cancer season.

hi. this piece discusses medical trauma, including detailed descriptions of severe pain, procedures, and hospital experiences. it also discusses themes of mortality, cancer, and personal struggles with emotional and physical suffering. please proceed reading with caution and take care.

a bead - tiny screws - grains of rice — all things about the size of the tumor the doctors let me know they had pulled out of my stomach as my mind and body were returning to earth from under anesthesia. they didn’t actually let me know the size of the tumor at the hospital, instead reassured me that everything went fine “aside from one small tumor we removed; we’ll send it off for testing and you should have results in a few weeks. your paperwork is here, is your driver downstairs?” was i supposed to process that? i didn’t.

“do you mind if i play a song really quick?” i asked the nurse as i scrolled my spotify. “i also remembered a few more book recommendations for dr. alvarez if you can get me a post-it.” i can’t say if it was the waning propofol running through my veins or just my own stubborn need to practice total avoidance, all i know is that in that moment i wanted out of my body so badly i was trying to will myself to become nothing more than a sentient media archive in that moment. i found my song and pressed play.

made it out the chi'

if i didn't, wouldn't see today

it's a setback, everytime i see the cage

you got warfare, if you do then we can play

it got real dark, i'm like, "bro, i see the way"

bitch where by chief keef is, to me, a cathartic anthem. it came on immediately after a recent altercation with a meter maid on behalf of my friend lex’s legally parked prius, and i had no choice but to feel a little more okay about it. ready to keep it pushing. i revisit it anytime i’m in a place where i feel like i need a reminder that the light just out of my arm’s reach is still light worth reaching for. it’s a love letter to self-identity and ownership, an acknowledgement of the magic that lives inside of perseverance and resilience, and honestly, it just fucking bangs. it’s a song i can leave my body and live inside of for a few moments.

i want to pause here and explain why i’m feeling such big things about a bead-sized tumor in my stomach. it’s not the size of it but the fact that it exists at all that has me fucked up. earlier this year i was rushed into the emergency room, actively dying and making it clear to everyone around me that i was aware of that before slipping unconscious. my vitals were shaky at best; i was immediately taken back and pumped with contrast to stop my stomach from vacuuming itself, and within a few hours, i felt slightly more tethered to this plane. the doctors explained to me that i had something called intussusception, a freak occurrence with no known cause that did, in fact, almost kill me. i later explained to them that i had been in intense pain for eight hours before finally coming to the hospital - how i had managed to avoid treatment for that long without actually dying baffled and concerned them.

another important piece of context is that, when my dad died a week after he turned 50, his body was full of malignant tumors. not beads, but baseballs. when he explained his diagnosis to me he let me know that it was too late, that they could try to slow the spread of the cancer, but he had avoided it for too long — that part stuck with me. how could anyone avoid something being clearly wrong in their body? how could that avoidance change the course of so many lives? immediately following was more than a year of surgery, chemotherapy, pain, pain medication, pain, and death. watching my dad slowly die leveled me.

back to the hospital, and why i waited so long to get there. it wasn’t an intentional choice to let eight hours go by. something in my body felt wrong around midnight, violently waking me from one of the few precious hours i had been sleeping lately, a stabbing pain that overpowered me immediately and left me throwing up everything, everywhere. i was repulsed by what my body was doing and powerless to stop it; i felt possessed. at the time, i was living with an ex - it was not going well — but we had no other choice, both recently having lost our jobs. he was the closest person who i thought could help me, so i tried my best at the time to run out to the living room couch and wake him up. my best at the time was not very good, the pain so intense words barely came, my breath so ragged i could hardly get them out.

“i think something is wrong” is all i managed before bending back into fetal position on the floor, gagging. i couldn’t even see clearly, but i was desperate to communicate my pain. “it’s my appendix or something. please help me.” both pleas were delivered to a deep sigh and a mile-long stare. i was too familiar with this look. it wasn’t far off from the same one i had seen in countless other situations while trying to communicate my needs, to express emotions, to set boundaries, to confront lies and gaslighting. i was even warned about this behavior early on - from what he described as an unwell ex - when confronted with the anonymous messages i had received while on a work trip. i gave the benefit of the doubt, if you could really call it that, even though i identified with some of what was said already, so early on in the relationship. the parallels were there and only became clearer with time. i immediately started to question the validity of what i was feeling before snapping back, and i knew that if i really wanted a chance at getting help, i needed to beg for it.

anonymous messages i received in 2022

“what do you want me to do? i’m not here to support you like that anymore.” the word anymore was an interesting choice, one i wanted to argue didn’t belong — for the first time, from where i was leaning over myself, i finally saw that the support i needed was never there, and would never be there. who was this sitting across from me? “our dynamic has changed,” he continued with a finality that signaled it wasn’t up for discussion. all of my previous justifications, my assurances to myself and “our” friends that he wasn’t a bad person, just not a good person for me — went out the fucking window. a good person doesn’t see someone - anyone - suffering like that, then pause to make a quantitative choice on whether or not they’re willing to help. i felt a jarring clarity in that moment, both free from the paranoia that i was the problem and that i had just spent nearly three years losing my mind with no identifiable source, yet suddenly flooded with awareness that i was not safe. the truth didn’t hurt, but it did leave me frozen in shock. by 4 am, defeated, i simply crawled back down the hallway, took every form of stomach medication i had in reach, and tried to pass out quickly before another wave of nausea hit.

i managed to sleep through the pain for four hours until it erupted again, harder this time. it wasn’t a pain i could fight against, it was pain that was taking me away, somewhere i had never been before. i lie naked on the bathroom floor, unable to even reach for my phone. i’d like to take this opportunity to argue for the validity of siri’s existence, which up until this point had been murky for me — without it, i wouldn’t have been able to call my ex, who wasn’t home by this point, for help. it was my last attempt before giving in and calling 911. he was out getting coffee, a daily routine he rarely broke, especially not for me. i think i said i was dying and i needed the hospital, by this point i couldn’t even sit up straight. he assured me he was leaving and on the way.

i don’t remember actually getting up, getting dressed, getting to the hospital. i do remember lying on my left side on the gurney in the emergency room hallway, facing the plastic-y textured wall to avoid seeing some extremely intense shit happen at grady memorial, which it did. i remember thinking it seemed like there was another gunshot wound announcement every hour, then realizing that there were actually so many, there was an hourly update of how many were currently in the trauma unit next door. the gravity of where i found myself was paralyzing, yet none of it felt real. the problems i thought i faced immediately became insignificant, and as if pulled out from underwater, i could hear my own voice again.

i'm in the church, and i'm tryna get my soul clear

wrote my name on the wall, hope it don't smear

said "i love you" forty times, i was sincere

he poppin' out with same clothes that my bitch wear

dirty ho said i was broke, and i said "bitch, where?"

by the time the doctors confirmed to me that the intussusception was gone and that i was clear to leave, i had experienced near-death in an ER hallway, alone, after enduring eight hours of the most excruciating pain of my life, and i still had work ahead of me to figure out what could’ve caused it in the first place. i could say that my ex and his invalidation was the reason i waited so long to seek help, and it could be true. but what is also true is that i was avoiding myself and my needs. not just in those moments, but for years leading up to them, i allowed myself to shrink my identity to let someone else’s fill the room, my home, my world. when my mind and body started to push back, i just continued to ignore the screams pushing on the walls of my existence, until i had no other choice. some of my friends say it was a miracle that my body set off alarm bells, reminding me of the danger my mind tends to ignore. i want to get past the point of needing it, past the point of ignoring my intuition.

nothing was the same once i left the hospital, but in a strange way, not that much had changed, either. i hadn’t lost my safety - it was never there - but i gained perspective and realized i needed to help myself. this person’s power over me was completely gone, but i needed to regain some strength before moving forward. i trashed my life plans and immediately took two trips, on opposite ends of the country, far away from this person desperately trying to control my narrative and keep me small, getting smaller. i surrounded myself with friends i knew i could trust, and finally started healing. i inhaled the metallic textured city sounds and cried midday in tompkins square park. hid in the corners of countless bookstores looking for answers to questions i had only just learned to ask, shotgunned beer for breakfast, wrote every single day, exhaled my body empty into the shorelines. i lived every day just to feel an ounce less weight holding me down than the day before.

i don’t know if i would call the experience a miracle, but i do feel lucky to be here. being aware of your mortality is one thing, being faced with it is a completely level of understanding. awareness made me nervous, had me kicking and screaming, always ruminating on the inevitable moment. living through something that took control from me so quickly and easily made me realize that, when my time comes, i really won’t have anything to say about it. the experience lives in my bones, reverberating through them whenever the memory is triggered. turning it over in my mind, like it’s a battle to be won, is how i stay trapped. i get free by being present. i liberate myself by owning what i can - my identity and experience.

sitting here, writing this now, i still don’t know if the bead in my body was just a bead, or if it was cancer. i wish i could say that i’m at peace with waiting to find out, but i’m not. it’s terrifying. every time i think about it, i feel my mortality reverberating in my bones, reminding me how easy it could be to slip away. i try to tell myself that feeling is enough acknowledgement for now. i try to keep my focus on healing. i try to stay present. i don’t need to be here forever, i want to be free.