There are some things you expect to learn when you have cancer. You learn the names of drugs you cannot pronounce, the location of every washroom between your house and the cancer centre, and exactly how long you can sit in a waiting room before you start reading posters about diseases you don't even have.

What I did not expect was to discover that I have something in common with Mr. T.

Yes, that Mr. T.

Clubber Lang. B.A. Baracus. The mohawk, the gold chains, the van, and the magnificent ability to threaten somebody while somehow remaining suitable for Saturday afternoon television.

I grew up with Mr. T. I watched The A-Team. I knew Clubber Lang long before I knew what a T-cell was. I am reasonably sure I even had a Mr. T action figure at some point, although enough decades have passed that I would not want to testify to that under oath.

He was simply part of the scenery of growing up in the 1980s.

Then, more than forty years later, I learned that Mr. T had been diagnosed with cancer in 1995.

Not just cancer.

My cancer.

Mycosis fungoides.

Mr. T had been diagnosed with the same rare form of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma that I am now fighting.

When you have something rare enough that you spend half your time explaining what it is, finding someone familiar who has already walked this road feels different.

That landed harder than I expected.

Mycosis fungoides is rare enough that I have become accustomed to explaining it. Even the name is misleading. It sounds like something you should be able to clear up with a tube of antifungal cream and an apologetic conversation with your pharmacist. Instead, it is a form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma involving T cells, and it can behave very differently from the cancers most people immediately picture when they hear the word.

It is rare enough that one of the nurses at my cancer centre had never encountered it before. Before my appointment, she looked it up so she would know what she was dealing with.

There is nothing wrong with that. In fact, I appreciated that she took the time to learn about it rather than pretending she already knew. But there is something psychologically strange about sitting in a cancer centre and realizing that the cancer you have is unfamiliar even to somebody who works with cancer patients every day.

Rare diseases can be lonely that way.

You don't often run into somebody who says, “My uncle had that.” There aren't endless television campaigns about it. Most people have never heard the words mycosis fungoides until I say them, and judging by the expression I occasionally get afterward, a few probably wish I had kept it that way.

Then along comes Mr. T.

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Thirty Years Makes a Difference

Mr. T was diagnosed in 1995. He underwent treatment, including chemotherapy and radiation, and years later was publicly talking about having survived cancer.

And I found that enormously comforting.

Not because Mr. T and I are medically identical. We aren't. Cancer doesn't work that way. Two people can have exactly the same diagnosis and travel very different roads. His experience does not guarantee mine, and I am not interested in manufacturing certainty where none exists.

But sometimes you don't need a guarantee.

Sometimes you just need evidence that the road continues.

Think about 1995 for a moment.

Windows 95 had just arrived. Most people didn't have a cellphone. The Internet still screamed at you through a modem before reluctantly allowing you online. If you wanted to watch a movie at home, there was a decent chance you drove to a store and rented a plastic cassette roughly the size of a paperback novel.

That was the medical world in which Mr. T began dealing with mycosis fungoides.

Cancer treatment has not exactly been sitting around with its feet up since then.

The treatment options available for mycosis fungoides have expanded considerably over those three decades. Doctors understand more about the disease, more about the cells involved, and more about how to target them. Treatments exist today that simply were not available when Mr. T received his diagnosis.

That matters to me because I am now entering another stage of my own treatment. Naturally, I am worried about it. I would be lying if I claimed otherwise. Cancer has already taught me that treatments can fail, treatments can make you miserable, and the distance between “this might work” and “this is working” can feel enormous when you are the person sitting underneath the IV bag.

I have had treatments that did not give me the result I wanted. I have had treatments that made me feel horribly ill. So I am not marching into the next phase waving pompoms and declaring that everything will be fine.

But I do have something I didn't have before.

I have a strangely familiar face on the other side of this disease.

Here was somebody I had known from television since childhood who faced the same obscure cancer when the medical toolbox was much smaller than it is today. He went through treatment. He kept going. Years became decades.

There is something especially powerful about that when you have a rare cancer. Statistics are useful. Doctors are useful. Medical papers are useful. But occasionally what you need is another human being standing much farther down the road, proving that there is a farther down the road.

It doesn't hurt that the human being in question is Mr. T.

There is a certain poetry in discovering that one of the toughest men of my childhood ended up fighting the same disease I am fighting now. Back then, I watched him take on Rocky Balboa and an endless parade of bad guys in The A-Team. I certainly never imagined that decades later I would be looking at him and thinking about T-cell lymphoma.

But here we are.

Mr. T went into this fight with the medicine of the mid-1990s behind him.

I've got another thirty years of research behind me.

I don't know exactly where my own story goes from here. Nobody does. But knowing that someone else faced this same rare disease three decades ago and kept going has lifted my spirits more than I expected it would.

Maybe part of that is nostalgia. Maybe part of it is simply the relief of finding another member of a club almost nobody has heard of.

Either way, for the first time in a while, I feel pretty damn good about having medical progress on my side.

And cancer?

I pity the fool.

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