In 1996, I graduated from Binghamton University at 21 while going through brain cancer treatment, with no idea what came next. 30 years later, I’m going home. A reflection on cancer, music, survival, and the extraordinary amount of ordinary life that happened in between.

Bryan Bishop and I bonded over brain cancer, bald heads, microphones, dark humor, and being two Jews who refused to let cancer become our personalities. Fourteen years after one unforgettable conversation, I went back to hear his voice again. This is for my bald brother.

During my cancer treatment, my father documented everything: doctors, appointments, weather, parking and even where I threw up. Thirty years later, I understood those notes differently. They were a record of what a terrified parent does when love cannot fix the problem.

When I came home from brain surgery at 21, I went to the piano. I needed to know whether my left hand still worked. Medicine could measure whether the surgery succeeded. I had a different question: did the life being saved still feel like mine?

In December 1995, I came home from an MRI and saw the answering machine blinking. The doctor had “found something.” That tiny cassette tape became the dividing line between the life I knew and the bewildering new world of being a patient.

At 21, chemotherapy might have improved my five-year survival odds by five points while risking my hearing, fingers and cognition. My Uncle Jay asked the question medicine hadn't: what exactly were we saving if treatment took away the things that made my life mine?

At 21, I watched my father drive onto a Manhattan sidewalk to get me home from brain cancer treatment. Thirty years later, I realized that absurd New York moment was a perfect metaphor for American healthcare: when the road is blocked, patients are expected to find the sidewalk.

In January 1996, I lay in a hospital bed with a brain tumor, no piano, and no idea if I would survive. A simple melody came to me. When I got home, my left hand had forgotten how to play. So I wrote Simplicity with just my right hand. 30 years later, I'm performing it live for the first time.