The year 2013 blew into my world like a whirlwind. And it was destined to alter my personal landscape forever, not to mention the lives of the people I knew and loved. I turned 58 early that year, and the numerologist in me realized right away that those two innocent numbers—five and eight—when added together, equaled 13. I had little doubt that 2013, for me at least, was going to be a year to reckon with.

I had always been a healthy person. I prided myself on it. Other areas of my life were far more precarious—I couldn’t find direction regarding work, and I slogged through decades of low-paying, entry-level jobs; I couldn’t find someone to love me, and I slogged through decades of incompatible short-term relationships; I often couldn’t accept people “on their own terms,” so friends forever came and went; and I moved from one small, messy apartment to the next—but my health was usually pretty darned good.

I wasn’t obsessed about it—but I’d been a vegetarian for 40 years! And since I was one of the rare folks who’d never had a driver license, I spent a lot of time walking, and I loved it. And despite this, I was still vigilant. I had a physical exam every year, dental cleanings twice a year, and regular visits with the ophthalmologist to monitor the health of my less-than-stellar eyes. But the one thing I pushed the snooze-button on was the one thing that would come back to haunt me.

When I turned 50 in 2005, my doctor began recommending a colonoscopy. At first, I would tell her, “Oh yes, I’ll have to do that.” But as the years passed—literally, years—I would say, instead, “I just don’t want to.”

Why did I resist? I dwelled on the potential risks of the test itself, rather than what might happen if I were actually diagnosed with cancer (a possibility that never entered my mind). I also started catastrophizing the prep procedure—and in the meantime, the years passed uneventfully. Or so I believed.

In January 2013, I traveled to Portland, Oregon, to see my mom and my brother for my birthday. I took Amtrak, my favored mode of transportation—and I spent the 18-hour trip rocking away on the Coast Starlight in my tiny roomette.

It was a good visit—as always too fast—and the night before I left to go home, my stomach began to bother me. I assumed it was something I ate, or the anxiety of traveling, but something was brewing down there and, as the saying goes: the shit was about to hit the fan.

I returned to work on Tuesday, January 29, after a couple of weeks away. The week was uneventful, except that my stomach continued to bother me. When I left for the day on Friday, February 1, I wished my co-workers a nice weekend, and went home. I had no idea at all—why would I have?—that I’d never return.

Over the course of the weekend, I went to the Menlo Park Library to return a book. It was a new nonfiction best-seller about a physician’s near-death experience, and how that instilled in him a certainty of the existence of Heaven. My own feelings on the subject were a belief in a Creator, but I wasn’t sure about an afterlife. My father had died a little over a year earlier from Lewy body dementia—was he still somewhere, hovering? I always wondered.

I also saw a matinee and had lunch at Round Table Pizza. For me, it was the usual ho-hum weekend I generally had. But, looking back now, I wonder if I would have spent that time differently, had I known what was lurking like a ghoul around the corner.

My business-as-usual weekend changed when I went to bed on Sunday night. My stomach felt funny. I could hear strange, sloshing sounds inside my belly. What was this—was it the peppers on yesterday’s pizza? I remembered reading that peppers are supposed to be difficult to digest. Though uncomfortable, I wasn’t overly concerned, but I called in sick on Monday morning just to be sure I was OK.

I felt ill all that day. My appetite was poor. That night, again, I had the sloshing sensation in my stomach—but also a disturbing twisting in my belly that, though brief, was still frightening. When I still felt ill on Tuesday, I decided to go to urgent care. The doctor there said I likely had a stomach flu. She suggested I continue to rest and eat lightly, but that if I wasn’t feeling better in a few days I should return.

The uncontrollable hiccupping started on Wednesday. Whatever was wrong with me seemed to keep morphing. The symptoms were strange and didn’t add up. I was hardly eating, and I felt weak and tired. I slept a lot. I called in sick the entire week.

Still hiccupping and feeling strange on Saturday morning, I reluctantly decided to go back to urgent care, despite the trek I’d need to make in the February cold. I showered and shaved and dressed and made myself a bigger breakfast than I’d eaten all that prior week. I think I had scrambled eggs, toast, and juice. In retrospect, I imagine I would have savored that meal more if I’d known it was to be my last for several days.

I bundled up in my parka, slung my new black vinyl purse over my shoulder (mom’s birthday gift to me last month), and braved the cold at the bus stop on the corner of El Camino and Roble Avenue. It was a short bus ride to the depot downtown, and from there I walked to the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, where I had been only four days before.

The urgent care lobby was practically empty. I checked in, took a seat, and my name was called only a few minutes later. I was brought to a large room and told to lie on the gurney. The doctor appeared—a short, middle-aged man with a dark mustache and a white coat. He had a kind face and a patient manner, and I trusted him. I explained my symptoms and he examined me. “Hmm,” he said when he pressed my belly, which at this point was hard and distended. It hadn’t been on Tuesday.

The hiccupping concerned him. Of course, I was worried—but not overly so. He would find out what was wrong with me, fix it, and send me home. Of that I was sure. “I want to run some tests,” he said evenly, not tipping his hand.

The doctor ordered blood work, a urine test, a chest X-ray. At one point he thought I might have pneumonia—the possibility of which alarmed me—but it was quickly discounted. He said we’d just have to wait for the results to come in.

Though my brother, Gary, and I hadn’t been getting along well just then, I knew instinctively that he was the one person I wanted to call. Not long before, he had gone through his own medical mystery—a cyst on his kidney that sent him to the emergency room on Christmas—but that had ended well. On the phone, Gary was calm, sympathetic, pragmatic. He told me to try and relax, and to keep in close touch.

So, I lay there, waiting for test results, listening to the murmurings of the patients in neighboring cubicles. I was bored and tired, and I wanted to go home to my little apartment on Roble Avenue. But I wouldn’t see my apartment again for nine days.

After I had been there about three hours, the doctor reappeared. We looked each other in the eye. He told me he wanted to do a CT scan.

“Uh-huh,” I said, not really knowing what that was.

“I have to tell you,” he said, “this scan can cause you to get cancer in twenty or thirty years.” I did the math quickly—at 58, I could probably roll those dice. “OK,” I replied.

My calm was beginning to fray. When a nurse appeared with a traveling cart holding six tall paper cups filled with orange liquid, I blanched. “I need you to drink one every fifteen minutes,” she explained. “I’ll be back in about ninety minutes to get you ready for the scan.”

All that liquid was daunting—and I got through only four cups. Eventually, a nice orderly arrived and wheeled my gurney slowly out the door, down a long hallway, and into an elevator. It was very cold down in the lab where he got me set up for the scan.

In my memory of that event, I went into the machine only up to my chest or so, but I was told afterward that I would have gone all the way in. I had to hold my breath, the scans were taken, and I was returned on my gurney to my cubicle upstairs. I thanked the orderly and never saw him again.

And I waited. It seemed a long time until the doctor poked his head in. He sat on his little round stool.

“You have a mass on your colon,” he said matter-of-factly. “Do you have a hospital you like?”

I stared at him, unsure what he was getting at.

“Well, I had a hernia operation twenty years ago in San Mateo,” I began.

“How do you feel about Stanford?” he asked.

“Yes, Stanford is very good,” I said, frowning. “Are you talking about surgery?”

“Oh yes,” he said emphatically.

“Oh. All right.”

It was starting to sink in slowly, giving me a queasy feeling. But there was lots of time to mull and muse while I waited for the ambulance to come for me. I was being taken to nearby Stanford Hospital—for surgery!

All that followed happened very quickly. It was a short ride to the hospital, and I was wheeled inside. Before I knew it, I was in a bed in a hospital room. A doctor appeared—and I liked and trusted her immediately. As she explained that I would be going into surgery in about 40 minutes, I knew that it would turn out all right. I wasn’t fearful, which shocked the bejesus out of me. After a lifetime of fretting about the terrible things that could happen to me, here was one of the worst imaginable—and I wasn’t afraid.

I called Gary right away and brought him up to speed. He stayed calm and confident. But I know my brother, and I knew that inside he was feeling the fear that I, inexplicably, wasn’t.

The last thing I remember was being introduced to the anesthesiologist. I had never had general anesthesia and was probably more afraid of him than of the surgeon. What if I had a bad reaction? What if I didn’t wake up? But what choice did I have? I must have signed the papers granting permission to anesthetize me, though at that point I was in so much shock, much of it was a blur. I do remember thinking It’s Saturday evening; I should be home, taking a bath or reading a book.

I was taken to surgery around 6:30 p.m. What was supposed to take a couple of hours ended up taking four. By the time it was over, they had removed my entire descending colon, my appendix, and some lymph nodes to boot. As an added bonus, I’d been given a colostomy, and I would discover the stoma in my abdomen several hours later.

When I surfaced again, I was in a big room and there were two young women with me. One was asking me questions. I was answering, but I also felt like I was dreaming and needed to wake up.

I drifted in and out of consciousness for a while, but by around midnight I was awake and able, once again, to distinguish between dreaming and reality; I knew where I was and what had happened.

It was dark and quiet. I had just had cancer surgery. But I was alive.

I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

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