The morning runs on rituals.
Bowel program first, because that part of my body needs to be argued with before anything else can happen. Then shower. Then protein pudding I don’t really taste. I do everything in the order I always do it, because the order is the only thing about today I get to decide.
I pack like someone going to a job interview for my own life. A thumb drive with all my imaging. A three-page profile — diagnoses, conditions, the things I need from people, Walter, the whole map of me. If a stranger is going to make decisions about my future today, they’re going to know who they’re making them for.
Semmelweis swallows the rest of the morning. Oncologist. Physiotherapist. Psychologist. Dietician. Four doors in one day. Somewhere between the second and third, the language stops being conditional. They’ve updated my chart. Cancer, not suspected. They did it to speed things along — symptoms, radiology, the math of bodies — but the speeding-along is the thing my brain stumbles over. I was supposed to have a longer hallway between not-knowing and knowing. They took the hallway away.
I cry three times with the psychologist. She is kind. I’m not connected to her yet, but she catches the shape of what I’m asking for without making me explain it: I need to be treated more like a kid than an adult when things get scary. She nods like that’s a normal sentence. Like I’m allowed to ask.
The physiotherapist squeezes my hands and tells me I’m super strong. The dietician worries about my weight, says please stay at 95 if you can, and then accidentally lets the word chemo slip from a screen before anyone has officially said it to my face. My future leaks out sideways, between two appointments, off a monitor. That’s how I learn.
I’m in just an alien-print diaper for part of the exam. I picked the alien one on purpose, because comfort matters and because somebody has to bring softness into this kind of room. Nobody laughs. Nobody flinches. Walter meets the dietician. The dietician meets Walter. It’s that kind of day.
Then the call comes later, after I’m already home, after I think the day has finished being a day.
They canceled the biopsy and I will go to surgery next week or the week after.
They know it’s cancer so they don’t want to do biopsy before surgery because it’s operable right now and they don’t want to miss the window.
Window. I keep replaying that word. Not metaphorically — literally, on loop. Like there is this narrow opening in the wall of my body where a person with a knife can still reach in and pull something out before it locks closed. And if we miss it, the room behind it changes, and the next chapter is a different chapter entirely.
They will biopsy after they cut. Chemo no matter what. The biopsy only changes the dose. Everything I thought we’d have time to talk through has been replaced with calendar.
I message Jakey. The sentence has been forming in my chest all afternoon and it finally arrives whole:
I’m going to go bald! 🥺 But I’m prepared. I have a cute hat to wear.
That is my whole day in two breaths. Terrified and prepared in the same exhale. Crying into Walter’s fur in the teepee with the fairy lights on, but already auditioning hats for a head I haven’t lost yet.
I put on a happy movie. I curl around Walter. I let the fear be in the room without trying to be efficient about it for once. Tonight I am scared, and tonight I also know this:
The team moved fast because they think I still have a chance. They didn’t slow down for ceremony. They didn’t pad the news. They didn’t wait for biopsy paperwork to dictate a calendar that the cancer is already writing.
They don’t want to miss the window.
Neither do I.
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