Cleared for Discharge

A True Story of Missed Symptoms, Medical Gaslighting, and the Cancer That Almost Got Away

Most memories fade. Even the ones I believed would remain sharp forever—those childhood summers at the yellow cabin on Lake Koronis, the time I hitchhiked across states in a converted school bus, the afternoon I secured my first six-figure brand deal. They’ve softened now. The outlines smudged. Like photographs left too long in the sun.

But others—the ones I would give anything to forget—remain stubbornly intact. Fixed. Calcified. The day I cut my mother down from the ceiling fan. The day my father exhaled and never inhaled again. The day I learned the pain in my body wasn’t anxiety, or IBS, but something far less temporary.

There were signs, of course. And I suppose if I had been paying proper attention, I might have seen what was forming. But that’s how these things often go. The road appears clearly only once it has been traveled.

It is possible this memory endures not simply because of the horror, but because of the way it unfolded. Not suddenly, but gradually. A slow accumulation of signs, each small enough to dismiss. And so I did. Repeatedly.

I don’t wake in the middle of the night screaming. Not the way soldiers do. Instead, the memories return uninvited—faint at first, like dust on the lens. Sometimes they’re triggered by a place or a thing, like a ceiling fan, or something someone says. Sometimes there’s no trigger at all. Just the sensation that I’ve slipped, briefly, into a darker negative of the present moment.

They arrive like old film stills—grainy, slightly overexposed, tinged with that specific kind of shadow that only exists when something irreversible is about to happen. In these scenes, I watch myself from a distance. Not above, not below. Just… removed. The way a camera watches a character who hasn’t yet realized she’s in the first act of a tragedy. There’s a faint hum to it all, like a projector left running after the credits.

I assured myself I was well, the words slipping from my lips with a certainty I wished to believe. It was only a digestive unease, I told myself, or the lingering ache of loss, or the quiet strain of ordinary days. I bent into yoga’s gentle forms, climbed the red trails of Camelback under the desert sun, joined the slow dance of qigong in Sereno Park, and wandered the farmers markets on Saturdays, my hands brushing over ripe tomatoes and fresh sage. I photographed strangers, their skin flawless, untouched by the desperation of pleading for answers in the sterile glare of an emergency room. Yet in the stillness, where such assurances fray, I felt a shadow I refused to name, a truth I turned from, as if by moving onward I could outpace it.

But now, when I remember that version of myself, I see her like I’d see a protagonist in a slow film with a long single take: walking through a hallway she doesn’t yet know is an ending. I want to call out. Want to stop the scene. But of course, I can’t. The film has already been shot.

There are too many moments like this. I couldn’t possibly rewind them all for you. So I’ll show you only a few. Selected frames from the reel. The ones that flicker when I close my eyes.
The ones that never made it to print, but still refuse to fade.

There are moments from before August 2024 that remain strangely intact—preserved in my mind with a clarity I wish they didn’t possess. These moments, mundane at the time, now seem to shimmer with the quiet knowledge of what lay ahead. They shaped the path I was already on, though I couldn’t yet see it. And I find myself, still, marveling at how unaware I was.

I remember attending a scope meeting for a VR project I had pitched. It was a promising opportunity, the sort of thing I once would have celebrated. I behaved as if I were well. I dressed like someone in control of her body. I arranged my face accordingly.

But even then, I wasn’t quite right. I remember feeling bloated in a way that made sitting feel unnatural. I remember a pressure, like something expanding from the inside, gently but persistently, as if testing the limits of what my body could contain. There was nausea, too—not abrupt, but creeping. It came on slowly, like condensation on a window.

And the sounds—those I remember best. Wet. Percussive. Like the plumbing in an old house trying to confess something. Because we were screen sharing, the noises traveled through the call—unfiltered, disembodied. I recall my colleague in New York—a man I once knew differently—pausing mid-sentence. He tilted his head slightly and asked, with an awkward sort of courtesy, “Do you need to go check on...whatever that was?”

I smiled. That, too, I remember with clarity. Not the joy behind it—there wasn’t any—but the act itself. The practiced way of smiling as if to say everything was fine. I chewed a TUMS, casually, like one might pop a mint before a meeting. All the while, I was praying silently—not with any real hope, but more out of habit. A kind of bargaining. Just let me finish this meeting, I thought. That’s all.

I told myself it was stress. Or hormones. Or maybe something stirred by the sight of my ex lover’s face on the screen. A face I had once loved, and had tried, in vain, to forget. At the time, it all seemed plausible. And that’s what’s so difficult now—not that I missed the signs, but that I convinced myself there were no signs at all.

I remember going to the Mayo Clinic a day later thinking I was passing another kidney stone. I remember Dr. Shari Brand. 

It’s strange the things that return to you, later. Not the pain, which was considerable, nor the exact phrasing of the diagnosis, which never came that day anyway. But her face—yes, that remains. The way she entered the room without ceremony, as though she’d already been there for some time, standing just behind the curtain of my awareness.

She had a softness about her, though not indulgent. A kind of careful steadiness, like someone who has long since learned how to soften the edges of truth. Her hair was dark, parted simply. She wore a modest necklace I only remember now because of the way the light caught it when she turned to look at the monitor.

I don’t recall her tone, exactly. Only that she spoke in a way that made it difficult to distinguish reassurance from uncertainty. She ordered tests. Many of them. Blood work, scans, panels I couldn’t pronounce. I remember a sense, not of alarm, but of something being quietly ruled out. One possibility after another, brushed aside like crumbs from a table.

At the time, I was grateful. I believed in her composure. Believed that thoroughness meant safety.

And now, of course, I wonder.

I wonder if she suspected more than she let on. Or if, like me, she hoped the story was something simpler. Appendicitis. A stubborn infection. Something with a course of treatment and a clean, uneventful end.

I don’t know. I never will. We passed through each other’s lives like passengers arriving at a late train—polite, exhausted, mutually distracted. But I do know this: she belongs to a version of my life that still believed being in a hospital meant someone would catch you if you were falling.

And I have since learned how many patients are allowed to fall through, quietly, with all their symptoms neatly documented on the way down.

I remember the shoot I was on the next day. A branding campaign—important, at the time. The CEO moved through the set like a force of nature too controlled to call chaotic. She wasn’t loud. She didn’t need to be. Her criticism arrived in the form of questions. Her praise, when it came, felt indistinguishable from warnings.

I remember trying to focus, telling myself to get through just one more shot, then one more after that. The light was difficult. The heat made my equipment temperamental. I remember feeling as though my body had become a kind of unreliable camera—slow to respond, fogged at the lens. I assumed it was dehydration. I told myself it was stress.

I did not think it was cancer.

Later that night, I woke before dawn with the unmistakable sensation of something being expelled. I vomited in the dark, quietly, so as not to alarm the dog. I crawled into the bathtub and ran the hot water, believing it might soothe whatever unnamed thing was unraveling inside me. I fell asleep there.

When I woke, the room had changed. The light had shifted. A thin blade of morning sun had crept through the window above the sink. I got out slowly, wrapped myself in a towel, and dressed like someone preparing to explain themselves again. Then I went back to the ER.

That was April 6th, 2021. And still, I believed this was something temporary. Something my body would resolve, if given time. I was, in this way, both the protagonist and the observer. Both inside the story and watching it unfold from just outside the frame.

I didn’t know what “flank pain” was. It was the phrase they used when I arrived, and so I used it too. Repeated it back, as if by saying it in their language, they might be more inclined to believe me. The truth is, I just hurt. On my right side, yes, but also more diffusely. Somewhere deep. Like something was pressing outward from inside, asking—politely at first—not to be ignored.

To my surprise, it was Dr. Shari Brand again. The same physician from three days earlier. She entered with the same quiet professionalism, and if she recognized me, she didn’t say so. She moved with the careful precision of someone accustomed to urgency, but not drama. She ordered the usual tests. Chem 8 with Hematocrit. i-STAT, Point of Care. Complete Blood Count. Liver panel. Microscopic urinalysis. Nucleated RBC. And a CT Abdomen and Pelvis, this time without contrast.

Later, when I read the discharge notes, I would come across her words again and again, each time hoping they might sound different: Your blood work and CT scan did not show any acute abnormalities. We do not see any small stones. The pelvis appeared normal.

She said it could be related to my back. Possibly muscular. But nothing to indicate spinal cord involvement. Nothing alarming, she said, or something close to that. She suggested ibuprofen, 600 mg every six hours with food. Tylenol, if needed, but not to exceed 3000 mg a day. If the pain grew worse, oxycodone was an option—with all the familiar caveats: addiction, no driving, risk of constipation. A stool softener, perhaps. A primary care follow-up in a few days. And then, almost as an afterthought: If you develop increased pain, fevers, loss of control of bowel or bladder, weakness to your legs, or worsening symptoms—return immediately to the emergency department.

I remember nodding, though I didn’t understand all of it. A UTI she decided. And so I folded the printout like a receipt. Slipped it into my bag. Walked to my car. I didn’t know then that these would be the words I’d carry forward—formal, restrained, and quietly wrong. At the time, I still believed in the system’s ability to recognize danger. I thought: if it were something serious, surely they would have seen it. And so I went home. Not reassured exactly, but instructed. And with an order for metroNIDAZOLE.

For a while, that was enough to convince me. I told myself the pain was a stubborn UTI, or the return of PCOS, or the phantom ache of grief still housed somewhere in the body. The kind of grief that settles in quietly, like dust in the corners, and begins to feel indistinguishable from illness.

I moved forward as best I could, interpreting my symptoms not as warnings, but as punishments for not coping better. I believed, in the way one believes things they need to be true, that the body could be reasoned with—that if I ignored it long enough, it would eventually quiet down. But my pain only grew louder. 

A year passed, and I flew to Las Vegas in September for an engagement shoot. The couple—gracious, radiant, owners of a well-known restaurant—fed me tandoori roti, gulab jamun, goat curry. All generous, all rich. My insides did not thank me.

I remember the bathroom at the Flamingo. It became, over the course of several days, something like a refuge. The tile was cold, white, polished, and relentlessly clean, which made the slow unraveling of my body feel all the more surreal. My reflection in the mirror—sallow skin, sunken eyes, hair damp with sweat—was unfamiliar, as if I were watching someone else succumb. I had tickets to see the Chainsmokers. Bad Bunny. Alesso. Instead, I spent the weekend rationing overpriced minibar water and hoping not to pass out before checkout.

It wasn’t the city’s excesses that did me in. It was the quiet betrayal from within. My body, in ways subtle and then not, had begun speaking a language I could no longer ignore. And in some figurative sense, perhaps even literal, I was dying. I just didn’t know from what yet.

A few days later, I found myself again in the ER—this time at HonorHealth on October 5th, 2022.

I was seen by Amber Marie McDaniel, NP. She was young, efficient, and had the sort of presence that suggested she'd been trained not just in medicine, but in holding back emotion. Her uniform was crisp. Her speech deliberate. She looked like someone who’d been taught to manage expectations before symptoms. There was no cruelty in her—just the clipped, procedural detachment of a system pressed against time.

Had I known then what I know now—had the word "cancer" even been a possibility in my mind—I would not have gone to the ER at HonorHealth. Not because the people there were unkind. But because the institution, like so many others, was not built to listen closely to patients like me. Patients with complex symptoms. Patients who don’t fit easily into checkboxes. Patients who are quietly falling apart.

This was a hospital stretched thin, serving a largely underinsured, working-class population—many of them immigrants. Many of them people who’d already been trained by life to downplay their suffering. It wasn’t malice that failed me. It was indifference paved over with protocol. By the time I saw the attending, my chart had already spoken for me.

I came in for severe diarrhea, but the RN or the PCT labeled my symptoms as “COVID-related.” There wasn’t much time to clarify. My chart was already moving faster than I could speak.

Tests were ordered: CBC/PLT with Differential. COVID-19/FLU/RSV PCR. Comprehensive Metabolic Panel. Lipase. UA with Micro, Cult if Indicated. hCG, Quantitative. Pregnancy Test. Culture, Urine. A CT scan. The CT showed no acute findings. I was told, once again, it was a UTI.

Her notes were exacting: “36 y.o. female presenting to the ED for evaluation of COVID-19 symptoms and diarrhea. Reports 5–6 daily episodes of diarrhea, dehydration, and fatigue. Denies nausea, vomiting, urinary complaints…”

I was diagnosed with GERD that day. But I wouldn’t find out until much later—when writing this, in fact. When combing through MyChart for evidence of a history I’d somehow lived through and missed at the same time. The diagnosis was buried in provider-only notes. Not on my discharge papers. Not spoken aloud. I left unaware.

The fair-skinned NP returned with more instructions: a single dose of Rocephin in the department. Then home. Continue Keflex. No explanation for the lipase level. No mention of the GERD. My body was speaking clearly by then, but the system had already decided what it wanted to hear. She told me to follow up with my PCP. She smiled the way you do when something is finished, not resolved. And then I was released. In stable condition. At least, that’s what the paperwork said.

On October 10th, 2022, I went back to the emergency room at HonorHealth. This time with a new concern—what felt like a mild allergic reaction. My face was flushed, my skin hot. More urgently, my labia had swollen to the size of beef franks, the kind you'd see in a butcher’s window. It was alarming, uncomfortable, humiliating.

I was seen by Dr. Brian McColgan. He conducted a gynecological exam and informed me that I had an abnormal cervix. His words were direct: "It could be cervical cancer."

More tests followed. Another CBC. A metabolic panel. A pregnancy test. A PCR screening for chlamydia and gonorrhea. A urinalysis. A panel for vaginitis. An EKG. And then two parting gifts: fluconazole and oxycodone—one for the presumed yeast, the other for the pain. That was it. No conversation. No next steps. Just another round of symptoms reduced to parts and handed off to medication.

Seven days later, I followed up with Dr. Lorenzo Boyce, an OB-GYN. He ran a NuSwab Vaginitis Plus panel—checked for yeast, chlamydia, gonorrhea, trichomonas. All came back negative. I had a Pap smear. Another pelvic exam.

What no one noticed then—what I didn't know to question—was that we were looking in the wrong place. They thought the bleeding and pain must be gynecological. But no one thought to examine the gastrointestinal system. No one tested my stool. No one ordered a colonoscopy. No one questioned why my diarrhea had persisted since my gallbladder was removed.

They didn’t check for rectal cancer. They didn’t check for celiac disease. They didn’t check for inflammation in my gut. They didn’t run a shield blood test—something that could’ve flagged a malignancy early.

Instead, they looked where they always look for women: the uterus, the cervix, the vagina. And when that came up clean, the story ended there. The possibility that the problem might be coming from a different direction wasn’t even entertained.

I didn’t have cervical cancer, it turned out. But I did have cancer. Just not the kind anyone was looking for.

And once again, I left with a clear bill of health and instructions to follow up with my primary care. That refrain—follow up, follow up—had become a kind of institutional lullaby. A soft dismissal disguised as care.

After that, I tried again to return to normal life. I was still in pain, but the fear was quieter now. Not gone—just muffled under the weight of bureaucracy. I began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t cancer after all. Maybe it was the mold.

The apartment I had lived in had suffered severe water damage. My belongings had grown damp and sour. My rapacious landlord did nothing. I cleaned what I could, but the spores lingered. Black mold, I later learned, can wreak havoc on the body—on the gut, the lungs, the brain. It became easier to believe the mold was the culprit. Mold made more sense than a system repeatedly missing what was right in front of it.

I told myself I just needed more time. A better diet. A new mattress. Less stress.

And so I kept going. As people do. Because when your body is speaking in pain and the world insists you’re fine, eventually you stop arguing. You learn to whisper back.

I remember fasting in the summer of 2024. There was no real reason. One day I just decided to stop eating. I called it discipline. Others called it radical. My so-called "fasting coach" checked in from afar. He joked that I wouldn't make it past two days. Then past ten. Then thirty. But I did. And somewhere in the middle of it, he reminded me that daily diarrhea for weeks on end wasn’t normal. I had almost forgotten. It had been going on so long, I’d gotten used to it. Learned how to live around it, really. I only noticed it again when the fast stripped everything else away. With nothing left to hide behind, my body finally had my attention on a microscopic cellular level.

I remember showing up for qigong in Sereno Park with David and his partner, Tracy. The sun was low. The grass was dry. I was trying to act fine. Tracy said I looked pale. David suggested I add maple syrup and cayenne to my water. Tracy asked if I’d ever had a colonoscopy. “I’m thirty-eight,” I said, as if youth made me immune. My lower stomach was twisting, sharp. I couldn’t finish the lesson.

I walked to the park bathroom—the one without stall doors, like it was made for animals, not people—and stayed there most of the hour. Tracy checked on me. I told her I was okay. I wasn’t. But I was convincing.

I went home. I vomited into a plastic Target bag while folding my laundry. I kenneled my dog. Then I drove myself to the ER.

I was seen by Dr. Nicole Hodgson. She treated my diarrhea like a minor inconvenience. I could tell by her tone—polite but dismissive. She ran a panel of tests: bloodwork, stool samples, cultures. I told her I’d had diarrhea for forty days straight. Seven to ten times a day. Sometimes it eased a bit after my period, but mostly it was relentless. No fevers. Some cramping. Nausea here and there. Two episodes of vomiting during the fast.

She took notes: Pleasant 38-year-old female presenting with diarrhea. Longstanding. Slightly improved. No severe pain. No travel. No GI follow-up.

She wrote up a list of possible causes: a bacterial infection, IBS, colitis, or something viral. The next day, the test results came back: Norovirus. A stomach bug. It would pass in one to three days.

But it didn’t.

By the morning of July 22nd, I was scheduled to photograph an interior design shoot. I felt like my insides were falling apart. I tried to find someone to cover for me—no luck. So I went. I’ve worked through worse. Fourteen-hour weddings with kidney stones. Shoots the weekend after my mother hung herself in my brownstone.

I sipped water. I moved slowly, carefully, taking photos one room at a time so the client wouldn’t notice. I remember she handed me a gift at the end—a book her neighbor wrote about black mold.

I remember thinking maybe the fast was helping flush out whatever damage the mold had done. Maybe all of this had an explanation I could live with.

I pulled out of her driveway too fast and scraped her lighted pillar. I left a note. A few blocks from home, I had to stop the car and threw up in the street. When I got inside, I ran a bath and sat there, quietly, trying not to move.

The nausea wasn’t going away. The body had stopped whispering. It was starting to scream.

I remember not being able to get out of bed the next morning. I was still fasting. Still determined to make it to day forty. Only a few more days. I had gone too far to stop. But I was still vomiting—just water, but now with black flecks I couldn’t explain. Then came more diarrhea. This time with blood. I went back to the Mayo Clinic. Back to the ER. It was July 24th, 2024.

I was seen by Dr. Steven Maher. He wore glasses that gave him a thoughtful, precise look. He seemed calm, methodical. I remember thinking he looked like someone who wouldn’t panic, no matter what he saw. He ordered another round of tests: Basic Metabolic Panel. Chem 8 with Hematocrit. i-STAT, POCT. Complete Blood Count with Differential. Liver Function Panel. Lipase. Prothrombin Time. Nucleated red blood cells.

His notes were plain: 38-year-old female presents with diarrhea. She’s been having it for months, possibly years. Seen here last Saturday. Norovirus positive. No fever now. No chills. Still having significant diarrhea.

He added that last time I’d been there, my kidneys weren’t doing well—acute kidney injury, he called it. My creatinine was up. But it had improved. And then I was discharged. Again. Told, again, to wait it out. Norovirus, they said, runs its course.

I remember sitting in the hospital chair, listening politely, holding the discharge papers like they might suddenly reveal something new. But there was nothing new. Just the same conclusion, slightly rearranged. Go home. Rest. Drink fluids. Wait. And so I did. But something in me had already begun to suspect: I was waiting for the wrong thing.

On July 27th, I was still fasting. Day forty. I’d made it. Though it felt less like triumph and more like collapse. I was dehydrated, barely able to stand. Anything I drank came back up, or worse—shot out both ends like a broken valve. So I went back to the ER. This time to HonorHealth John C. Lincoln Medical Center.

The emergency room was unlike the others I’d visited. This wasn’t Mayo. There were no private rooms, no softly closing doors. The place was overcrowded, buzzing, raw. I was hooked up to an IV in the waiting area—next to a man twitching so violently I wasn’t sure if it was from pain or something he’d taken. I sat like that for hours. Five, maybe six. Long enough for the nausea to spike and then settle into a dull, familiar rhythm. My body ached in new ways. My bones felt too close to the surface.

This was my third ER visit in a single week. Still no answers.

The reason for this visit was vomiting and nausea. But by now, that was just part of the picture. My records show they ran the usual tests: CBC with Differential. Metabolic Panel. Urinalysis. Pregnancy screening. Another CT scan.

The notes were clinical, distant: 38-year-old female. Ongoing diarrhea. Nausea. Vomiting. Right lower quadrant pain. Black mold exposure. Day forty of water-only fast.

I was seen by a nurse practitioner—Claudia Zirkus—and a GI specialist, Dr. Al-Jashaami, was asked to review my CT scan. He agreed with the plan to discharge me. No further investigations or interventions are warranted at this time. His words, not mine.

I do not believe the patient has an acute emergency medical concern requiring emergent management at this time.

Another quiet dismissal. Another clinical echo. The supervising physician, Dr. Derksen, reviewed the case. Signed off. Approved everything. This was also the first hospital that gave me a referral to a GI doctor. It felt like something—a gesture toward next steps. But when I followed up, I learned that the referral wasn’t covered by my insurance. Another door, already locked. That was the worst ER visit of my life. I left a google review that was one part scathing and one part lost connections for the hot lobotomist who pricked me with his needle.  

With forty days behind me, I started to wean myself off the fast. Slowly. Carefully. A bit of homemade broth. A sliver of avocado. A few peeled slices of apple.

But it didn’t help. I was still sick. The vomiting hadn’t stopped—just changed. Now there were dark flecks in it. And the diarrhea hadn’t let up either. I tried to stay in bed, or in the bathtub. I moved as little as possible. I sucked on fruit and threw it up five minutes later. It was no way to recover.

Two more days passed. On July 29th, I returned to the ER. Back to Mayo Clinic. This was my fifth ER visit in two weeks. I was exhausted, dizzy, weak. Standing up felt like a gamble. Dr. Paul Kozak was my attending. He seemed young, but thoughtful. He had the demeanor of Doogie Howser—like a child prodigy who’d grown into a polite adult. He listened. Or at least appeared to. He ordered labs: Comprehensive Metabolic Panel. Point-of-care glucose. Lactate. Lipase. Thyroid panel. They gave me fluids, Zofran for the nausea, and something called a GI cocktail. My nausea finally eased. I was relieved. And tired. Again I asked for a Shield test—a blood screen that can catch signs of colon and rectal cancer early. They refused. Said it wasn’t necessary.

Dr. Kozak diagnosed me with gastroenteritis, though he never said it out loud. I found the diagnosis much later again when I was writing this, hidden in MyChart. It wasn’t listed on the paperwork they sent me home with.

They also noted something called a Mallory-Weiss tear—small blood vessels in my esophagus likely ruptured from too much vomiting. I was told to rest. To eat. To follow up with a GI doctor when I felt well enough. They checked my CT scans again. Everything looked fine, they said. My intestines weren’t inflamed. My appendix was normal. No red flags. Several tests were considered but not performed. No new imaging. No CBC. No stool test. Not even another look at the virus they said I had.

Once again, I was sent home. With instructions. With Zofran. With a diagnosis I didn’t know I had. And with the growing sense that no one was really seeing what was wrong with me.. And if you don’t look like an emergency, you don’t get treated like one.

On August 16th, I met with a gastroenterologist. It felt almost accidental, like a detail the story had forgotten to mention until now. I’d been calling every number I could find, googling endlessly. Every clinic was either out of network or booked out for months. Then a call came in. A doctor I didn’t remember contacting. He said he no longer practiced in Arizona but listened as I described the fasting, the vomiting, the diarrhea. He said I should try Dr. Florin Gaidici. He gave me the name like it was a secret. Like I’d be able to walk in and say the right words and doors might open.

I called. They had an appointment within the week.

When I arrived on the 16th, I learned I’d need a referral from a primary care physician before I could be seen. There happened to be a pediatric and family clinic just down the hall—still unopened, barely furnished. I waited for them to unlock the doors. I was the first patient they ever checked in. They agreed to a walk-in visit. I got the referral. Walked back down the hall. Scheduled the colonoscopy for August 22nd, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.

Snapshots from the waiting room of misdiagnosis—forty days of fasting, six ER visits, three polyps, one rectal mass, and a healthcare system that still sent me home with a smile and a stool softener.

They wrapped me in a heated foil blanket. I remember the nurse adjusting the settings, trying to warm my hands. I remember joking with Dr. Gaidici in the pre-op room. I told him it was my first time. That I was nervous. He smiled and said he’d “be gentle”—the way doctors sometimes do when they don’t yet know what they’re about to find.

I woke to unfamiliar words floating above me—rectal mass, biopsy, suspicious. I knew words like suspicious were loaded in the medical world, but still I didn’t think it was cancer. 

There were codes on the paperwork: K529, R197—labels for the suffering I could not name. They told me I couldn’t leave without someone to escort me. But there was no one. No friend I wanted to burden. No family members in Arizona. Medical transport wasn’t covered by my insurance. $180 for a fifteen-minute drive. One way. I called a Lyft.

To satisfy the hospital, I told the nurse he was my boyfriend. Texted the driver and asked him to pretend. When they wheeled me out, I looked at him and said, “Hi, babe.” He hugged me like he meant it and I got into the back seat. It was absurd—performing intimacy for paperwork, pretending to belong to someone just so I could be released. But it worked. And in that moment, it was enough.

On August 28th, I had a CT scan with contrast. Abdomen and pelvis. Routine. Ordered by Dr. Gaidici. I waited. I wondered. But I still didn’t think it was cancer. 

On August 29th, the call came. It wasn’t a doctor. Or a nurse. It was a scheduler. I was in my car between appointments when I answered and she said she needed to book me with an oncologist.

“Whats an oncologist?” I hesitated.

She said, “A cancer doctor.”

That was how I found out. 

That was how I found out. No ceremony. No pause. Just a new appointment on my ever-filling calendar. No crescendo. No gasp. Just a quiet pivot, as if she were offering directions to a different office. And the quiet realization that everything was about to change—though nothing, in that moment, looked different at all.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer