The test results are in, and it’s not good

One day this past spring I was running late for class at Cape Fear Community College.  I overslept, and just made it to class in the nick of time. As I took my seat, my neck felt sore, so I reached up to rub it, and felt a lump on the right side of my neck. Alarm immediately overtook my body. What was this thing? It felt solid, yet it seemed to have cropped up overnight. I tried to push it from my brain, but that’s not something you can brush off easily. As I sat in class I did the dumbest thing one person could do to feel reassured about a possible health issue. I pulled out my phone and looked on Web MD.  Within moments I wondered if I had the plague, AIDS, scurvy or cerebral palsy among other diseases. When I got home I looked further into it, and found that it was most likely (or so I thought) a swollen lymph node. I read one account after another of people with swollen lymph nodes for one reason or another and these people all said the same thing. The gland was swollen for weeks, sometimes months on end, and then out of the blue the swelling would go down and that would be the end of that. As a person who absolutely hates going to the doctor or any other health professional I immediately self diagnosed myself there on the spot, and moved on. The only problem was that my neck boner had no intention of moving on.

As the weeks stretched into months, it began to hurt and even worse, get bigger. When you don’t have health insurance going to the doctor for the most routine things becomes a daunting task, and when you have rent to pay, kids to feed and gas tanks to fill up, it gets pushed to the back burner. After all, I felt fine. I was still able to go to work, play with my kids, make dinner, tell jokes and rail against the government. I wasn’t sick, I just had a neck boner that was planning on staying around longer than anticipated. It wasn’t until mid July when I became sick with a severe chest cold was the true nature of the neck boner revealed to me. I went to the ER complaining of my symptoms, however once they saw that bulge on the side of my neck, they couldn’t care less about my chest cold. Immediately tests were ordered for it to determine what was really growing out of the side of my neck. Eventually a biopsy was done, and it was determined that I had Melanoma that had moved into my lymph node. Needless to say, at 35 years old this was a blow to my wife and I. The day we found out was absolutely surreal. I was only 35 years old, how could I have cancer? I’m married with 2 kids and a budding comedy career. Didn’t God know I didn’t have time for this nonsense? Apparently God knows all too well what I do and do not have time for, and He cleared my schedule for the next few months to deal with this.   I won’t lie, there was a part of me that so desperately wanted to be enveloped in self pity and depression. I wanted to cry “woe is me!” and flop on the floor, but I didn’t do that. I couldn’t do that.

You’re not the boss of me cancer!
They say the formula for comedy is pain+time=comedy, and I have found that to be mostly true. For myself, pain is eased by comedy, so I tend to bypass the whole waiting thing and immediately begin to laugh at the pain. When I was a kid and there was something I found scary my father would always make fun of the thing that I was scared of. He would eventually get me to laugh, and as soon as I laughed at it, I realized it wasn’t as bad as I originally thought. This thought process has served me well over the years and I have used it ever since I was a kid. The day I was diagnosed with cancer was a Monday, and that’s the night the Juggling Gypsy has their open mic night. A mere 7 hours after a doctor looked at me and said “Mr. Webb you have cancer”, I was on stage telling jokes about my day. Laughing at tragedy is an incredibly powerful tool. Something that was devastating I was using to make people laugh, and with their laughter I took solace. It was the next day that it fully set in what a sick individual I am (mentally, not physically)

A million little pieces.

It was at that open mic that I realized I was wielding a mighty comedy sword. Cancer, along with rape and racism are taboo subjects in comedy. Sure there are comics that tell those jokes, but you gotta be really really good to get away with it, and even then you’ll always get some jackass who’ll get a bug up their ass about the joke. So when it dawned on me that I now had carte blanche to do cancer jokes an overwhelming happiness overcame me. It was like that moment in “Bruce Almighty” when Jim Carrey realizes he has God’s powers. I could joke about cancer as much as I wanted to and nobody could really say anything to me about it. It was my cancer, and they can’t say shit to me. So it was at that point I began writing cancer jokes in earnest, and boy did it feel good. I still had one hurdle however. While I knew I wasn’t going to be an asshole for talking about my cancer, I had to avoid something even more treacherous in the comedy world: pity. I could not have a crowd that felt sorry for me because that’ll kill the energy in the room more thoroughly than a white comic saying “nigger” on stage. So I kept it light, I pointed out the absurdity of it all, and the jokes pretty much wrote themselves.

The more I did the cancer jokes the better I felt, and in my mind I had cancer under my boot, not the other way around. It’s extremely empowering, and while not everybody can go on stage and joke about their cancer, they can still poke fun at it. Don’t turn it into a scary monster, because then you start to become careful about the words you use, and next thing you know you find yourself censoring yourself in day to day conversations as to not make things awkward. You start to avoid words like “death” and “dead” out of fear of angering the cancer.

You like me, you really like me!!!

Cancer is a funny thing. When you get cancer, you don’t just get the disease in your body, you get an entire life changing package which includes surgeries, doctors appointments and a whole butt-ton of missed time from work. Not only that, but the 1st two bring you a shit load of bills you didn’t have before, and the 3rd makes it exponentially difficult to take care of the first two. Finances soon became a looming issue, and while I love to joke about tragedies, it’s hard to joke around when the power has been shut off. Things were getting dicey to say the least, but that’s when something absolutely mind blowingly wonderful happened.

Why so serious?

The comics here in Wilmington are a close knit group, and this was put on full display when the guys decided to throw me a benefit show. When they first floated the idea to me, I was on board, however in my mind I was thinking “If we can raise like $500, that would be nice”. Not only did they surpass that, they went all out with promoting this show. They were on TV, they were on the radio. I half expected to look up one day to see an airplane dragging a banner promoting the show. And beyond that, my friend Lew Morgante started a fundraising site (http://www.gofundme.com/laughseanscanceraway) to raise money from people who wouldn’t be able to attend the show. The day of the show came, and I was floored when I entered Orton’s pool hall to see a packed house of at least 100 or more people, all there, to support me and my family during this time in our lives. I was touched, I was floored, and I hate to admit it, but I felt awkward as well. I never saw myself as someone worthy of that much unconditional love and support from friends and total strangers. When it was all said and done they raised $1,370 that night, and almost another $3,000 from online donations. The comedy community single handedly ensured that my family wouldn’t have to worry about bills anytime soon and that Christmas would indeed be coming to the Webb house. I can’t express how grateful I am for their love and hard work. I can only hope that one day I prove myself as good a friend when their time of need comes.