Those of us who have stayed up late at night, staring at the ceiling of our bedroom, contemplating our own mortality, know that there is a certain fear, a certain anxiety in not knowing. Not knowing when, how, or why. Whether we will be missed or if we have done enough in life.
“My biggest battle is the unknown. The uncertainty. The relationship with uncertainty,” Adolfo Velasquez told me.
On Feb. 22, Adolfo celebrated a notable anniversary. Ten years since his first cancer diagnosis. As I speak with Adolfo via Zoom, I mention to him that he looks quite healthy and that there wasn’t anything that would tell you that he was living with cancer. He is quick to tell me that I didn’t see him after the last diagnosis in 2019. He had ballooned from the medication he had been prescribed—his Facebook photos prove as much. But Adolfo emits a type of positive energy and speaks with a certain levelness, adding a chuckle here and there when he speaks of issues that sound quite difficult.
Adolfo was born in 1960 and comes from a Nicaraguan family deeply rooted in the Mission District. He has worked at City College for nearly a decade and a half as a counselor and is someone who is deeply invested in his community and his students. In 2011, Adoflo was working as an academic counselor at SF State, but was also working two other jobs as well, coordinating the SF State/CCSF dual language program and working part-time at City College.
“The initial one was like a sucker punch,” Adolfo said about his first diagnosis. The comparison is fitting for someone who once competed in a Golden Gloves boxing competition. The year prior, his father who was a well-regarded community member, had passed. For five years, Adolfo shouldered the weight of responsibility of being his caretaker. His father was diagnosed with encephalitis and dementia. Illness and cancer, in that sense, was no stranger to Adolfo. His mother had passed from colon cancer nearly a decade prior. His uncle passed from liver cancer sometime before that. So, as surprising as his diagnosis was, it didn’t come out of nowhere.
“I somehow knew that cancer would hit me eventually. But not knowing what kind,” Adolfo said. He would soon find out. Adolfo recalls telling his primary doctor about a pain on the lower side of his back. His doctor recommended mental health therapy. The lower back pain finally peaked while he was in a GRE class, the entrance exam required for the doctoral program at SFSU. He left and when he made it home he ran to the bathroom. He passed what he thought, or maybe hoped, was a kidney stone.
“That was a week after my birthday,” Adolfo says. “That’s what started the CT scans. They found blood in my urine, microscopic, I couldn’t see it. So, it wasn’t a stone that I passed, it was part of a tumor.”
The scan revealed a mass larger than the diameter of a baseball on his left kidney, as well as several nodules on his lungs. Within two weeks, he was scheduled for surgery to have it removed. He recalls the last words the nurse said to him before he went under. “She goes ‘you got two choices,’ and I go ‘what?’ ‘live with it or die from it’.” Adolfo chuckles, reflecting on the profoundness of this simple statement which serves as a life mantra for him. Adolfo would definitely have to go on living with the cancer. He would be diagnosed three months later with stage 4 kidney cancer which metastasized to his lungs.
Around this time I was introduced to Adolfo by Professor Felix Kury, a mutual friend and recurring character in activist and community spaces in the Mission District. My own grandmother was battling cancer, which she ultimately lost. Kury recommended I get my hands on a Cuban cancer drug, Vidatox, derived from the venom of a blue scorpion. Luckily for me, Adolfo had traveled to Cuba to find the homeopathic medicine for himself. I remember meeting Adolfo at one of the Mission BART stations. He handed me the Cuban drug over the BART gate in what could be perceived as a shady transaction. I didn’t spend much time contemplating how big of a deal this was. Not the exchange, but the fact that Adolfo was willing to dip into his own supply of a medicine that you couldn’t easily acquire. A selfless act of generosity and solidarity.
His act of generosity had nothing to do with his recovery. That can be attributed to his immunotherapy, a second surgery, and a number of alternative healing treatments. With a new lease on life he would go on to dance in Carnaval and rueda, a cuban-style salsa. Sometime in 2018, he began to develop short spasms in his right arm. He didn’t think much of it at the time, but then his arm began to spasm pretty significantly.
“How did this happen? You got nothing here,” Adolfo makes a box with his arms over his chest, one hand up near his neck and the other hand on his stomach. “It found its way to my brain and that’s the trickiness of cancer. That’s what happened in 2019.” The muscle spasms actually turned out to be seizures. Another CT scan revealed a mass in the frontal lobe which he had to have surgically removed. The surgery went without any hiccups and Adolfo, brimming with hope and optimism, went into his rehab process. The last set of nurses took notice of his enthusiasm and the progress he was making. So what came next was unexpected, even for him.
“The day I came out of rehab, I was back in the emergency room that same night. It was September 4th,” Adolfo reminds me. “My father also died on September 4th.” Adolfo has kept a meticulous track of his life over the past 10 years, keeping a diary of his treatment and recovery. That night in September, maybe for the first time, Adolfo went into denial. He had blood clots covering his lungs. He can still remember the words from the medical personnel—fatal and catastrophic. His doctor placed a temporary intravenous catheter filter to catch any new clots. Adolfo is also on blood thinners for the rest of his life, but as our mutual friend Kury says, mala hierba nunca muere.
Like any decent, Mission-born Nicaraguan, he is a Giants Fan, and says that his support team has mirrored a good baseball team. “You got your team members that stay for the long run and you got your players that get traded. I found out who was real and who wasn’t.”
“My biggest battle is the unknown. The uncertainty. The relationship with uncertainty.”
Adolfo Velasquez
He’s gone through a divorce, he’s lost friends, but he’s also gained new friends. He also is embarking on a new journey, as he contemplates retirement from City College. He is officially credentialed to teach Integral Hatha Yoga and his goal is to bring it to the Latinx community. He took his first yoga class as a student at SF State. He recalls even back then how it grounded him as a young father, working multiple jobs. He revisited yoga as an extension of his physical therapy which he felt he needed more of. He didn’t go in with the idea of becoming a yoga teacher, but through the process he felt like he could be of further service to the community by doing so. He wants others to find that peace amidst the chaos and there is no doubt that we all feel the chaos during these times. Whether it be because of covid or the many other existential threats we face today.
I joke with Adolfo telling him that he can take over a studio that is being left behind by the gentrifiers fleeing the city. That may be a goal in the future, but for now he is working on bringing his vision of cancer therapy yoga to fruition. When he first enrolled he was a bit self-conscious, as the only latino man in the group, and part of the challenge for Adolfo is figuring out how to bring it to men like himself, so that it is embraced. He had to let go of his ego and remember he was doing this for himself. The fact that it was online made it easier because they were all tiny boxes on a screen, which allowed him to refocus on his purpose.
I imagine the two Adolfos I’ve been presented with: the teenager fighting in a grungy ring and the 61 year old man who is no longer swinging, but finding peace within. Since 2019, Adolfo’s doctors have found no evidence of cancer.
“Cancer might be the killer of me, but in taking that approach with it—live with it or die from it—I live with it.”