“Fight or Flight-cancer, fire & the long game”

Over the years, I’ve learned I make a better cheerleader than a nurse. Lucky for me, I married a quarterback. When things get rough, my husband Mitch calls the shots. He’s calm under pressure, never surrenders, and I’ve always said that if our world ever “went up in smoke,” with him beside me, we’d survive.

Then our world did go up in smoke.

On the morning of January 7, 2025, we sat in the urology/oncology offices at Cedars-Sinai while Dr. Kim scoped the inside of Mitch’s bladder. In his gentle-but-blunt way, he told us Mitch was six months cancer-free. This would be the longest stretch since his first diagnosis in November 2021. Relief washed over us. The monthly chemo cocktails injected directly into his bladder were working.

Then a text from our daughter interrupted the moment. A photo of a massive plume of smoke near the Palisades High School track field.

“Local fire. Coach is sending us home.” 

Mitch tilted back in the passenger seat, bladder full of chemo, as I drove toward Pacific Palisades. We weren’t panicked—yet. Evacuations weren’t new to us. But when we hit PCH and found the road closing, urgency kicked in, not just on the road, but in Mitch’s bladder.

“It’s illegal,” I said, “but I can follow the cops up the center lane.”

“Fuck it,” Mitch said. “This is no time for legalities. Go.”

Cancer had trained us for this kind of pressure. Fire just changed the uniform.

So I gave myself a police escort, weaving through traffic and sirens up Temescal Canyon. We grabbed our daughter from a neighbor’s house as helicopters circled overhead. By nightfall, we were in a hotel room near the airport, watching the news as fire swallowed our town. We sat on the edge of the bed, holding each other, numb.

The next morning, despite chemo nausea and exhaustion, Mitch fought his way through police barricades and the National Guard back to our neighborhood. He joined other locals, garden hoses in hand, putting out spot fires. If he hadn’t just been declared cancer-free, I swear he’d have smeared ash across his face and charged into the flames like Rambo.

This is the Mitch I know. Relentless. Unapologetic. A survivor.

In the fight to beat cancer, stamina is key. There are no tie games. It’s postseason sudden-death overtime.

On May 19, 2023, before sunrise, we arrived at Cedars for Mitch’s third surgery in two years. What began as urethral carcinoma had taken his left kidney and spread to his bladder. Wristbands were snapped on, one with his info, the other reading FALL RISK. Before cancer, we’d never talked about wills. Now I knew every password on his computer.

In the waiting room, a man in pajamas and an N95 mask moaned as he clutched a pillow. Mitch muttered, “I do not need to see this.” I took his hand and leaned into him, tears soaking into my mask.

A volunteer arrived to escort him back to pre op. I hung his wedding ring from the chain around my neck. We kissed goodbye. While Mitch was stripped, wired, and wheeled away, my job was to wait. I escaped to a bathroom stall, sat on the toilet, and let everything fall apart.

Composure regained, I sit in the lobby across from a family with a young child wearing the white wristband. I pictured my own daughter safe at home, just waking up, lunch packed for her in the fridge. Comforted, knowing our neighbor would take her to school. A tap on my shoulder. Mitch was ready for surgery.

Walking alongside the gurney to the OR, Mitch fought the anesthesia long enough to tell the nurses, “Whatever you do, I do not recommend this.” Even then, he made me laugh.

January 8, 2025. Day two of the Palisades fire.

Mitch was gone before dawn. Cell towers were down. Over half of our town was destroyed, with zero containment. Our daughter and I watched the fire map spread.

“Where’s Dad?” she asked.

“Your dad was born for this,” I told her. “If anyone can get in and get back, it’s him.”

***

Back at Cedars, Dr. Kim called: surgery was successful, all visible cancer removed. Pathology would tell us what came next. When I finally saw Mitch, groggy and apologetic for “doing this to me,” I reassured him "everything was ok" and quietly hit record on my phone in case anesthesia delivered that truth-serum, comedy gold.

It didn’t. What it delivered was a bladder that refused to cooperate.

Hours passed. Machines beeped. A fabulous, big-boned overnight nurse with RuPaul energy explained he’d help Mitch to the bathroom. Eventually we decided to walk the halls, hoping movement would help. It did.

“I could pee,” Mitch said suddenly.

Then, louder: “I’m going to piss.”

The bathroom was behind locked doors. The buzzer went unanswered.

“Fuck it,” I yelled. “This is no time for modesty. Go!”

After the surgeries and months of fear, it turns out dignity is where we finally drew the line.

Right there in the lobby, Mitch pulled aside his hospital gown, grabbed the jug, and let it rip.

“It feels like razor blades!” he cried.

An elevator opened. A nurse wheeled past a comatose patient, nodded at us without blinking, and kept moving.

With a full jug, we pressed the bell again, and this time RuPaul buzzed us in. He pulled out an ultrasound machine. Finally, he confirmed, we could go home.

***

Home. Our home, which on day two of the fires was still standing. By now, word got out that Mitch had found a way in. It was obvious to me that he would go back again. He safeguards a friend’s home by begging the fire department to use water from the pool in the backyard. I stayed behind at the hotel, running our own disaster relief center: FEMA claims, insurance battles, comforting our daughter.

“Didn’t he just get chemo?” a friend asked.

“Yes,” I said. “But he’s not going down without a fight.”

On July 8th, 2025, seven months after the Palisades fire, one year since he was declared cancer-free, Mitch’s cancer made an unforeseen comeback. After living out of a hotel for a month and a half, relocating to the South Bay, where our daughter would change schools, remediating and battling with the insurance company, doctors found more tumors in his bladder. He was given a choice: to be the first patient to receive a new immunotherapy fresh off the FDA desk, or surgery to remove his bladder. As our Hail Mary in this game of cancer, we opted for treatment.

It didn’t work. This past December, we learned through another surgery that the tumors found in his bladder were high-grade.

January 7, 2026

And yet here we are.

Still fighting, still standing. Because when it’s time to go, you go.

But the game clock is still running.