good way of beginning the discussion of how we are different. Eric tends to choose a support network and friends who support his values and ideas and are unlikely to challenge him or make him feel uncomfortable. This happened in undergraduate education, and again in law school, and again in various other ways and times. In my opinion of course. I tend to choose people who will challenge my values and put me essentially at risk to be exposed to things that will make me change. For me, the most important human qualities are to be interesting, to be funny, to be original, to be unique, to have intellectual freedom, to have intellectual courage. For Eric the more important qualities are hard work, consistency, loyalty, religious activity, steadiness, patriotism, and so on. Most of our arguments as adults result from these differences between us.
CLOTHING
Since high school I have loved buying and wearing clothes more than Eric. My Mom always called me a "clothes horse." I never knew what that meant, like why does a horse wear clothes. Obviously I knew she was making a statement about my interest in clothing, but I don't understand why a horse is part of the idea. I just looked it up. The expression "clothes horse" does not refer to the animal "horse" but rather to a frame used for drying clothing. The idea is a person with a large frame to dry clothing maybe has a lot of clothing or an interest in fashion.
At age 19, Eric and I both went on LDS missions. I went to Belgium and northern France, and Eric went to the state of Washington. My clothing tastes were strongly flavored and formed by the fashions I saw in France, particularly by the idea that men didn't often wear shorts, and that French people in general wore less loud clothing than their American counterparts. In addition, the French wore a lot of black and charcoal colored clothing, and for men and women alike, they tended to wear black dress shoes rather than shades of brown.
Eric and my other two brothers tease me for wearing elven (European style) men's shoes that tend to be more narrow. I tease my brothers for buying their clothing from large boxes at big box retailers like Costco.
BIGGER, FASTER, STRONGER
Other than fifth grade, Eric has always been "stronger" than I am. I'm not sure what happened in fifth grade but in fifth grade I beat him at wrestling once or twice and never before then or since. As kids and teens, he was always 5 or 10 pounds heavier than me, and 1/2 inch to 1 inch taller. When we wrestled and fought as kids, which was all the time, he would always pin me. At some point later in life we achieved each exactly the same height and the same weight. The weight has changed since then because we both have cancer which has impacted each of us in different ways, but there did arrive a true equilibrium maybe around age 30 or so when we were the same height and weight as the other.
In junior high school, Eric took a karate class for several months. This was a very very serious karate class. Extremely serious. They met two or three times in the evening, and each class was a three hour workout, with pushups, stretching, sparring, strength training, and flexibility. During this short three-month period, Eric's biceps grew about an inch bigger than mine. He also achieved crazy flexibility for a teen boy and could do the splits and other crazy feats of flexibility. His muscles and bones seemed to grow hard and when we would fight each other (not real fights, but fights where we were allowed to hit each other in the arms, or kick each other on the legs) he would destroy me and it seemed like his body was impervious to pain. It was suddenly like I was fighting a grown man or something, he grew so strong.
HISTORY BOOK CLUB
Eric was the first of the two of us to adopt good study habits and to begin to develop the intellectual power and desire to progress beyond being idiotic high school students. In high school, Eric developed an interest in both history and English. He joined some book club called the History Book Club whereby he paid some kind of initiation fee and in exchange received several history books, and then was required to periodically buy a new history book. Sort of like those music subscription services, except Eric signed up for history books instead of Def Leppard CD's. Eric had books on Kennedy, Lincoln, and Martin Luther King, Jr., in high school, and read them. Can you imagine? A high school student buying extra non-required history books, and reading them? WTF? He joined the History Book Club several times and wound up with a dozen or more big history books on his shelf. I joined RCA and Columbia music several times and had about fifty compact discs and cassette tapes. Here's Eric reading Battle Cry of Freedom; here's Scott listening to "Round and Round" by Ratt. It's kind of funny to think about.
Around this same time Eric developed a special interest in English grammar. He could distinguish between hanged and hung and those types of things that most of us don't think about until college. He had extra, optional grammar books he liked to read. Our senior year he took AP English and I took regular English. You know that person at work that talks about the Oxford comma? That was Eric in 11th grade.
We both took AP European History and AP US History in high school. On those AP tests at the end of the year, Eric received the score of 5, and I received the score of 3. He was an incredible student. In 12th grade, for AP European History, Eric identified about fifty topics that could potentially serve as the essay question on the AP European History test. He then outlined how he would respond to each of these fifty hypothetical questions, and then drafted an essay response for each. Can you imagine? Fifty practice answers? In high school. Who does that? WTF? He probably got the highest score ever recorded on that European History test. Even now if we talk about it he can remember about twenty or thirty of the questions he made up as a study guide.
As a result of his study habits, when we started college, Eric started strong with A's from beginning to end. Eric attended college in Cedar City the first year, at Southern Utah State College (SUSC) and then he transferred to BYU for the other three years. I attended the University of Utah all four years of undergraduate education. I started college slower and received a few B's in my freshman year. At the beginning of my sophomore year I somehow underwent the change that Eric had undergone in high school, and I began studying very seriously and thoroughly for every university class. Once I adopted these habits I too received all A's from then to the end.
We both attended law school at the University of Utah. Eric was three years ahead of me. As an English graduate, he went directly to law school because his college degree did not afford any job opportunities. I graduated in business and went to work for a few years before deciding to attend law school. So we were not in law school at the same time. In general we both did well in law school although I learned a lot from his experiences so in a way it was easier for me, because I could learn from him as the first who had attended.
I don't understand what occurred that allowed Eric to become a college-type student in 11th grade, and why it took me until my sophomore year in college to adopt those habits. That's a three-year difference for identical twins, which doesn't make sense to me.
WHEN DAD DIED
Our father passed away in June of 2024, at the age of seventy-eight years of age. By this time, Eric and I both had serious cancers. When my Dad died, I felt loss and pain, but it seemed to me that the death of Dad was harder on Eric than it was on me.
At first I decided or assumed that because I had stage IV lung cancer and had been hospitalized with severe illness several times, that I was more "numb" to death and dying than Eric, who had kidney cancer that was very serious, but which had not at that time had as many grave consequences for Eric as my lung cancer had had for me.
Over time I learned and realized that Eric and I processed our Dad's death differently for multiple reasons. In our family, beyond me and Eric, there are two other brothers, so four boys total for my Mom and Dad.
In general, you could say that Eric and another brother are more religious than myself and another brother. So there is sort of a natural 2-2 split when it comes to religion. I began to see and understand that for Eric, Dad was sort of a fifth brother or tiebreaker. Dad's religious interests were quite similar to Eric's, and I think it comforted Eric to have Dad on his side essentially, so that there was always a 3-2 split rather than a 2-2 split on matters of religion. I believe part of Eric's grief was losing that support and empathy and strength of our Dad with respect to religion, in particular to Eric's own religious views. On the other hand, for me, in a way my father's absence gave me more freedom to express my own views and opinions. Dad had often disagreed with me on matters of religion or other spiritual or philosophical or political ideas, and once he was gone I felt like I gained strength and power because he was not there to disagree with me.
Reverting back to the "safety v danger/excitement" theme I identified above, my Dad's death gave me more of a chance to be independent whereas for Eric that same loss signified a loss of support or safety or strength.
CANCER
I have had three separate cancers now. First was testicular cancer in 1997, then testicular cancer again in 2004, and then lung cancer in 2023. The two testicular cancers occurring on different side of my body are separate unique cancers that constitute "getting cancer twice" rather than the second one being a progression of the first. And my lung cancer is also completely distinct. For a long time Eric was spared having cancer or knowing what it meant or what it would feel like to have cancer. For many years one of the main differences between me and Eric is that I had had cancer and he had not. Other than this issue, we had similar health overall, similar diet, similar exercise regimen, similar prospects of living to be a certain age, etc.
Unfortunately, about ten years ago, Eric was diagnosed with kidney cancer, which during the course of the past decade has evolved into stage IV kidney cancer. He has had a kidney removed surgically, and been on various targeted therapies and immunotherapies as treatment. For me testicular cancer was essentially eradicated both times within 2-3 years, and then I enjoyed a period of 18 or 19 years where I didn't worry about cancer. This changed in 2023 when I was diagnosed with stage IV lung cancer with brain mets. As a result of my cancers I have had multiple forms of chemotherapy, ten surgeries, radiation, and multiple hospitalizations. Like Eric I am currently being treated for my cancer with various therapies.
In the past 1-2 years, our situations with cancer have become similar. We both have a stage IV cancer with significant mets in the body. We both have endured multiple forms of surgery and treatment, and suffered multiple hospitalizations. We have both burned through multiple forms of treatment and had to face our mortality as the options for treating our cancers have dwindled. Both of us worry about the impact of our cancer on our families. Both of us have managed to work full-time notwithstanding our cancer diagnoses.
In the past 2-3 months our situations have converged even more. Just ten or so days ago I was hospitalized at Huntsman Cancer Hospital when my right lung became inflamed as a reaction to the targeted therapy I had been taking since December of 2024. I was put in a room on the fourth floor of Huntsman Cancer Hospital. Eric had been admitted a few days earlier for a pain pump surgery in which a pain pump was surgically inserted into his body so that opiates could be distributed directly onto his spine where he had tumor growth. Eric was on the fifth floor of the hospital.
Without planning it and without realizing it was happening at first, we were both in the same hospital for cancer-related care at the same time, Eric one floor above me.
Eric, who is a bit of a prankster, came down to my floor and wandered around the hallways, trying to get me in trouble with my nursing team for being outside of my room. He found great delight in this, wandering around trying to confuse people about why there were two of us on the fourth floor. He came into my room and we hung out for a while until he had to go back to his room for stromboli or something.
Unfortunately his pain pump surgery was more complicated than anticipated and it caused him severe problems for several weeks. He had severe pain, severe headaches, vomiting, and other drastic symptoms, that ultimately sent him back to the hospital a few weeks later. During this time, Eric began expressing (for the first time with his cancer) a lot of agony and expressing the unfairness of having such a difficult disease. Normally he had been stout and resolute but now he was really suffering physically and mentally. Seeing him suffering brought me acute pain and grief. We have been able to talk to each other and empathize with each other and comfort each other, as each understands what the other is going through in a profound way. This is the predicament we both face currently, with the future uncertain (as it always is).
A great read, Scott! Thank you for sharing. Sending you a big hug from the old continent.