Fast facts (if you don’t have time to read the full post): I hate the gap in time since I’ve last written. I feel like I’ve lived so many different lives over the course of the last couple of months. What started off as a joyful trip to Japan and my body getting its act together in the knick of time to a victory run coming off oral chemo in May, celebrating the fourth annual Madison & Friends with record-breaking statistics, and lots of afternoon happy hours, has quickly turned into my personal nightmare: another body-altering health event and a positive ctDNA test I received on July 27. I don’t have the heart to write more than that in the fast facts, so I guess you will be forced to read my rambling stories via the long version to learn more. Lucky you!

Days until we retest ctDNA: 39 days

TO THE REALLY FUCKING LONG VERSION!

Time Capsule #1 – August 2025

I pour the milk into my mug and watch it bloom into foam. The coffee follows, rich brown ribbons swirling through the white. My hands know the ritual before I do. Left hand through the handle. Right hand underneath. The froth kisses my nose as I breathe in what has become my comfort.

Morning has settled into the living room, spilling across the temporary reclining chair we brought home after my reconstruction surgery. It beckons me to stay awhile.

I do.

Suddenly I realize that survival has a feeling.

---

“You can stop taking Lynparza,” my oncologist said. She was in a good mood. “Let’s give your body a break and see how it does for a year.”

I had searched for those words for so long. Begged for them, really. Begged my body to hold on just long enough to get here. As if I had any control over rampant mutant cell division and stupid ass side effects.

We threw everything we had at this disease until we reached a place where maybe I could just… coast. Maybe I could exist without the constant negotiation between survival and side effects. The ocean of cancer hasn’t disappeared. It never will. But the tide had finally gone out far enough for me to actually fucking breathe.

My tumor markers looked great. My ctDNA was negative. My lab work was unremarkable, a word that suddenly becomes extraordinary when you’ve spent years hoping to hear it.

I got the green light to finish my bottle of oral chemo, move my injections and labs to every three months, and stretch my appointments with my oncologist to every six. It felt like the beginning of a new chapter.

“What happens in a year,” I asked.

“We will see,” said my oncologist.

Ominous.

On May 6, I swallowed my final dose of Lynparza and all I could think of was I hope I don’t regret this.

Time Capsule #2 – November 2025

I walk to the car and turn the heater on full blast. I put on my favorite song and settle in for the twenty-minute drive to work. I hit cruise control.

I sing at the top of my lungs. I ignore the texts that are demanding my attention. The windows are beginning to fog at the edges.

Somewhere along the way I decide I’ve earned an americano. I take an icy sip and smile.

I feel so alive. The feeling is as addicting as it is fleeting.

I hold on to it.

---

Coming off oral chemo is one of my favorite hobbies. As a proud three-time quitter, I feel uniquely qualified to speak on the subject.

Every few months I get to meet a slightly different version of my body. She’s usually a little less tired, a little stronger, and slightly less offended by stairs and loves to pack her calendar full.

One morning at CrossFit, box jumps were programmed. Is today the day I try to jump instead of step? I stared at the box for a second longer than everyone else. The last year had been a parade of reasons not to jump: a blood clot, abdominal surgery, muscles that still liked to remind me they had been through a lot, and generally a body that had spent the better part of four years begging me to knock it off.

“Well,” I thought. “Guess we’re about to find out.”

I barely landed it. And then I tried again. And then again, except this time I biffed it. Oh well. It’s funny the things that make you feel invincible after cancer.

Turning 34 wasn’t one of them.

For most of my life, birthdays have been a generally delightful affair. I have never needed much of an excuse to celebrate existing. Cake? Great. Friends? Even better. An opportunity to be just a little obnoxious with a fun theme? Count me in.

Cancer complicated that.

Birthdays are now earned, exhausting, and scary. I think of them like laps in Mario Kart. Every year I’m just trying to limp across the finish line. How many bananas did I hit? How many blue shells absolutely ruined my day? Did I somehow end up driving off Rainbow Road again? I almost died getting here, and now I get a consolation prize next to fucking Donkey Kong on the podium for Worst Finish Ever.

Thankfully, I cope with complicated emotions the same way I cope with everything else: I overcommit myself to projects.

The fourth annual Madison & Friends arrived at the end of June. In the weeks leading up to it, my living room slowly disappeared beneath stacks of artwork, raffle baskets, random sticky note reminders, and enough spreadsheets to make me question my own sanity. And as quickly as it arrived, it left. Six months of hard work resulted in a record-breaking year of 118 pieces of art, 62 artists, and $10,670.85 raised for cancer patients in our community currently in treatment.

For the first time in a long time, I finally stopped treating every ache like a prophecy and could feel myself relax.

Time Capsule #3 – April 2026

The automatic doors slide open and a chorus of familiar sounds greets me. It is packed. Everyone is getting ready to go out on a Saturday night. I smell like fourteen hours on an airplane and all I want is an egg salad sando and enough yen to survive tomorrow.

I weave through the aisles, grinning like an idiot.

I am just another tired tourist buying snacks at a 7-Eleven. I am wonderfully anonymous.

Joy fills my chest and I let out a year’s long exhale.

---

It started on the Fourth of July. Something felt… off.

Living with metastatic cancer means I exist in a permanent state of uncertainty with my body. But after four and a half years, I’ve developed an uncertain baseline: random aches, weird twinges, the occasional pain that shows up, overstays its welcome, and leaves without explanation.

This felt different.

My Spidey senses immediately went on high alert when the flank pain appeared. It wasn’t severe. Just… there. Dull. Present. Both sides.

I was hosting friends for the Fourth of July, so I did what any reasonable person does when they’re trying to pretend nothing is wrong: I carried on. I skipped the alcohol. We sang karaoke and I bounced around the living room belting songs I absolutely did not have the vocal range for, all while gathering data on my body. Maybe I just need to sleep this off??

By Monday, the pain had wrapped around both flanks and settled into my pelvis and lower abdomen.

I scheduled an appointment at urgent care and handed over what can only be described as my color-coded, overachieving symptom log, except it is me acting as a historical oracle and being questioned why I don’t look “sick.”

I explained that I’d experienced something similar the year before. I don’t tend to present with classic UTI symptoms, and somehow urinary tract infections have developed a remarkable talent for evading my urine tests. I was secretly hoping all of that history would be enough to convince someone to throw a course of antibiotics at me while we waited for the urinalysis and vaginal swab.

Instead, the dipstick showed microscopic blood in my urine and I was sent home with no answers and the classic parting gift: “Go to the ER if your symptoms get worse.”

Yeah, thanks for the foreshadowing.

By Wednesday morning, my symptoms had, in fact, gotten worse. It takes a lot for me to decide to go to the ER because I hate leaving work and I somehow always end up in a medical loop of sorts. I left work around 11:30 and drove myself to the Richland emergency department.

It was absolutely packed. My first mistake was forgetting snacks. My second mistake was forgetting my phone charger. Eight hours is a very long time to contemplate your life when your phone is slowly dying.

The ER staff attempted to access my port, which I begged for because ~needles~. Lord Voldeport, staying true to character, refused to cooperate. After a small fit of tears and a brief acceptance of my fate, we attempted a peripheral blood draw, managing to collect just enough blood to check my kidney function before sending me for a CT scan.

The bright spot came from the CT tech. “I think the last time I saw you, you were on your way out of the country,” she said. She remembered me from my 2024 scan before my Europe trip!

We laughed about travel and my difference in hair color before pivoting, as all CT conversations eventually do, to contrast dye.

“Everyone keeps saying it tastes super metallic today,” she said.

“I’ll be the judge of that,” I replied. “I’m basically a CT scan connoisseur at this point.”

I was hoping for some super fun mouth flavors, but was left with just a light sensation of peeing my pants. What a rush.

I was wheeled back to my room to have an existential crisis, another UA, and think about my life decisions. The little MyChart notification appeared on my phone an hour later. At 17% phone energy, I bravely opened the results to an incredibly unremarkable update about my lower abdomen. No kidney stones. No cancer.

I left the hospital with zero answers once more, a shot of Toradel for the pain, and confusion.

Saturday rolled around again. I was now a week into the pelvic, abdominal, and flank pain. At this point, I was beginning to wonder if I was losing my mind. A friend came over so we could do what two completely normal adults do in July: Talk about Halloween costumes.

I was deep in another pain episode, drinking an absolutely irresponsible amount of water, and making frequent trips to the bathroom. On one of those trips, I stood up to flush and noticed… something. Huh. It looked like a tiny poop fleck. Except… I hadn’t pooped.

For one concerning second, I considered fishing it out for further scientific investigation. I decided against it. Goodbye, mystery. I flushed.

About an hour later, while watching the World Cup, I realized something: I didn’t hurt nearly as much anymore. It couldn’t be. Did I just pass a kidney stone? Had I just accidentally flushed the answer?

For the next few days, I convinced myself I was getting better. The pain wasn’t gone, but it had softened enough that I let myself believe the mystery had solved itself. Maybe it really had been a kidney stone. Maybe my body had finally decided to cooperate for once.

In the middle of all of this chaos, life insisted on continuing.

On Tuesday, July 14, I made my scheduled trip to the cancer center for my three-month labs, Signatera ctDNA draw, and injection. Somehow, in what I can only assume was an attempt to gaslight me into thinking it had always been functional, Lord Voldeport decided to cooperate and provided enough blood for both my routine lab work and the ctDNA draw.

I told the nurses about everything that had been happening: the pain, the urgent care visits, the emergency room. Nobody seemed especially alarmed, which, admittedly, helped calm me down a little. I was still hurting, but at least my port wasn’t being a dumb bitch.

By Wednesday, that tiny bit of hope completely unraveled. The pain returned with a vengeance, settling deep into my pelvis and lower abdomen. The flank pain was still there, but it had faded into the background. This felt eerily familiar. It was almost identical to what I had experienced the previous spring.

Then a new pain joined the party: just below and to the left of my belly button, I kept feeling this strange pulling sensation. The best way I can describe it is if someone had tied a string to one tiny spot inside my abdomen and gave it a gentle tug every time I moved. It wasn’t a stabbing pain. It wasn’t cramping. It was just… wrong.

At this point, I figured it was time to recruit more adults into the situation.

I called my primary care office and spoke with the triage nurse. I called the emergency nurse line through my insurance. I walked them through the last two weeks: urgent care, the ER, microscopic blood in my urine, the new pain, the whole saga.

They both arrived at the same conclusion: “You should go back to the emergency room or urgent care.”

Ah yes. My favorite answer.

Back to urgent care I went on Saturday, July 18.

This time, the ARNP looked at my chart and seemed genuinely surprised that no one had started me on antibiotics after my first visit.

“Let’s at least see what happens,” she said.

She collected yet another urine sample—one for the in-house results and one for culture—and finally sent me home with antibiotics.

That night, after my first dose, I experienced a glimmer of hope: The pain eased up a little bit. For the first time in days, I let myself believe we might finally be headed in the right direction.

The thing about hope is hope is a terrible diagnostician. Less than 24 hours after leaving urgent care, I found myself right back in the pain cave. The pain ripped through my pelvis and lower abdomen with a vengeance. Every ounce of optimism I had managed to manufacture the night before evaporated.

“Do I need to go back to the ER?” I asked. Apparently, the answer was yes.

My coworker drove me to the emergency department on Monday, July 20, where I embarked on what can only be described as the deluxe edition of diagnostic testing: another CT scan, a transvaginal ultrasound, two urinalyses, and enough blood work to satisfy every vampire in the Tri-Cities.

Miraculously, Lord Voldeport decided to be a productive member of society and happily donated tube after tube of blood.

Then the results came back. Everything looked… mostly normal, except for one line buried in the CT impression: Prominent ureter urothelium suggests ascending urinary tract infection.

Bingo.

I felt vindicated. My body is a fucked-up piece of work, but I generally don’t complain unless something feels particularly wonky. My threshold for seeking medical attention is probably higher than it should be. I will happily rot in pain until there are no longer enough normal thoughts in my brain to outweigh the pain thoughts. So to finally have something on paper that said, “Hey! Something might actually be wrong with this bitch!” felt validating.

I was prescribed a different antibiotic and some pain meds and sent home.

The next day, I had an emergency follow-up with my primary care provider that had thankfully already been scheduled. We reviewed the previous two weeks: urgent care, ER, mystery toilet fleck, antibiotics, second urgent care, second ER, enough urine samples to last me a lifetime. She felt confident we were finally on the right track.

“Call us if things get worse,” she said. Again with the fucking foreshadowing.

By Thursday, I was back in pain. I was perplexed. How the fuck had I started an antibiotic specifically for the thing we finally thought was wrong, only to be suffering again two days later?

Friday found me back on the phone with triage at my primary care office.

“It sounds like you need to go back to the ER,” the nurse told me. “We don’t have any urgent appointments available. If you go, call us back and we’ll try to get you on the schedule next week.” What the fuck.

I couldn’t do it.

I was exhausted. I had already spent hours of my life in emergency rooms, been poked and prodded, had two CT scans, an ultrasound, countless urine tests, blood draws, antibiotics, and still somehow remained the proud owner of the same fucking pain.

So I decided to ride it out. Again.

I spent the weekend suffering. I canceled plans. I tried to rest. I tried to listen to my body, although at this point my body and I were no longer on speaking terms. I also had a funeral to attend, because apparently the universe felt the weekend needed a little more razzle-dazzle.

But my adventure wasn’t quite over yet. On Monday, July 27, I found myself writhing around on the CrossFit floor. The bizarre thing about the pain was that I could still function through a surprising amount of it. I could complete most workouts fairly well, only for my body to collect its debts afterward. Hinging movements were becoming uncomfortable, though. Every time I folded forward, I could feel this strange pressure pulling through my groin. I finished the workout anyway.

After class, I stood around talking with friends and ended the workout on my watch. I reached for my phone. There it was, a little red folder with a heart: New test result. My fucking Signatera. My heart started racing.

“Sit down,” my friend told me.

Normally, I open these results alone. I don’t know why. Maybe because I like having the freedom to completely lose my shit in private. But this one should be fine, right? It had to be fine. My friend was right next to me! The universe wouldn’t do me dirty like that.

You know when you’re lying in bed telling yourself there is absolutely nothing underneath it while simultaneously knowing, with every fiber of your being, that the Boogeyman is absolutely fucking under there?

I clicked through MyChart, the test results page taking forever to fucking load. Then the little graph appeared. My eyes followed the line and my heart dropped.

0.36

Positive. My Signatera was positive.

No. No no no no no no no. I don’t remember deciding to say it out loud. It just came out. Then the tears did. Disbelief. Terror. Fear. My brain immediately began firing questions faster than I could answer them.

What does this mean? How is this real? I hadn’t even been off Lynparza for two months. The number was still incredibly small, but it was the highest result I had ever had. My previous positive had been 0.06. This was 0.36.

And suddenly all I could think about was the pain. For weeks, something in my body had been screaming that something was wrong. And now this. Were they related? Was this pain cancer? Had we missed something? Was cancer growing somewhere we couldn’t see yet?

There was no time to process any of it. I immediately messaged my oncologist and asked her to please advise.

The answer was somehow both reasonable and the last thing on earth I wanted to hear: we would do nothing, or at least, not yet. We would repeat the Signatera draw in September and see whether the number continued to trend upward. If it did, we would go from there. I had just had two pelvic CT scans, both of which showed no evidence of cancer, so she was completely unbothered by whatever health episode I was experiencing outside of the realm of cancer.

Medically, I understood the logic. Emotionally, I wanted to crawl out of my fucking skin. For weeks, I had been begging someone to tell me what was happening inside my body. Now I had a test telling me something was happening inside my body, and the answer was still the same: Wait. And that was the end of my conversation with my oncologist.

At this point, a deep sense of hopelessness had settled into my bones. My body felt completely out of control and I couldn’t get a single fucking answer. Is this how the end starts for me?

What began as maybe I have a kidney stone and then became maybe I have a UTI had somehow evolved into the full-fledged nightmare of maybe cancer is making its triumphant return.

And now I had a new chicken-or-the-egg problem to obsess over: What came first? A potential recurrence? Or whatever the fuck had been causing the pelvic, flank, and abdominal pain for the last several weeks? Were they related? Completely separate? Was my body really capable of producing two independent medical crises at the exact same time? Actually, don’t answer that.

The pain became unbearable again Tuesday night, July 28, and I found myself back in the emergency room for round three.

Lord Voldeport, perhaps exhausted from the single day of honest work it had performed earlier that month, was once again useless. Thankfully, my nurse was some sort of vascular wizard and managed to get a peripheral IV using ultrasound. It was genuinely one of the best peripheral draws I’ve ever had, which is both a compliment to her and a deeply depressing thing for me to have enough experience to rank.

And then I completed another urine sample, transvaginal ultrasound, and more blood work. Everything came back fucking normal. Again.

I was sent home and told to follow up with my primary care provider. Again.

Conveniently, I already had an appointment the next day with another resident at my primary care clinic. Have I mentioned I go to a residency clinic? Because at this point I feel like I’m contributing substantially to everyone’s education.

The resident and attending were equally perplexed. I walked them through my theory again: the whole experience still felt eerily similar to what happened the previous spring, when a urinary infection spiraled out of control and eventually required three different antibiotics before my body finally waved the white flag, except they didn’t think that was happening now. At this point, they felt there was basically no chance this was still a UTI. I had already been through two different antibiotics (I mean, just for a couple of days each) without any meaningful improvement.

Okay. Cool. So what the fuck was it?

A new theory entered the chat: maybe I had a blood clot somewhere in my pelvis. Honestly, why not? I’d already had a DVT. The strange pressure with hinging movements during CrossFit gave the theory at least a little credibility. But my brain immediately had questions: What about when I’m not working out? What about the pain when I am sitting? What about all the other places that hurt? What about the last three fucking weeks?!

I left with a follow-up appointment three weeks away and an order for a D-dimer blood test. At this point, three weeks felt like asking me to casually hang out inside a burning building and see whether the smoke cleared.

I did get the D-dimer drawn that day. How I accomplished that in a timely fashion is between me, the universe, and a few incredibly helpful people who deserve my eternal gratitude. Lord Voldeport, for the record, continued its commitment to being absolutely fucking useless.

Meanwhile, my best friend had heard enough about my descent into medical purgatory and started making calls. She reached out to a friend whose husband happens to be one of the very few urologists in the Tri-Cities. He graciously agreed to talk with me and reviewed my recent urinalyses, blood work, and second CT scan.

After weeks of urgent care visits, emergency rooms, imaging, antibiotics, phone calls, theories, and being passed from one medical professional to another like a medical hot potato, he casually suggested something almost offensively simple: A different antibiotic, specifically one of the three I had taken the previous spring.

Within twenty minutes of our phone call, the prescription was ready for pickup. I took the first dose that evening and a couple of hours later, I noticed something: the pain slowly dispersing. Again. And because apparently I had learned absolutely nothing from the last month, hope came crawling right back in.

Time Capsule #4 – August 2026

I held my eye contact normally than I would. She has tiny freckles in her golden eyes. My eyes slide past to see the birthday girl and my best friend singing in-sync.

“Maybe, you’re going to be the one who saves me…”

My friends don’t know they’re saving me from myself, even for just a few minutes.

---

For the first time in four weeks, I felt like maybe I was finally on the right track. I was still having pangs of pain, but nothing like the weeks before. The free-falling elevator into hell finally felt like it was slowing down. Can we please get to the good part?

Saturday, August 1 was supposed to be a bright spot on my calendar: my friend’s 40th birthday, complete with an outfit requirement of kaftans and mandatory karaoke. I love a good party theme.

As I got ready, I hopped in the shower. Before I do, I always perform this weird little naked stretch where I reach my arms toward the ceiling and stare at the Frankenstein collection of scars my body has accumulated over the years. This time, I felt a pull in my right foob.

My port had been sore, but considering the number of times we’d attempted to access the useless little fucker over the previous few weeks, I figured it was probably irritated. I’ve felt pulling around there before. Uncommon, but not unheard of. I cautiously stepped into the shower.

As I washed my body, my hand passed over that spot, the spot I will never be able to touch without thinking about it: One o’clock on my right foob. My fingers grazed over something hard.

I stopped.

I went back. There it was.

A hard lump.

The world around me disappeared. Suddenly, I wasn’t standing naked in my shower on August 1, 2026. I was Madison on February 11, 2022, accidentally running my hand across her breast at work and feeling her tumor for the first time. I pressed again. Hard. Distinct. Something I hadn’t felt before. My fingers traveled across it until suddenly the mass dropped away into the softness of my foob.

I pressed harder. It hurt. Something is wrong.

Panic flooded in almost immediately.

For weeks, I had been trying to solve the mystery of my own body and now I was standing in the shower with my fingers on a new lump in the exact fucking neighborhood where this nightmare began four and a half years ago. What the fuck was I supposed to do with that?! And before a fucking party???

I carried the pain with me all evening, along with the little secret beneath the skin of my foob. I wanted to crawl out of my body and leave it somewhere behind me.

I wanted June back. I wanted the version of myself who filled her calendar like time was something she could waste, who jumped on boxes and made plans months in advance and assumed she’d be there to keep them. I wanted my tired muscles and stupidly busy days and the luxury of believing a good day was just a good day. I wanted to go back before my blood betrayed me, before my body became a crime scene again.

Instead, I stood in a room full of people celebrating another year of life and wondered how much of mine I had left.

Am I becoming just a memory?

---

Unfortunately, this is the part where the story catches up to me. There is no neat ending waiting at the bottom of this post, no diagnosis I can reveal, no medication I can credit with saving the day, no funny little mystery fleck floating at the bottom of a toilet bowl holding all the answers.

I finished my seven-day course of antibiotics and saw the urologist on Wednesday, August 5. For a moment, I thought maybe we had finally outrun this thing. By Thursday, the pain returned. As of this post, I am still experiencing pelvic and lower abdominal pain in waves of intensity and fatigue beyond my normal baseline.

I don’t know what that means. Did the antibiotics help but fail to completely eliminate whatever is happening inside of me? Was their success another mirage? Is something else wrong entirely? I don’t fucking know. Apparently nobody else knows or feels pressured to find an answer. One provider (I don’t want to say who) even said to me that this could just be my life now. I will just have chronic pain all the time. (Uh… what the fuck.) I am so tired of not knowing. I am so tired of being in almost constant pain.

While my oncologist was out of town, I was lucky enough to see one of my favorite providers at the cancer center. She examined the lump in my foob and told me it didn’t feel particularly concerning to her, then she asked me what I wanted to do. If I wanted imaging, she would order it.

For someone who has spent the last month begging people to take my body seriously, you’d think being handed that kind of control would feel empowering. Instead, I was terrified. Part of me wanted to ask for another CT. Scan everything. Find whatever the fuck is hiding inside of me and drag it into the light. Another part of me couldn’t bear the thought of finding it.

After two CT scans in a month, I also couldn’t stomach volunteering my body for even more radiation unless I absolutely needed to, so I chose an ultrasound. Start small and look at the lump. If it’s nothing, let it be nothing. If it’s something, the ultrasound opens another doo to more imaging, more tests, maybe a biopsy. I’ll start that process on Tuesday, August 18.

The darkly hilarious consolation prize to this entire disaster is that my collection of emergency room visits officially pushed me to my out-of-pocket maximum for the year. Can’t wait to get those bills in the mail. So, fuck it. Charge everything to my tab! Scan me. Ultrasound me. Take my blood. I’ve unlocked the “unlimited” healthcare package by being a medical mystery.

I wish that felt funnier. I’m exhausted, not just tired. Not “I need a good night’s sleep” tired. I’m tired of appointments and waiting rooms, MyChart notifications, tired of explaining where it hurts. Tired of producing urine on command, needles and ports and blood and scans. Tired of results that somehow manage to tell me everything is fine while my body continues to insist that something is wrong. Mostly, I am tired of being afraid of my own body.

Four years ago, I touched my breast and found cancer. Now I touch my body and wonder what else I haven’t found yet. Cancer isn’t a disease, it’s theft, in my case, theft in the (stage) fourth degree.

It stole my body, my peace. It stole my sense of security. Every night when I lock the doors before bed, I wish I could lock the doors on me.

I’ve thought a lot about whether this could be the beginning of the end. I know that sounds startling, maybe even dramatic, but I know how this cancer thing works. I don’t want October to arrive with another positive test and have everyone act surprised while I pretend the possibility hadn’t already been living in the back of my mind for months.

It has barely been three months since I stopped oral chemo, and my body is potentially—and potentially is doing an enormous amount of work here—trying to kill me again. But where? And how??

Was the health event in July the domino or is it completely unrelated? How much does 0.36 actually mean on its own? How much more positive do I need to become before we’re allowed to panic? Can my body clear cancer on its own, the way my 0.06 positive disappeared three months later in 2024? Or is this the first tiny breadcrumb leading us somewhere I desperately don’t want to go?

I don’t know.

That’s the cruelty of it. I don’t know if cancer is growing somewhere inside of me or if something entirely different is wrong. I can’t even get people to believe me right now that something is wrong. I am being gaslit by the medical system. I don’t know if both things are true or if neither is. I just know that cancer has stolen my ability to live comfortably inside the uncertainty because once you’ve discovered that your own body is capable of trying to kill you, it’s really fucking hard to convince yourself it isn’t doing it again.

I want June back. I want Japan. I want the crowded 7-Eleven and the egg salad sandwich. I want the drive to work with my americano. I want the morning sun. I want to jump on a box and biff it and laugh. I want the version of myself who filled her calendar like time was currency she could spend again. I want a body that can hurt without it meaning I have to enter an endless hole of panic.

I keep these little time capsules buried inside of me because sometimes I need proof that I have been more alive than afraid.

Cancer has already stolen enough from me.

I don’t want it to have these, too.

Today’s song lyrics of the day are brought to you by Frank Sinatra.

“For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows
I took the blows
And did it my way”

– My Way, Frank Sinatra