Life on the road felt less like freedom and more like exile. I left Swan Valley with stage 3C rectal cancer, a broken heart, and just enough gas money to outrun both. Here on Cancer is a Gift, I write about those miles—about collapsing barns and empty fields, about momentum as a prayer, and the sound of my dog’s whimper as I pulled away.

The garden never bloomed all at once. It came in waves: daffodils bowing like they knew something I didn’t, lupine standing tall like they’d survived a war, and bachelor’s buttons too scattered to commit to a direction. I photographed each one obsessively, not because they were beautiful, but because they were proof. Proof that something had grown here. That I had. Before I had to leave. Before everything was boxed and packed into the back of my car like a secret I wasn’t allowed to tell. This is the story of the last days in Swan Valley. Of flowers, and photographs, and the slow recognition that nothing, no matter how tender or tenacious, can root where it’s not wanted.

I didn’t leave Idaho with a bang. I left the way women do when they know they’re no longer welcome. Quietly. Efficiently. The night before I drove out of Swan Valley, the Hunter and I cleaned the house like we were going to stay forever, like we weren’t already done. He promised to pick wildflowers for me the next morning. He set an alarm so we could watch the Strawberry Moon. At 1:44 a.m. he looked up, squinted, and said, “It ain’t shit.” I think that’s how he felt about us, too.

In the quiet spaces between doctor's appointments, the weight of cancer settles into your bones. The hardest part isn’t just the diagnosis—it’s realizing that sometimes, the people who promised to stay with you through it all are the very ones who pull away when you need them the most. This is a story of cancer, love, and the slow unraveling of a life I thought I was building. It’s about the cracks we try to ignore and the ones we can’t, as I navigate not only illness but the isolation that so often accompanies it.

When my Ukrainian cousin visited me in Swan Valley, Idaho, we spent a week sharing coffee, parables, and quiet revelations. He told me the story of the onion farmer, a Taoist lesson in sitting with life’s uncertainty, and taught me how even the simplest things—a mug, a meal, a drift on the Snake River—can hold the weight of healing.

I told him he had the wrong house.

I told him I was the wrong woman.

But cancer doesn’t listen. It barges in, uninvited, and starts taking things you didn’t think could be taken: your sleep, your appetite, your energy, your lists, your plans, your hope.

This is how it starts.

A chapter for my memoir: a first-person account of growing up in a charismatic prosperity gospel church that met in an elementary school gym. I learned to speak in tongues before I knew how to spell my name. This chapter is about the gymnasium church I was raised in, the Jesus Language I faked at four, and the first time I lied to a room full of adults so God wouldn’t be disappointed.

Every year on my birthday, the ghosts show up. The year my mom died. The year my dad forgot who I was. The year I got cancer. I’ve spent my thirties grieving something or someone, and this essay is a nonlinear tour through those haunted birthdays—complete with clowns, mocktails, blackout whiskey, and a semi-truck crash outside my farmhouse. This is what it means to turn 39 when the candles feel heavier than the cake.

Why does all the hospital art always look the same? I got my chemo port placed this week—watched the whole thing on a flatscreen while the surgeon gossiped about a nurse. I left the hospital a little more bruised, a little more bionic, and still haunted by that damn sunflower print in the hallway.

I met my radiation oncologist, Dr. Calvin McAllister—he’s cute, bald, and about to help blast my rectal tumor into oblivion. This post dives into Total Neoadjuvant Therapy, the surreal beauty of a sunlit waiting room, and what it feels like to lose your fertility and maybe your hair, but not your humor.

I cried during chemo class. This is my raw, unfiltered account of what it’s like to start chemotherapy for a locally advanced rectal tumor—the logistics, the side effects, the port placement, and the quiet heartbreak of asking your partner to believe you have cancer. This isn’t a comeback story. It’s survival, in real time.

After ending my relationship with the man I moved to Idaho for, I’m left alone in Swan Valley—a town that never really felt like mine. In this post, I reflect on love, loss, and what it means to start cancer treatment in a place that feels more like exile than home.

I'm 38, living with terminal cancer, and yet my deepest fear isn't dying—it's dying without ever hearing "I love you" from a man who chooses me. This letter is a raw, gut-punch reflection on romantic longing, the silence that follows vulnerability, and what it means to redefine love when the words never come. If you've ever ached for something you were told was simple, this one’s for you.

They handed me a CD of my scans and expected me to figure it out—no explanation, no guidance, just a tumor I couldn’t see. In this post, I write from the waiting room: about cancer, the failure of bedside manner, and a woman who might’ve been Virginia Woolf.

Stopped during a medical crisis and was handed a bathroom key attached to a muffler. The bathroom held up better than I did. A sacred Idaho experience.

I’m a poem about grief, memory, and the quiet ache of moving forward. I speak in glass, silence, and unspoken words—traveling through cities and losses that never properly say goodbye.

I wrote this on a night I couldn’t sleep—when cancer wouldn’t shut up in my head. In this post, I ruminate on everything: my dead parents, my old relationships, what I ate, what I believed, and whether I somehow invited this diagnosis in. There’s no tidy lesson here—just the looping, restless truth of being alive while wondering if you’re already halfway gone.

I ended up in the ER with severe rectal swelling. Cramping, bloating, and no relief. A rectal stent might be next. Here’s what went down.

I grew up begging my parents to quit smoking. Then I became a smoker. This is about addiction, grief, inheritance—and the drag I still feel in my lungs.

I left Phoenix before my cancer had a name—packed my life in silence and drove toward Swan Valley with my dog and a man I’d only just met. A story about illness, intuition, and the man who helped me pack. You’ll find photos along the way—of landscapes and moments that remembered me before I remembered myself.