Some people find this upsetting, but cancer itself does not give me nightmares.
Surviving cancer does.
When the demons show up at three in the morning, they don’t bring images of death. They don’t whisper about hospitals or scans or last breaths. They bring spreadsheets. They bring numbers. They bring the quiet terror of living a long life without enough money to support it.
My subconscious has already decided something important: I am going to survive this.
That belief is not romantic. It is not motivational. It is simply there—firm, unannounced, and stubborn. The fear that follows it is not whether I will live, but how.
In my nightmares, I am not dying young. I am old, poor, and cornered by math.
Right now, disability income covers my basic bills. There is a small monthly top-up coming from my retirement savings. It works. It is tight, but it works. The problem is time.
Run the numbers forward—accounting for inflation—and that top-up runs dry around age seventy-seven. That’s where the nightmare begins. Not illness. Not pain. Poverty.
That’s the scenario that wakes me in a cold sweat.
As I’ve already written about in When Time Stops Being Abstract, I can’t work while I’m under treatment. That isn’t a motivational challenge—it’s a medical constraint. In my nightmare version of the future, treatment ends somewhere between sixty-one and sixty-three. I survive. I stabilize. And I am released back into the world… financially exposed.
If cancer hadn’t happened, this wouldn’t even be a conversation. I was putting roughly thirty-five thousand dollars a year into retirement savings. That compounding curve mattered. Cancer didn’t just attack my body—it amputated an income stream that my future depended on.
The blunt math looks like this: I need roughly 140,000 more dollars in income. I need to generate an additional thirty-two thousand dollars a year for just under five years, assuming a conservative six percent return. Not luxury. Not abundance. Just acceptable stability into old age.
My doctors would tell you this is an academic problem. Statistically, I have about a seven percent chance of surviving five years, let alone reaching my eighties or nineties. By their model, this nightmare scenario is unlikely.
But nightmares don’t run on probability. They run on belief.
And I believe I will survive.
So I plan.
If nothing else, I am a planner. Planning is how I regulate fear. Planning is how I negotiate with uncertainty. Planning is how I sleep.
That’s why I’ve started building a “what if” life—not as denial, but as insurance. What if I live? What if treatment works? What if the worst thing that happens is that I outlast the expectations placed on me?
That question led me to build a parallel path: a slow, deliberate plan to generate roughly thirty-two thousand dollars a year through photography over time. Not overnight. Not while under treatment. But intentionally, patiently, within the energy limits I actually have.
That plan lives here: The Parallel Path. It is not optimism. It is architecture.
When the nightmares come—and they do—I don’t reach for affirmations. I don’t tell myself everything will be fine. I open spreadsheets. I revisit assumptions. I refine timelines. I work the plan until my nervous system believes there is a shape to the future again.
The anxiety eases. The sweating stops. Sleep returns.
This exercise isn’t about defying the odds. It’s about refusing to let fear operate in a vacuum. If the future is uncertain, then uncertainty deserves structure.
Cancer took many things from me. It took time. It took energy. It took financial momentum.
What it didn’t take was my ability to think and plan.
And for now, that is enough to keep the nightmares at bay.