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‍My stomach sank a little every time the numbers changed on the outdoor temperature screen. I was excited about the trip, but I was dreading leaving the air-conditioned bus. My boyfriend and I were heading south to meet with friends for a weekend of camping and swimming, a tradition stretching back more than 20 years that I was determined not to miss. At least that was the plan.

The white and yellow houses announced our destination, a village on Alentejo’s coast. I stepped out of the bus, and the hot dry air filled my lungs and burned my skin, triggering a hot flash that radiated to my now crimson face. We were in the middle of a heatwave, and it was my first post-menopausal summer.

‍I was sitting on my patio with coffee in my Hello Kitty mug when I decided I might want to have sex again.

Not eventually.

Not theoretically.

I mean the actual kind.

With another human being.

This probably isn’t how inspirational metastatic breast cancer stories are supposed to begin, but after eight years of cancer, I’ve earned the right to skip the inspirational part.

‍‍My husband and I climbed into the car on a gray-sky Friday morning, reflexively starting the engine and buckling our seat belts. He pushed the clutch to the floor putting us in reverse, even stretching his arm to my headrest while looking over his right shoulder before he froze, looking at me. I stared back dumbfounded, unable to answer the question I saw on his tear-stained face: where do you go after you find out you have cancer?

‍‍I have always taken issue with the word thriver being used to describe those of us with metastatic breast cancer. I prefer hostage or lifer. Thriver is too loaded, too wellness-branded. It sounds like green juice, gratitude journals, and photos of women in headscarves smiling into the sun. It sounds like something people want for cancer patients because it makes everyone else feel better. I have MBC, and I’m not interested in pretending this is fine. But if thriving means refusing to disappear from my own life, maybe I do understand it.

‍Sunnyside is a hive of activity on Wednesday evenings in the summer. Upbeat music, shouts, and cheers echo from the beach volleyball courts. Children splash along the shoreline. Dragon boat paddlers chatter excitedly on their way to and from practice. Locals take it all in as they stroll along the boardwalk or relax with friends at the beachside restaurant. The skyline of Canada’s largest city dominates the horizon to the east, but where we are doesn’t really feel like Toronto at all.

‍Just before the diagnosis, we are on Kaua‘i for a short trip. I book a massage at the hotel, and as the therapist begins working on my arms, nearing my shoulders, then my left armpit, I surprise both of us as quietly I begin to cry. I’ve never cried in a massage. But I can’t seem to stop the tears from running down the side of my face. She tells me, gently, that this is a natural reaction. Perhaps the body has something it needs to release. A few days later, back at home, I had my biopsy. Shortly after, I learned I have breast cancer. The cancer just so happens to be on the same side of my body that triggered the tears.

All of a sudden, I realized I had stopped looking at my body. Not out of vanity, but out of distance. Somewhere along the way, it had become a thing I carried—not something I truly lived inside. It wasn’t intentional, nor an act of rebellion; it just… happened.

In the years after my diagnosis, my body became a vessel—something I moved through but no longer inhabited, carrying me from one shadowed place to another. I didn’t want to look at it. I was angry at it. It had betrayed me, hadn’t it? Grown something inside me that could take me away from my children. Altered itself without my permission. Changed the trajectory of my life in ways I could never undo.

So, I stopped listening.

White patient gown. Blue paper hairnet. Tall socks with the grippy things on the bottom.

At best, I probably look like a 3.

But I rubbed my breast anyway and made eyes at my 10 of a nurse.

At least, I think he was?

I’d have to ask my husband to confirm.

Because he was also there.

(Probably) not caring, as I hit on this medical professional.

Did I mention I’m on drugs? So many drugs.

‍It was a warm June afternoon. I was in my new therapist’s carefully curated, sunlit room. It was our first session. After I had given her an outline of my cancer story, and she asked me when it was, I had started to feel well.

I groped for an answer I knew wasn’t there. I stared at the window, as if the answers to this question were hidden somewhere in the white venetian blinds. They were not. The truth, I quietly realized, is that I had not been feeling well, had not been living well. When I went back to work full time two years ago, I gave everything I had—and more that I didn’t, to my work, grateful to be alive. Ignoring my body. I had recovered enough to function. But four months ago, I started having debilitating panic attacks at work.

The river was frozen, massive chunks of ice floating silently between the large boats that sat in the river separating my hotel from the touristy shops across the way; the ones selling homemade dish towels, chocolate balls covered in sprinkles, and pomegranate juice. Stockholm in the winter shared the gray skies of the East Coast cities I was used to, but there was an understated glamor threaded through the cold winds, every window above the sidewalk revealing a curated cozy interior, heads bent over books placed under glowing table lamps, candlelight flickering on the sills.

I was there for a medical conference, sent overseas by my job to present an academic poster.

The tears are streaming into my barely edible “chicken casserole” and mashed potatoes on the overnight flight to Heathrow. My thumbs are raw and bleeding—a horrendous habit of skin picking I have not been able to break since I was five, always exacerbated by stress. The flight attendant notices my puffy eyes and pours me a second round of cheap prosecco, brimming over my plastic cup, just like the tears down my face. In her proper British accent, she whispers, “Enjoy, darling; get some sleep.” It’s as though she could feel my grief, my heavy chest and broken heart; the pit in my belly; the breath that is stuck.