Category: Origin Stories

Some of The Weird Things I Did – part 1

The doctor sent me home with a picture of my tumor. It reminded me of the hamster for the Quizno’s commercials from the early 2000’s. But it didn’t feel like giving my enemy a face so I could focus my rage…it felt like only a silly dork like me could have such a silly looking dork tumor. So I spend sometime with that strange feeling. I didn’t expect for the cancer to feel like an indictment of my personality.

Every couple of days I woke up in the middle of the night with a start, sweating and scared. I would think – I can’t believe I’m pretending to have cancer to get attention! That’s crazy! And I can’t believe all these doctors are going along with it! Am I an amazing actor? Then I would remember that it was all true and that it was the Australian woman in Apple Cider Vinegar who made it up for attention. I was the person who pretended to have horrible hemorrhoids to talk myself out of going to the doctor.

I apologized to everyone I told. That doesn’t actually seem weird, but I know other people think it’s weird. The reality is a diagnosis like this changes a lot of the lives of the people around me. I’m not the only person who felt like everything they thought they knew about adulthood got turned upside-down. And Tom, and Onyx, my parents, and my in laws, and my best friends all have their own journey to take on now.

I Have Cancer

I knew something was wrong for a while. I felt strange. I had symptoms. But it was very easy to make excuses: I was working out a lot then my family went through some very difficult times then I got covid. And you know how times goes along so quickly, I was going to take care of it one of these days.

I finally went to my doctor and told him what was happening and we scheduled a colonoscopy as quickly as possible. He was acting very calm, but I was a year late. While Tom drove me to the appointment I turned to him and said, “what will we do when we find out I have cancer.” He told me not to joke about that, and we’d find our way through it.

I woke up to the anesthesiologist saying to then use, “it’s cancer.” I started crying and said “did you say I have cancer?” He said “I’m sorry” and went to get the doctor and my husband. They knew just from looking that it was cancer, and we talked briefly about what to do next – all under the assumption that it was colorectal cancer.

But the biopsy was inconclusive and went out to the Cleveland Clinic. It took ten days to find out that I have mucosal melanoma.

And everything changed. My life came to a standstill.