After His Second Treatment An Oncologist Gave Him A Simple Instruction
Go live your life
Sometimes the strongest music is not written after the fear is gone but while you are still walking through it with one treatment and one morning and one faithful dog beside you
Wade Hayes was 42 and fit and still touring when doctors found stage IV colon cancer that had already spread deeply into his liver and during chemotherapy he started writing a song around the question he was afraid to ask
Years earlier Hayes had arrived on country radio almost effortlessly and his 1994 debut single Old Enough to Know Better went to No. 1 followed by a run of Top 10 records that made his baritone familiar across 1990s country
By 2011 that commercial peak was behind him but Hayes was still recording and performing and for several years he had also been ignoring minor bleeding and fatigue
He was young and lifting weights heavily and had no known family history of colon cancer so cancer seemed an unlikely explanation
He Played One More Show Before The Truth Came
Then one October night the pain became impossible to dismiss and Hayes still flew to Houston the next morning and played his scheduled show
Back in Nashville a colonoscopy found a large tumor and further tests delivered the worse news that the cancer had spread extensively into his liver
Kix Brooks heard about the diagnosis through a mutual friend and helped get Hayes into Vanderbilt and the situation soon became urgent
On December 8 surgeons removed more than 20 inches of his large intestine and roughly 60 to 75 percent of his liver and part of his diaphragm
Chemotherapy followed and that was when Hayes began writing Is It Already Time and much of it came during chemotherapy and walks with his dog Jack
The title was not poetic invention because Hayes had been reading survival statistics and found himself genuinely wondering whether at 42 he had already reached the end of his life
Then almost exactly a year after the first battle doctors found cancer again this time in his lymph nodes and more chemotherapy and another operation followed and Hayes survived that one too
Two Songs Documented Two Very Different Wade Hayeses
Hayes carried those words away and turned them into another song and eventually made Go Live Your Life the title of his 2015 album
He has since said he no longer wants to write from the place that produced Is It Already Time and the experience changed what he wanted his songs to give people with less fear and more hope
One song asked whether life was ending and the other answered by telling him to live
And Jack the dog beside him on those walks while the first song was taking shape eventually received a song of his own and Hayes called it Who Saved Who
Jack could not change the diagnosis but he was there in the middle of it and survival became a songwriter map of fear and hope rather than only a medical comeback