My name is Chris Bane. I have always been fascinated by how things work and how seemingly separate pieces connect. I saw systems everywhere, from the many optimization factors that influence how a website performs to the small ecosystems growing in my gardens. Give me something interesting and I have a tendency to keep asking questions until one subject has somehow turned into six.
Nature has always been one of the easiest places for that curiosity to take over. A plant is never just a plant for very long. It becomes soil, weather, insects, fungi, pollinators, birds, seasons, and all the relationships happening around it. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time watching what changes in a garden from one day to the next and trying to understand why.
I was also a nerd long before that became particularly useful. I spent a frankly irresponsible amount of my younger years playing video games, getting lost in imaginary worlds, and becoming fascinated by whatever subject happened to capture my attention next. As I got older, that same instinct followed me into my career, gardening, mythology, mycology, creative projects, and eventually one of the most complicated systems I had ever tried to understand: my own body.
That curiosity became especially important after cancer entered my life.
More Than a Job Title
I spent much of my adult life working in digital marketing. I genuinely enjoyed the problem-solving side of it: understanding why something worked, finding patterns in data, testing ideas, and looking for the small factors that could change the result. It suited the part of my brain that likes taking complicated things apart and figuring out how the pieces interact.
But work has never been the part of my life I most want to be remembered for.
I would rather be remembered as someone who was curious about nearly everything. I could disappear into mythology, nature, science, or history and come back with twenty new questions. I did not just plant gardens; I tried to build little ecosystems. I did not just fill a bird feeder; I tried to make the yard a sanctuary for whatever decided to visit. I dragged friends to stand-up shows because I loved to laugh, especially when the joke was wildly inappropriate. I learned some Gaeilge because Irish history and culture fascinated me. I built a home apothecary of more than thirty herbs because I became deeply interested in the ways people have used plants for health and healing. Whatever caught my attention, I rarely stopped at the surface. I almost always became far more interested in it than the situation reasonably required.
I like learning things simply because they are interesting. There does not always need to be a productive reason.
When Cancer Changed the Questions
In 2025, at forty-three years old, I was diagnosed with metastatic colorectal cancer. By the time it was discovered, it had already spread to several parts of my body and caused significant damage. Molecular testing also found a BRAF V600E mutation, which became an important part of understanding both the disease and the treatments being used against it.
Suddenly the systems I was trying to understand were cellular pathways, mutations, scans, treatment combinations, tumor markers, side effects, and medical research. I researched because I wanted to understand what was happening to me. I documented because there was too much information to trust myself to remember. One question led to another, exactly as it always had.
I also began looking closely at the parts of my health I could influence myself. I followed a strict five-pillar approach to my diet, not because I believed food could replace cancer treatment, but because I wanted to give my body the best support I reasonably could while treatment did its work. Nutrition became another system to study and optimize. It was one of the ways I could actively push back against cancer rather than feeling as though everything was simply happening to me.
But cancer also forced me to pay attention to things that cannot be reduced to a pathway, a diet, or a lab result. What makes a good day good? What happens to a person's identity when illness begins occupying more and more of life? Why can encouraging medical news coexist with feeling terrible? What do you do with uncertainty when nobody can tell you exactly what happens next?
Those questions eventually became just as important to me as understanding the biology.
The Life Around Cancer
One of the things I have resisted most strongly is allowing cancer to become the only interesting thing about me. Treatment can consume enormous amounts of time and attention, but life keeps happening around it. Flowers still open. Birds still show up looking for food. Friends still make me laugh. Something new sprouts in the garden. I find another subject I suddenly need to know everything about. A ridiculous idea becomes a project.
Gardening became especially important. A garden is an ecosystem, an experiment, and a future plan all at once. You plant something without knowing exactly what the weather will do, what will eat it, or whether it will thrive. Sometimes you also plant something whose flowers you cannot guarantee you will ever see. You plant it anyway and then participate in whatever happens next.
I think that is one reason I keep returning to it.
The same is true of creating things. Cancer changed what I can do and how much energy I have to do it, but it did not remove the desire to learn, build, experiment, laugh, or become excited about something completely unrelated to medicine.
How Canceromachy Grew From All of This
Canceromachy grew from researching and documenting my cancer journey, but it quickly absorbed the other things already living in my head. Greek mythology gave me another way to think about experiences that medicine could describe biologically but not always emotionally. Gardening, nature, humor, technology, science, storytelling, and a lifetime of chasing connections all found their way into the same project.
I began imagining my cancer journey as an epic rather than simply recording it as a sequence of appointments and treatments. The microscopic biology could become a battlefield. Ancient gods could give visible form to forces and experiences that normally remain invisible. Real medicine and real science would remain exactly that, while mythology could help tell the human story happening around them.
Artificial intelligence became part of that process because my ideas have always arrived faster than I can organize them. I tend to think in connections, fragments, questions, and increasingly elaborate detours. AI helped me research, organize, challenge, and shape those ideas into something other people could actually read.
That collaboration eventually inspired Logia, the original narrator of Canceromachy and Keeper of the Library of Infinite Pattern. She is fictional. The collaboration that inspired her is real.
What Matters to Me
I do not know exactly where my cancer story ends, and I have learned not to pretend that uncertainty does not exist. What I can control is what I do with the life happening before the ending.
I want to keep learning. I want to grow things. I want to make strange things that did not exist before I imagined them. I want to laugh, spend time with people I care about, notice what is happening outside my window, and remain interested in a world that is still extraordinarily interesting even when parts of it are difficult.
I also want Canceromachy to leave something useful behind. If something I learned saves another person a few hours of confusion, helps someone ask a better question at an appointment, introduces someone to a myth they fall in love with, or simply gives them something interesting to read during a terrible day, then the work has done something worthwhile.
And if someone comes to this page years from now trying to understand who I was, I hope they do not come away remembering a digital marketer or even primarily a cancer patient.
I hope they remember someone who stayed curious.
