Facebook has a peculiar little hobby.
Every morning, it digs through the attic of your life, dusts off something you forgot, and drops it in your lap before coffee.
Sometimes it is a picture of Coco, my dog, looking innocent enough to have never destroyed anything. Sometimes it is a restaurant meal I apparently considered historically significant.
And sometimes Facebook reaches into the darkest chapter of your life and says:
Hey, remember this?
Apparently, I wrote this on August 27, 2019:
“So…latest update: They are transferring me down to the surgical floor so that if the biopsy turns out positive they can go in and do surgery right away. One of my cancer markers is greatly elevated, but the dr said that could be because of the pancreatic inflammation as well. Apparently the issue is isolated to the bile duct system itself, over near the liver. 😳”
I stared at that for a while.
I don’t remember writing it. Not vaguely. Not in that hazy, oh yes, now that you mention it sort of way.
Nothing.
That may tell you more about how sick I was than anything I have ever written about those days.
Because I know now what that woman did not know.
She was very, very sick. She just had not been properly introduced to the reason yet.
Something was blocking my bile duct. My liver was protesting. My pancreas had joined the uprising. My bloodwork was abnormal, and one of my cancer markers was greatly elevated. During an ERCP, doctors took brushings from the bile duct to look for malignant cells. Eventually, I would learn those brushings were highly suspicious for cancer.
But I did not know that then.
I still believed it might be inflammation. A blockage. Something fixable. Something awful, certainly, but perhaps not the word that rearranges the entire architecture of your life.
Cancer.
Instead of surgery that day, they placed a stent in my bile duct to get the bile flowing again. I had backed-up plumbing of the sort for which Liquid-Plumr is strongly discouraged.
So they opened the drain. And we waited.
Serious illness involves an astonishing amount of waiting. You wait for bloodwork, imaging, pathology, specialists, and answers. You wait in gowns designed by someone with a personal grudge against dignity. You wait while people speak in careful voices outside the door. You wait while your body is failing and everyone keeps saying, “We’re still trying to figure out what’s going on.”
Meanwhile, you assemble information like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and no box.
Looking back, that Facebook post is heartbreaking because I can hear myself trying to make sense of it:
“Cancer marker.”
“But it could be inflammation.”
“Biopsy.”
“But maybe.”
“Bile duct.”
“Near the liver.”
That shocked-face emoji nearly undoes me now. 😳
Apparently, it was the best punctuation available, for my entire life may be about to detonate.
There should be an emoji for that. Maybe one with a hospital bracelet, a thousand-yard stare, and a deductible.
Eventually, surgery became the plan: a Whipple procedure.
If you don’t know what a Whipple procedure is, congratulations. May you remain blissfully ignorant forever.
It is one of the largest and most complicated abdominal surgeries performed. Mine lasted approximately eleven hours. Parts are removed, other parts are rerouted, and your digestive system emerges with an architectural plan that looks suspiciously like somebody lost the original instructions.
But before they wheeled me into the operating room, I needed one thing.
The truth.
By then, I knew what everyone was circling around. Cancer was no longer simply one possibility among many. Yet no one had looked me directly in the eye and said:
You have cancer.
I asked. Then I asked again.
Finally, I begged: Please tell me.
Most people might want reassurance at that moment. Tell me everything will be fine. Tell me it isn’t cancer. Tell me there has been some terrible mistake.
I did not want that. I wanted the truth.
If this was cancer, I needed to know before they put me under. I wanted my mind locked into fight mode. I needed to go to sleep knowing the enemy’s name.
Maybe anesthesia does not care whether you are spiritually prepared. Maybe cancer cells are unimpressed by determination.
But I cared.
I needed to wake up as a participant in my own survival. Not confused. Not protected. Not eased gently into it.
Ready.
Tell me what I am fighting. Then let me fight it.
So they told me. “Cancer.”
One word. Six letters. A door slamming shut on one life and opening into another.
I nodded, laid back on the stretcher, and went to sleep.
Many hours later, I woke up on the other side. Different. Rearranged. Scarred. Tubed. Sutured. Alive.
There would be chemotherapy, radiation, fear, pain, complications, more surgeries, and more scars. Eventually, seventy staples would hold together another chapter of the damage left behind by the first one.
There were days when I was brave and days when I was absolutely not. Moments when I handled everything with grace and strength, and others when I used language unsuitable for small children and offendable older people.
But I fought.
At the time, I could not imagine fighting cancer alone. I could not imagine how I was supposed to keep moving through a body that no longer felt like mine.
I had to find creative ways to carry groceries when I could not lift anything heavier than a gallon of milk. A grocery bag became a problem to solve. Taking out the trash, something so ordinary it should not require strategy, became an operation. I shopped Amazon for all sorts of solutions. You’d be surprised how resourceful a mind can be in those situations.
Nobody prepares you for the humiliations of survival. Nobody tells you that independence can disappear in inches, or that you can be grateful to be alive and furious that you cannot carry your own groceries.
And I did not yet understand what chemotherapy would take from me, not only from my body but from my spirit.
It took my strength, appetite, hair, certainty, and ability to trust a good day. It took pieces of my identity and left me staring at the wreckage, trying to remember who I had been before my body became a battlefield.
Chemo does not simply make you sick. It reaches into the deepest parts of you and asks what else it can take.
Then it takes that, too.
Facebook, trying its best to be social showed me that old post, and for a moment I looked at the woman who wrote it as though she were somebody else.
She had no idea what was coming. She did not know what the Whipple would cost her. She did not know about chemotherapy, radiation, or the surgeries still waiting years down the road. She did not know how profoundly her body would change, or that survival itself can leave scars.
She was sitting in a hospital, typing an update to her friends and adding 😳 because she did not yet have a symbol for what was really happening.
I wanted to reach through the screen and tell her:
Honey, this is cancer.
But mostly, I wanted to tell her something else. Something no doctor could promise.
You make it.
Not because it is easy. Not because you are fearless. Not because you are stronger than everyone else.
You make it because, one day, one hour, one breath at a time, you keep going.
You are going to hurt. You are going to be afraid. You are going to lose pieces of yourself you thought were permanent and spend years putting yourself back together, sometimes literally.
You will become intimately acquainted with operating rooms, pathology reports, CT scans, surgical mesh, and industrial quantities of staples.
There will be broken bits. There will be days when you do not recognize the person in the mirror. There will be nights when you wonder whether surviving is supposed to feel this much like grief.
But broken is not the same thing as finished. And you will not get through it by your own strength alone.
God will see you through.
He will meet you in the hospital room, in the fear, in the nausea, in the silence after the doctors leave, and in the moments when you cannot lift a gallon of milk, much less carry the weight of what has happened to you.
He will hold you together when you are certain you are coming apart. He will give you enough for the next step, even when He does not show you the whole road.
I didn’t understand that then.
I understand it now.
As we go into year seven, I know this survival is not something I accomplished alone. I fought with everything I had.
But God carried me when I had nothing left.
That is the part my younger self could not have imagined. Not simply that I would survive, but that survival would become more than an ending. It would become a life I could keep receiving, rebuilding, and inhabiting.
The woman who wrote that post thought she was reporting the latest development in a medical crisis.
She didn’t know she was standing at the beginning of a testimony.
She didn’t know the story would continue through pain, loss, healing, faith, laughter, setbacks, and ordinary miracles.
She didn’t know that one day she would look back and see not only everything cancer took, but everything God preserved.
She didn’t know the next update would not arrive all at once.
It would come in small pieces:
A breath. A meal. A slow walk to the mailbox.
A grocery bag carried without help. A morning that felt almost normal.
A year that became five, then six.
Six years that became seven.
And then, one day, years later, you will be sitting somewhere safe, scrolling through Facebook, and this little message from your frightened former self will appear:
“So…latest update.”
And you will finally understand what she could not.
That was not the latest update. It was only the first one.
The latest update is this:
I am still here. God is still faithful. The story is still being written.
But do not mistake survival for a clean ending. Cancer took a body I trusted and left me to live in the wreckage. It took years I will never get back. It took strength, certainty, innocence, and the luxury of believing tomorrow was guaranteed.
I am grateful to be alive. I am also angry.
Both are true.
Faith did not erase the scars. It did not make the pain noble or the losses acceptable. It did not give me back the woman I was before cancer.
It gave me enough to stand in the ruins and refuse to call them home.
So here is the latest update:
I am still here. Not untouched. Not unafraid. Not finished.
Still here.
And cancer does not get the last word.
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