The “C” Word: How a Cancer Diagnosis Became the Punchline in My Worst Month Ever

I was in my car when I got the call.

I had just left a meeting with an insurance adjuster, arguing over whether I would be financially responsible for my landlord’s incompetence. Three days after putting my father in a nursing home, the ceiling in my apartment began to leak. A month later, he was gone, and the roof might as well have fallen in. The flood in my apartment had started as a small leak in my bathroom ceiling—just a little water stain, a drip. Nothing urgent. Then my landlord hired some half-assed, uninsured roofer who thought "fixing" the problem meant power washing the entire roof for eight straight hours. This turned my tiny bathroom leak into a full-blown apartment flood.

By the time I returned from Minnesota, my entire apartment was unlivable—walls warped, my personal belongings ruined, mold blooming like some demonic houseplant I never asked for.

I thought renters insurance would take care of it.

But the insurance adjuster sat across from me, shuffling papers, shaking his head.

"Yeah, we’re not covering this."

"Excuse me?"

"Every policy has a mold exclusion," he mentioned offhandedly, referring to a line hidden away in the fine print—Property Exclusions 16. “Fungi” or Other Microbes on page 27 of my 80-page renter's insurance policy. A detail the high-profile lawyer I had enlisted to help me recover damages should have known.

As I watched the insurance adjuster shuffle his papers, a part of me wondered if this was just another test of endurance, another bizarre hurdle in a series of relentless challenges that had started to define my existence.

My entire livelihood was entangled in the contents of that apartment—equipment, records, all the tools I needed to run my photography business. With every refusal from the insurance, I wasn't just losing a claim; I was watching my future dissolve right before my eyes.

The landlord wasn’t taking responsibility, his insurance wasn’t, and neither was the roofer who didn’t even have insurance, and now it seemed neither was my renter's insurance policy.

Which meant it was on me. Like everything else in my life. I sat there, nodding, trying to absorb the absurdity of it all. Because this wasn’t even the worst thing to happen to me that week.

Sometime before that meeting but after the roofer turned my drip into a deluge, I got the call that my father had died, leaving me an adult orphan at thirty-seven years old and one without a couch.

The day I noticed the minor leak in my bathroom was the day after I’d just returned from Minnesota, where I had put my dad in a nursing home for dementia—a decision that felt like killing him in slow motion.

I already thought 2024 was off to a remarkable start—like I was channeling some serious Job from the Bible energy—so what preceded the phone call that would change my world for a second time and the meeting with the claims specialist was my unexplainable need to fast for 40 days in the desert, like Jesus.

I was sure all this bad luck could be reversed with a little cleanse.

Like just drinking water sans food, sans lemon wedge, sans ice cubes for 40 days in the Arizona summer would somehow right me with God, and He would hear my plea and turn the heart of that asshole insurance handler, convincing the man to approve my claim.

Instead, the 40-day fast ended with:

• Severe diarrhea (because, of course).

• A Norovirus that put me in the hospital.

• Doctors looking at me like I was a lunatic before ordering a colonoscopy.

And then, as I sat parked in the lot of the tea shop where I had just finished my meeting with the man from the big insurance company, sweating profusely from both the Phoenix summer heat and the sheer absurdity of my life, I answered a call from an unknown number I didn’t recognize.

A woman on the other end told me she was from scheduling and wanted to book me with Dr. Singh, an oncologist.

"What’s an oncologist?" I asked.

"A cancer doctor," she said, “you have rectal cancer” as if she were explaining something as simple as ‘podiatrist’ or ‘dermatologist.’

That’s how stupid I was.

I didn’t even know what an oncologist was.

But I was somehow allowed to run my own six-figure business.

And that was it. Just one more piece of bad news in an already shitty start to 2024.

So I didn’t cry.

I just lit a joint, reversed out of the park, and started driving down the 51 freeway, dropping fuck like breadcrumbs.

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