I’m Samson Yang, and this blog is about my attempt to find meaning amidst endless illness and suffering.
Where to begin?
My first 18 years were dark and traumatic.
The next two decades were also dark and traumatic—but with glimmers of light.
Then, in 2012, events converged: a rising career, money, family, friends, and my wife.
For the first time, my future seemed bright.
But by the end of that same year, I got mysteriously sick. Then I only got worse, never better.
Today is April 3, 2022, and it’s been a grueling decade: hundreds of baffled doctors, five failed surgeries, countless modalities, therapies, treatments. Joy and laughter replaced by pain and desperation. And the horrors of tumbling to new low after low.
Today, my three-year-old daughter asks why I’m not with her, why she can’t visit me, or I her. And it shatters me. See, my illnesses won’t just ravage my body; they exile me, they force me away from my daughter. Away from everyone I love.
I may be terminal. No one knows for sure. But these symptoms seem unsustainable. One day, a disease might pull the rug out from me. And that will be that.
I’ll try to graph it someday.
So many times, my mother, wife, and I huddled and cried over my mysterious suffering. Then, last year, we lost our home. The medical bills from my illness and my mother’s cancer wiped us out.
My wife and daughter moved away to a nearby state. And we’re divorcing.
My mother found low-income housing 800 miles away. There she still prays for me. Hours a day. The sacrifices this woman made for me…
I moved deeper into New Jersey, away from everyone. Here the environmental toxins seem to hurt me less. Seem. Because I don’t really know.
It would be fair to call my life tragic. Or pitiful. But today, with this blog, I’m trying to see differently. Trying to fight despair. Trying to turn darkness into light.
But really, I don’t know.
Even now, as waves of pain roll over me, as the infection pushes into my skull, it’s hard to be positive.
But I’ll try. And I’ll document it here.
I’ve already lost everything, and have nothing more to lose. At least I have that.
And If I succeed, this blog might stand to help others.
And if I fail, I’ll just be human, frailty and all.
And I’m okay with that.
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