Let's Talk
Do you have a project that would benefit from a world-class team of data analysts, pop culture writers, and marketing strategists? We’d love to hear from you.
Get in TouchWhen TBC's co-founder received shocking medical news, he crafted a mix of life-fulfilling songs.
Playlists for Life is a narrative playlist venture from Third Bridge Creative. Each month, a member of our team curates a soundtrack to a pivotal moment in their life, and writes about the circumstances and discovery methods that led them to these particular sounds. You can listen to last month’s playlist here.
The pain in my abdomen had been going on for about three weeks, evolving from a small twinge to a recurring ache to full on stabbing by the time I finally took myself to the ER on a Friday evening. My doctor told me I could wait till the following week to get a CT scan, but waiting a few more hours, let alone several days, seemed impossible by that point. I would learn later in this journey that Sunday mornings are generally a less congested and busy time at the ER; Friday evenings are a mess. I sat in the waiting room for hours, surrounded by patients who were variously bleeding, screaming, and oozing. Sometime around 1 a.m., after a series of scans and blood draws, a nurse delivered the news: They’d discovered masses throughout my stomach, and were admitting me so they could prep me for surgical biopsies in the morning.
The thing about cancer — and this is from someone who’s had it twice, who started a newsletter to chronicle his most recent experience with it, and who’s talked to several survivors about it — is that it takes many days and sometimes a week or more to finally determine you have it. There are tests. The tests have to be sent places, analyzed by various doctors, sent back. It takes longer than you think and way longer than you want. I’d been back from the hospital a few days, hopped up on painkillers, battling recurring fevers and other side-effects of an illness that had yet to be confirmed, when we finally talked to my doctor on a Saturday night, and he confirmed it: an “aggressive” form of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. We’d need to start chemotherapy right away. I was to report to the oncologist first thing Monday and begin the process.
That night, my wife and I sat on the couch in our living room with our dogs, and I cried a bunch. I forgot to mention: We were expecting our first child. That was news we’d received just a few weeks before my diagnosis. Now we had this news — bad news. The worst news. Survival rates for lymphoma are generally good, but it was still cancer, and when you find out you have cancer, especially early on, you fixate on the worst case scenario. What if I never got to meet my kid?
At that moment, sitting on the couch, I did the only reasonable thing I could think of: I started listening to music. Track by track, I made a playlist. What ties it all together is that these are the songs that have meant the most to me at various stages of my life — “River” by Leon Bridges was prominently featured in our wedding ceremony; “Car” by Built to Spill is the song I queued up the most as a sentimental high school indie rocker; “Colors and the Kids” by Cat Power will always remind me of the years I spent living in NYC for college.
The happy ending here is I survived, obviously, and our daughter was born in December, and now I have a bunch of new songs that I associate with the happiest time of my life, the ones I played for her when she was just a few days and weeks old (that’s a different Playlist for Life). But this mix is the one I created on that darkest night of my soul. When the full gravity of my life and its potential conclusion was pressing down on me, these are the songs I most wanted to listen to.
Do you have a project that would benefit from a world-class team of data analysts, pop culture writers, and marketing strategists? We’d love to hear from you.
Get in Touch