i wish i could live through something
on the scariest week of my life that happened a couple weeks ago
Picturing the saddest scene of wearing bedsheets
And two pats on the back, it just takes time
It’s getting late, since when did taking time take all my life?
– “Just For Today”, Clairo
When I first watched Lady Bird in 2017 at a naïve and impressionable sixteen years old, there was a specific line that stuck with me; one that I’d find myself mentally repeating or quietly muttering during lulls of boredom or moments of mundane exhaustion: I wish I could live through something.
This line is said within the first ten minutes and is quickly glossed over, but to me, it seemed to echo in my mind throughout the entire film, and even as the screen turned to black. I actually think my desperation for any kind of excitement to occur in my life caused the sound to continue to bleed into the years that followed. The script is full of memorable lines, but this one always seemed to resonate with me more than others, because at that point, I had led a life that was generally catastrophe-free. And I promise I don’t mean to sound ungrateful — I actually wrote a whole other essay last year about this exact personal phenomenon of being the lucky kid that you can read here if you’d like. I just hadn’t really experienced much at all, whether outrageously exciting or devastatingly tragic. I just wanted something to happen to me. Anything.
Remember when I said that we’re always just waiting for something to happen? That the second we finish waiting for one thing and get some answers and resolution, something else immediately comes up? Everyone constantly talks about how things can change within the blink of an eye, but that always came off as a corny, dumb cliché until it actually happened to me. That’s how most clichés feel until you experience it yourself. How else did you think they became clichés in the first place? I thought about all of this, about the concept of waiting and the never-ending cycle of problems making themselves known at the absolute worst times possible, as I lay in my hospital bed, admitted overnight for the first time in my life.
The thing about not having experienced many real hardships is that you don’t know how to react when it finally occurs. It’s a blessing, obviously, but also a curse. I kept thinking about how my life had been generally free of genuine catastrophe, as they ran test after test, scan after scan. The worst things that had happened to me were breakups that felt earth-shattering at the time but now seemed like brief interruptions in an otherwise comfortable existence. I had cried over jobs I didn’t get, over friends who stopped calling back. But those were disappointments, not necessarily tragedies.
This was different. This was my body betraying me in a way I couldn’t understand. Even now, two weeks out of surgery, I still can’t really understand it. When the stomach pain started two weeks ago, intense enough to send me to the emergency room, I hadn’t expected them to say they’d found a significant mass on my left ovary. Large, they said, with both solid and liquid components. A cyst and a tumor together, potentially cancerous. I tried to think of other people I knew who had gone through something similar, but couldn’t come up with anything. I was supposed to navigate this myself now, with no experience to guide me through it.
I felt like I was learning a new language in real time, one where words like malignant and pathology carried a weight I had never felt before. Everything felt both too real and not real at all. All I could think about in the moments after they broke the news was how I used to want so badly to live through something; for something huge to happen to me. And now something was, but all I wanted was to go back to how it used to be. I just wanted to be sixteen and naïve and bored again.
The first OB-GYN doctor assigned to my case seemed unconcerned about the solid part. Laparoscopic procedure, she said. Back to normal in a week or two. I could go home with pain medication and call in the morning to schedule surgery for later that week. At the time, this seemed somewhat reasonable. The narcotics made everything seem so. The next day was different. The pain was constant and overwhelming. I couldn’t even sit up or get out of bed without guttural, agonizing wails escaping my lips. When I called to schedule surgery, they would only let me book a pre-op appointment, which was frustrating because I was told to call to schedule an actual operation. I went back to the emergency room the following morning because I couldn’t do anything, even scoot on the couch, without experiencing what felt like my body tearing itself apart.
In the car with my dad on the way back to the ER, I made sounds I had never made before. Every bump in the road sent waves of pain through my body. I heard myself whimpering and felt embarrassed by the sound, wanted to stop but couldn’t.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. Even talking hurt. “I’m really trying not to be dramatic, but I can’t stop.”
“It’s okay,” my dad said, eyes still on the road. He kept driving, focused on getting me to the hospital as quickly as possible. I watched the ETA on Apple Maps and tried to will the minutes to decrease faster.
At the emergency room, I begged the doctor there to get a surgeon to remove the cyst immediately. She contacted the first doctor, the OB-GYN that saw me two days before, who had scheduled my surgery for Monday, May 12th. It was Monday, May 5th. Seven days felt impossible. There was just no way I could wait a week. Not with this much pain.
I started crying in front of the emergency doctor, which wasn’t something I normally did with people I didn’t know. I could usually maintain some dignity, some composure, but not this time. I had no choice but to let the doctor see me at my most desperate.
“I can’t wait that long,” I managed to choke out through tears.
“Since there’s no rupture or torsion, it’s not considered an emergency,” the doctor replied. Later, the surgical pathology would show massive torsion. She had been wrong. “What we can do is admit you to the hospital and have the doctor come and talk to you, re-examine the situation, and see if she’d be willing to pass you along to another surgeon who can do it sooner.”
So that’s what we did. They admitted me to the hospital to wait for the first doctor to return and re-examine my condition. When she finally came to my room, she said if she were to do the surgery, we would still need to wait until the 12th, but she had contacted a colleague who could perform an emergency surgery the next day. Of course I said yes. At that point, I would have agreed to let anyone operate.
The next morning, the second doctor came in. I expected to be taken to surgery, but instead he told me he was passing my case to a specialist. A gynecologic oncologist. The mass was probably benign, he said, but they couldn’t assume that and proceed without the proper expertise. If it turned out to be cancer, he wouldn’t be the right person to handle it.
I started thinking about waiting again — what else could I do but think at this point? My body had become weak, frail, and quite frankly, something I couldn’t fully trust. Before all of this, my anxiety had been entirely consumed by my master’s comprehensive exam. I had been refreshing my university email obsessively, waiting for results that were supposed to arrive any day now. The anticipation had felt enormous then, like my entire future hung in the balance of whether I had passed or failed. Now, lying in this navy blue patterned hospital gown, I realized I hadn’t thought about the exam in over twenty-four hours.
The shift was so complete it startled me. How quickly one crisis could crush another, how the thing that had kept me awake at night just days before now seemed almost non-essential in comparison. This was my central anxiety now. Whether I had passed that examination or not suddenly felt irrelevant. I had never experienced this kind of shuffling in priority before, where something that had felt life-altering became background noise overnight. There was something both humbling and terrifying about it.
To see the gynecologic oncologist, they transferred me to a different branch of the same hospital. Only fifteen minutes away, but the ambulance ride felt endless. Every bump sent waves of pain through my body, and I found myself counting the minutes, trying to breathe through each jolt. When we finally arrived, they confirmed I would be having surgery in two days. For real this time. The nurses kept telling me I had nothing to worry about because this doctor was regionally renowned, very good at his job. I tried to believe them. I had to.
Since this was my first surgery, and a major one, the nurses let my mom stay with me overnight. She stayed for five nights, every single night except the very last one. I had never felt so helpless, so completely dependent on another person. Sure, if my mom hadn’t been there, the nurses would have taken care of me, but it wouldn’t have been the same.
“After all, a girl needs her mom,” one of them said, when we asked if she could stay.
My surgeon and his PA came to see me the next day to explain the procedure. It wouldn’t be laparoscopic anymore because of the size of the tumor — fourteen centimeters, about the size of a large grapefruit. Instead, it would be an exploratory laparotomy, an open surgery requiring a large incision from the middle of my stomach down to my pubic bone. Along with the cyst, I would lose my left ovary, left fallopian tube, and appendix. He assured me that preserving my fertility would be his top priority. I wanted to feel confident, but I was scared. I kept thinking about how I had no reference point for any of this. I didn’t know what recovery would feel like, how long the pain would last, whether I would feel like myself again afterward. I was twenty-four years old and my body was about to be opened and parts of it removed, and I had absolutely nothing to compare it to.
Day in and day out until the operation, the only thing keeping me feeling relatively normal were the pain medicines they were administering to me through my IV. I learned to reduce my pain into numbers from one to ten, and that I had adapted to existing at a baseline of five. The weird thing about this numerical system of identifying pain is that when you experience it at brand-new, higher levels, it suddenly clicks just how dramatic you had been in the past at your previous threshold, whether that’s physical or emotional. It’s like as life goes on, our limits keep getting pushed more and more, and we realize we’re actually more resilient than we think we are. I definitely didn’t think I was this tough. But apparently I am. It’s scary to know that my boundaries, in terms of pain, are actually much wider than I initially thought, but it’s also sort of an empowering realization to make.
I didn’t have my phone with me when I was being wheeled into surgery, so I wasn’t able to obsessively check my email again about the results of my exam for a little while. Later on, around 1 a.m., groggy and still reeling from general anesthesia, I still remembered to check one last time before I knocked out for the night. Turns out, when I was being taken in to be prepped for surgery, within ten minutes of me leaving my room, I had gotten an email from my program’s graduate coordinator letting me know that I did it. I passed. I might’ve just been sliced open, but at least I officially earned my master’s degree. You win some, you lose some.
If I had to search for a silver lining in my medical scare, I think I would have to say that the whole situation helped relieve me of some of the mental torture I had been putting myself through in anxiously waiting for results. Sure, it got swapped out for something a lot scarier, so it didn’t exactly help, but it definitely took my mind off of it. And maybe deep down, I knew I needed that, after having the past several months revolve around it as my main source of stress.
While I think I lean more toward being a Type B person, my brain still likes to function in terms of lists and rankings and other forms of categorization. And for some reason, it does this insane thing where whenever I go through something difficult or something terrible or painful happens to me, I refer back to whatever the most recent worst thing ever was and wish I was back in that moment instead. Because nothing could possibly be as bad as what’s happening to me right now. I’m not really sure what I’m trying to say here exactly, but hopefully someone will understand. I don’t know how else to describe it. Like if I knew things were going to be this painful, I would’ve gladly braved the storm of the last worst thing to happen to me. In fact, all the way down here at rock bottom, the last worst thing to happen to me almost seems like a walk in the park. I’d rather be anywhere but here.
On Tuesday, I went in to see my surgeon again to get my surgical staples removed. For the two weeks I had them in, I tried my best not to look at them, because I don’t do extremely well with that sort of thing. When I get my blood drawn, for routine bloodwork, I can’t even look at the tube transferring my blood into the little cylindrical container. There were about fifty staples, compiled in a mostly-straight line that started a few inches above my belly button, all the way down to just above my underwear. I felt like Frankenstein. They were uncomfortable and made me feel less human somehow. Getting them removed, and then going over the final pathology with my surgeon — where he told me it was completely negative for malignancy — made me feel one step closer to being myself again.
“After we finish taking out these staples, you’re all done with me,” the surgeon told me, grinning, as his medical assistant continued to pluck them out one by one. “Everything should heal right up soon.”
“Cool. Awesome.” I couldn’t get myself to say more than this, but I was grinning right there along with him, so hopefully the emotion behind my few words came across.
“I’m happy with how it looks. Are you happy?”
I wanted to say more, wanted to thank him over and over again for all his help, but all I could muster up in the moment was:
“I am. Thank you so much.”
How do you become a normal person again after your entire world just shifted on its axis? How do you function like a proper member of society and go on with your life after being sliced in half and sewn back together? The answer is, well… you just don’t. Not immediately, anyway. But you still try. You get up out of bed and take a couple steps, and if that’s all you can do right now, that’s fine. We’ll just try again later.
Two weeks ago, I couldn’t walk more than two steps without being in pain. Today, I can walk around my house with ease — for the most part, at least. And whenever I gather up just enough courage to look at my incision in the mirror, I see it: real, tangible proof that time heals.
Because while no one ever tells you just how quickly everything can fall apart, they also often forget to remind you that you have all the time in the world to put yourself back together again.
I’m totally moved by this piece. Your vulnerability is so powerful, and I’m wishing you the speediest of recoveries 💗
oh my gosh. praying for your healing and recovery!!! reading this was a journey- experiencing it would’ve been a journey and back. all the love faith 🤍