Scott Hunt

Scott Hunt is thirty years sober and living with stage four colon cancer, a day at a time, on purpose.

Hunt and Brad Banyas have known each other about 35 years, since they were young sales guys working the phones at the same small company. Thirty years ago Banyas drove Hunt's kids up to the Chattanooga Aquarium so Hunt and his wife could have a day to themselves. Hunt asked to come on the SALTYmf GOAT Podcast to talk about the cancer, first person, no opinions, and said plainly that the hour was as therapeutic for him as he hoped it would be for anyone listening.

For about seven years before the diagnosis he had been lifting, most of it alongside his youngest son Zachary, who matched him rep for rep and set for set at heavier weights. He never did it with any of this in mind. His doctors later told him the conditioning was part of why his body took the chemo as well as it did. The rest of his method is narrow on purpose. He decided early that he would not become a Google expert and walk into appointments arguing with his oncologists, and that he would not look past the current day. He read enough to understand and stopped there. What research he did was mostly walking around the infusion room asking other people how they were getting through it.

The plan was six cycles of chemo. Then it was seven, then eight, and nobody told him they kept extending it because his numbers were dropping. The technician who ran the first infusion arrived in a hazmat suit. Hunt went home with a bag that pumped for two more days. The port dumped into his heart and damaged it, which happens to about one patient in ten. Liver surgery took about a quarter of his liver and was the worst pain he has known, and he had once woken up three days after a car accident. He lost 45 pounds, down to 140, and lost his taste buds along with them. He was afraid of the pain medication because he knew how easily he could go back. The scan last week was not what he wanted.

His wife Christy and his younger sister pushed the doctors for answers now instead of in three weeks, because someone has to. The one thing he would undo is the colonoscopy he kept putting off while his wife kept asking him to go. Caught at stage one, he says, he would be somewhere else entirely. The screening age is now 45. His plan for putting the weight back on is Angie sauce at the Thai house on Crossville Road, and Grammy's country cooking.