My Boobs Tried to Kill Me and All I Got Was Existential Clarity

Fifteen years ago, my body turned against me. One day I was living life, and the next—I had cancer. Just like that. No warning, no dramatic music, just a plot twist that felt more like a punch to the gut.

Suddenly, I was shoved into a crash course on mortality, medical jargon, information overload, and the fine art of pretending you’re okay when you’re actually falling apart.

The force of that diagnosis still exhales in my chest. And even now, I can’t breathe without it.

The day I found out I had cancer, I was sitting in a little room at the hospital with my sister. They told me to bring someone, so I knew it was serious. I just didn’t expect C-word serious. The doctor handed me a box of Kleenex that looked like it had been emotionally supporting people since the ’90s.

He started talking, but it was all static—like someone had switched the dial in my head to a dead radio station broadcasting my demise. I hoped my sister was listening.

In the blink of an eye, the world shifted—and so did I. Nobody can prepare you for a cancer diagnosis. Everything about it is honest and terrible. And it changes everything. Suddenly, I was afraid to live because I was afraid to die.

I had two kids—with a combined age of eight. And I had cancer. What??

Would I lose my hair? My sense of humor? My life?

I was only 34.

My daughter was scared of my bald head. She thought I looked like an alien. (I did.) I was scared—the deep kind, the kind that doesn’t go away when the lights come back on. Would my hair ever come back? Would I ever come back? Would my kids still have a mom? Someone help me. Someone hug me. Cue the internal meltdown. I simply unraveled.

After I was diagnosed, I went down every rabbit hole I could find trying to figure out why this happened to me. I cut out meat. I switched to natural deodorant. I threw away half the products in my bathroom. I scoured ingredient labels like they were hiding secrets. I didn’t have a family history. I didn’t have a risk factor that made sense. I searched and searched—for a reason, a root cause, something to blame. But all I got was silence. And Google fatigue.

Until then, I’d been pretty lucky. Privileged, even. My life had been relatively untouched by trauma. Maybe that’s why this hit so hard. I had no emotional calluses, no scar tissue to buffer the blow—just soft, unsuspecting optimism. And then boom.

Cancer didn’t knock. It just let itself in and took everything familiar, staring me down and daring me to survive.

Sometimes I think about the people who don’t have a village. Who don’t have a hand to hold when the pain becomes unforgiving. No one to hold their hair back in the middle of the night while their body purges itself of everything but fear. I was so lucky to have that—to have people who showed up to hold space for me. Crying, fearing, grieving, laughing, and rejoicing, day after difficult day—even when I’m sure I didn’t deserve it.

It’s wild to me that something so awful, so vulgar, gut-wrenching, and quite frankly unfair—can still somehow be life-changing in the best way. Cancer wrecked me. It cracked me open.

No armor, no filter, nothing to hide behind. Just me. Raw, exposed, and terrified.

But in that mess—in the baldness and the fear, the vomit and the dark—there was also light. There was clarity. A strange kind of shift I didn’t see coming. The worst thing that ever happened to me became the thing that changed me. Not a new version of me exactly, but a truer one. One I hadn’t met yet. Cancer nearly killed me, but what it gave me in return was a strange, unshakable awareness of what really matters.

Cancer gives you a life check you didn’t know you needed. I started to see my health through the lens of a healing prism—mind, body, and spirit. When you’re in the thick of treatment, the only way out is through. Crawl if you have to. Complain a little. Swear a lot. But try to laugh—especially on the days that aren’t funny.

All cancers are different—different symptoms, different treatments. And care is not the same everywhere. Some people go through multiple rounds. Some get no treatment at all.

I can’t pretend to understand what it’s like to walk through this without support. To carry the weight alone, without access, without answers. All I can say is: I see you. And I bow before you in humility.

Before cancer, my life was black and white. And after, vibrant color.

I don’t have bad hair days anymore—now, I’m just thrilled to have hair. There was a time I couldn’t taste anything, and now I have a fierce taste for life. And I know it sounds cliché, but I really am grateful for the little things—the sound of my cat’s feet in the morning, sunlight on my face. Belly laughs with my favourite people. The way my hands look more and more like my mother’s each year, and how my kids say “Mom” like it’s the realest thing in the world that I’m still here. I notice all of it now. How can I not?

This is not a club I wanted to be in—but survival made me a member.

We become survivors the moment we find out we have to be.

And it’s like we’re all holding the world’s secrets inside our scars—or maybe just the ones we’ve learned to live with. Cancer is life-changing. We are different people now.

I cup my palms every morning to catch the light where the cracks once were.

Fifteen years.

I am grateful.