I scan the shelves of shampoo and conditioner on the back wall of Ulta Beauty and pick up a large, purple bottle, 33.8 ounces, calculating how many showers that would be. I imagine my husband, Dave, throwing away a half-used bottle after my death. I want to save him the debate. Has enough time passed to throw away my electric toothbrush? The jar of soap I got for Mother’s Day? The last bottle of conditioner? Or does he leave it in the shower for months, rings of pink soap scum marking the spot on the tub where I’d last left it. I replace the 33.8-ounce bottle with a nine-ouncer, hopeful I can outlive that one.

My relapse surprised us. After three and a half years of clean scans, we’d both thought cancer was in the past. Yes, I still had a few more years of semi-annual PET scans, but the biggest risk was over after my oncologist declared me cancer-free in March 2021.

We excitedly shared the news with friends.

***

Four months later, in July, Dave bought an ATV, a Hammerhead utility vehicle, delaying the slow creep of middle age by revisiting childhood toys. It was something his own father had done, showing up with a four-wheeler strapped to a flatbed truck when Dave was young. We spent the day doing laps around his childhood home in upstate New York, which was situated on seven acres of open field. After Dave showed us the gears and buckled our safety harnesses, my daughter and I took off; we pushed the speed more with each lap. “Twenty-five point two miles per hour!” she exclaimed as I took the turn along the front of the house. Twenty-six point eight as I gunned it toward the field. Andie laughed beside me. We spent the afternoon doing figure eights around the barn and gazebo in the back yard, drag racing down the straightaway and tearing up the yard as we roared through puddles. Mud and grass covered the sides by the time we rolled into the garage.

The following day, I noticed a tightness in my lower back as I went down the stairs. I stepped gingerly, chalking the new aches to my mid-thirties and the bouncing ATV. The pain would be better in a few days when whatever muscle I pulled recovered.

When the pain remained after three weeks, I made a doctor’s appointment. While the pain wasn’t that bad, I was annoyed by the daily ache. It had been long enough that any minor injury from the ATV should be healed, and I’d seen my mom struggle with chronic back pain since I was a child. I wanted to avoid the years of surgeries and physical limitations she’d experienced.

At the doctor’s, we went over my medical history, discussed where exactly my back hurt. Like Doctor Google and me, the actual doctor thought I had a strained muscle. He suggested I try three therapy sessions and, if it wasn’t better, to come back. I dutifully went to my follow-up appointments. The physical therapist pointed out a limited range of motion on the left side and focused on loosening those muscles. We went through strengthening exercises, stretches, and focused massage. I followed my at-home routine—stretching and icing my back. The pain lingered but didn’t get worse.

***

It takes time, I thought. And I had more exciting things to focus on. Earlier in the summer, I had been accepted into a writing workshop in Chicago.

I loved walking through the city, any city really. I liked how the air smelled salty as I strolled along the harbor front in Sydney to the bellow of a cruise ship leaving port, or the shadows along a maze of cobblestone roads in the old souk of Marrakesh, where shopkeepers spoke in rapid Arabic as the sun set behind the ancient city walls. Even though I hadn’t grown up in Chicago, I had been raised in Illinois and the shops along Michigan Avenue felt like home.

With my computer bag over my shoulder, I would walk three-quarters of a mile from our hotel near Water Tower Place to the closest Brown Line station. With an AirPod in my left ear, I listened to Crime Junkie as the morning city sounds filled my right—the thud of boxes from delivery drivers loading handcarts, and garbage trucks, metal gears grinding as they emptied dumpsters from nearby alleys. The smell of rotten food and urine caught in my nose as I walked by. I didn’t know how, but I loved this city. Now that I was cancer-free and able to think about ten or twenty years into the future, I wondered if someday I might live here. I learned to recognize the doorman, with his Michael Jordan hat, at the apartment tower where I turned left onto a charming street with brownstones and tall oak trees. What would life be like in the condo with a doorman? Or sipping wine on the small deck in the back of my rowhouse near Wrigley Field? I imagined the stories I would write, lives I would lead, but content for now to spend the week with other writers and feeling like a writer myself.

My cohort and I spent the morning discussing our writing. We talked about our projects, goals, and fears between slices of margherita pizza before afternoon lectures on the craft of writing. I had submitted a piece about telling my parents about my original diagnosis, my mother’s worry, and my dismissal of my diagnosis as serious. I was fine after all.

After our sessions, I would hurry back to the hotel, to Dave, to tell him about my day. Walking more quickly than in the mornings, the computer bag weighed on my back. There’d been no pain earlier, so by the afternoons, I blamed the weight of my computer. I would switch the bag between shoulders to get relief. Yet another cost of getting older, I figured. I was determined to wear better shoes than my Birkenstock sandals the next day, and didn’t give too much thought to the pain. Until the return flight Saturday afternoon. Dave was going to New York, and Andie and I were going home to Texas. I kissed him goodbye before he boarded and found myself loaded down with bags as my daughter and I walked to our gate. Pain coursed down my back and leg with each step, until I found myself limping under the weight of two backpacks, Garrett’s Popcorn, and the booster seat I looped around my arm. I was grateful for the direct flight.

That night, I laid in bed unable to sleep as my daughter softly snored beside me. Pain shot through my body every time I moved. After hours of late-night Netflix bingeing, I made an appointment with my doctor for Monday afternoon, two days later. I tried to pay attention to the pain, certain if only I could explain it better, we could fix it.

Numb across my mid-back, tingling down to my big toe on my left foot. Sometimes it felt like a searing pain; sometimes it was more of a dull ache. Sometimes it felt almost like nothing at all; sometimes I limped when I walked. No matter what, it shot down my hip when I sneezed.

The doctor prescribed Tramadol for pain at my second appointment and continued physical therapy. “If it’s not better in three weeks, we’ll do an MRI.” It was probably a slipped disk at worst; a steroid injection should help.

But it didn’t get better. First, I blamed it on a firm mattress at an Airbnb and sent Dave to the gas station for Advil. Then on hours in the car driving around Texas, or an ill-advised cha-cha slide after a few margaritas during a conference. I’d asked a friend, Doctor Dan, about a new sore spot on my ribs, likely a muscle I pulled rolling over in bed, he suggested. Then we both joked about me clogging up the medical system with overly aggressive tests. Neither of us thought my back pain was anything concerning.

I was desperate for relief and set up a third doctor’s appointment because physical therapy hadn’t helped. We scheduled an MRI for 6:30 a.m. Wednesday, September 15. Dave had to wait in the car due to COVID restrictions. I came out to find him asleep in the driver’s seat. I snapped a picture before knocking on the window to scare him. Four hours later my doctor called.

His voice was apologetic. “In the MRI, they found something on your liver. We’re concerned it’s cancer. And your spine, it’s not what we expect for the bones of a thirty-five-year-old. It’s not what we like to see. I’m ordering a CT scan.”

Innumerable tumors. Bones. Liver. Lungs.

Everything became before or after.

Before the call.

After the call.

***

The last time I got my nails done was before. The first time I ate buttermilk pie was after. The first time I saw the northern lights was before. But the last time I gazed at the moon was after. The last time I fell asleep without imagining my death was before. The last time I fell asleep with my daughter cuddled around me was after. The last time I ate sushi was after. The first time I wrote a living will was after.

I wanted to draw a clear line in what felt like two lives. The one I thought I’d been living, the one that was supposed to be long. The one where I’d get to watch my daughter grow up, start her own family. I’d retire and travel the USA in an RV. And now this second life with uncertainty, chemo pills and medical tests. I was thirty-five. I was supposed to have time, not tests.

I found myself looking at photos on my phone, trying to figure out when this happened. In March my scan was clear. Was the tumor growing on my liver in April when Andie and I planted our garden? Or in May when Dave and I were in Mexico, getting beach massages? Definitely by June, when we road-tripped to Michigan for a wedding.

I looked at the woman who had no idea, smiling back in a metallic cocktail dress. I wanted to warn her that there is something inside her trying to kill her.

But I am not sure what I would tell her.

She won’t be as sad as she might think. But she will still cry. She will cry when her head is strapped into an MRI machine while Alan Jackson’s Chattahoochee plays on plastic headphones that can’t drown out the thunking machine. She will cry watching the Great British Baking Show when the winner is announced. Even though she rarely cried before.

But sometimes at one o’clock in the morning, she will be sadder than she ever thought possible. She will imagine her daughter as a teenager and wonder if she will be there to appreciate the drama she’d once dreaded. She will think about rescheduling the trip to Peru for the next November and if she’ll be alive to see the sun rise over the Sacred Valley.

The first weeks after felt like months. Time was marked with a pillbox. In the morning, there’s four pills, five at night. Pain pills as needed. I didn’t know that bones could hurt like they do, this burn like lava that spreads from the center of me in every direction. I learned to keep water by my bed because everything hurts more in the middle of the night when the house is quiet, and Google only offered bad news.

I thought about my dreams. I had started grad school again. I wanted to be a writer. I had wanted to be a writer for years, but I was afraid I didn’t have a story worth telling. I was afraid of the criticism. And that felt worse than dying.

Until I was actually dying.

I thought about the book I was working on. How I thought I had all the time in the world to write it. Until I didn’t.

Everything felt urgent after the call. First to get the CT scan. And then to live fifty years of life in the next two or three years. Fifteen percent chance I’d live five years, that I’d see forty. Andie would be thirteen. I had looked up these statistics after my first diagnosis, before they applied to me. I wondered if I could both ignore and embrace those odds. To live as if they are true and hope as if they aren’t.

I dropped out of grad school; that legal studies degree seemed less important. I applied for the Boston Marathon. I couldn’t exactly run because of the tumors on my hip and femur, but I needed something to look forward to. I’d wanted to run Boston for eight years. It was exciting but I couldn’t forget the fact that April was far away in terminal time. I needed to stay healthy and alive first.

***

When I got home from Ulta, I put my new conditioner on the shelf in our bathroom. My hair has grown since I was last treated for cancer, falling just at my shoulders. I think about the pills in my kitchen and run my fingers through my hair.

“Will you lose your hair? You just grew it out.” Everyone seems concerned. And I assure them that no, I probably wouldn’t. But of all the things I am afraid of losing, my hair feels inconsequential. It seems like no one wanted to talk about my death. My hair was safer.

I turn on the shower. As I get undressed, I stare at my reflection; I press the sore spot on my ribs and wonder if I’m touching the cancer. It’s like a toothache that I can’t stop poking. My body looks normal. Thinner than before but normal. No one would know that I’m dying. Sometimes even I forget I am dying. When I am cooking dinner for my daughter or making love to my husband. Life feels like it did before.

After a few minutes, the steam fogs up the mirror, so I step into the shower. I turn the water as hot as it will go. My back turns pink as I wash and condition my hair. The mint in the new conditioner makes my scalp tingle. I stand there, breathing deeply and letting the water run over me until it starts to go cold. I dry off and join my husband in bed.

He nuzzles my neck. “You smell good,” he says, as I curl up next to him.

“New conditioner. You like it?”

He nods and kisses me. I rub my fingers on his arm, like I do every night. I love the way my skin feels against his. I think this is the part of living I might miss the most.

Share This: