emme2844

End of May 2017 – July 4th, 2017

Now what?

Surgery. Chemo. Rinse. Repeat.

There’s a strange simplicity in the way it gets reduced to steps when you’re the one living it. Like if you can name it plainly enough, maybe it won’t feel so enormous.

My surgeon, Dr. Adkins, performed my partial colectomy. He removed about 12 inches of my colon, 26 lymph nodes, my appendix, and—if I’m being honest—the part of me that still believed my body was something predictable.

After the biopsy, I was staged at stage IIIb. Late stage, but still treatable. Still something to fight.

Then came the waiting.

Chemo wouldn’t start until July 5th. There’s always a gap like that in medicine—this quiet stretch where your life has already changed, but the next step hasn’t arrived yet. You just exist in it.

I learned how to wait.

Recovery

I spent about six weeks healing from surgery.

My mom came down from Wisconsin to help me. She bathed me, fed me, took care of me in ways I didn’t know I would ever need to be taken care of as an adult. She even tended to my garden, as if life outside my body still needed to be kept alive while mine was rebuilding itself.

She and my friend David got close during that time. He would tease me, saying he was going to be my future stepdad. We laughed about it, because sometimes humor is the only way to make something heavy feel light enough to hold.

Provision in unexpected places

Friends from church and work organized fundraisers to help us meet our out-of-pocket costs. My insurance had only just started the day before I went to the hospital—something I still don’t know how to fully explain except as grace. Timing that didn’t feel like coincidence.

Without that, I don’t know what we would have done.

Insurance covered nearly everything from the previous year—hundreds of thousands of dollars. The numbers were too big to fully absorb, too unreal to emotionally attach to. And still, life went on.

We owed what we owed. But we didn’t live inside the math of it. At the end of the day, money felt less like a measurement of survival and more like something secondary to it.

The harder part: recovery inside the body

Healing was not gentle.

I don’t want to pretend I handled it with strength alone, because I didn’t. There were days when depression felt close enough to knock on the door and wait patiently for me to answer.

My body was recovering, but my mind was still catching up to everything that had happened.

And then there were people—lifelines in human form.

Missy. Seyi. Deneen. Kali. Brian. Cindy. Rusty.

Each of them entered this story in a different way, but all of them became part of the reason I didn’t feel alone inside it.

Missy was battling breast cancer while also being someone who had known me long before any of this. She was like a second mom growing up—softball fields, travel tournaments, years of shared life stitched together by ordinary moments that suddenly felt sacred in hindsight. She had a way of speaking truth before I even knew I needed it. She once told me that no matter what you’re going through, you are a survivor. Every day you wake up, you are surviving something.

She is a light.

Seyi became my steady hand. She went with me to appointments, asked the questions I couldn’t think of in the moment, made sure I wasn’t drifting through my own care without understanding it. She still reads my blood work to this day, which says everything about the kind of friend she is. Everyone should have a Seyi.

Deneen, my mentor, drove hours to see me whenever she could. She helped shape me in ways I didn’t fully understand then—guiding me, grounding me, reminding me what it means to become the person God is shaping you into. And she gave the best foot rubs I have ever known, which somehow felt like its own form of ministry.

Kali and Brian were something else entirely: mirrors.

The only other young colon cancer patients I knew. Both diagnosed far too early in life for a disease that still carries the assumption of age. Kali, stage IV, fought with a kind of grace that didn’t make sense until you saw it. She could laugh in chemo chairs. She could find joy in the middle of something designed to take it away. Her faith still echoes in me.

She is gone now, and that truth doesn’t get easier to write even in memory.

Brian is my hero. He fought so hard and is a true inspiration. Since writing this blog, he has passed. Please pray for his family. Brian and I started Young Cancer Roanoke, where we created a safe space for other cancer patients, survivors, and caregivers. We met the incredible Andrea there who has truly changed my life.

Cindy is pure light. The kind of person who enters a room and somehow expands it. She has walked through her own battles—some that ended, some that didn’t, some that still continue—and still shows up with joy and wisdom and prayer. I watch her life and think: that is what resilience looks like when it learns how to smile.

Closing

These people shaped my recovery in ways I’m still discovering.

I don’t know if they realize how much they mattered.

Maybe they do now.

Community is not optional. It becomes part of your survival. You begin to take on the shape of the people closest to you—their strength, their faith, their steadiness, their joy.

If I’ve learned anything, it’s this: choose your circle carefully. Not because perfection exists, but because presence matters. Because life is built, or broken, in the people who stay.