Well, Sh*t: a true story of Cancer, Prayer, and Emotional Shrapnel

How It All Started

I can tell you the exact moment I felt the change. I was standing in the bathroom and I leaned on the counter to get a closer look at my eye in the mirror. My counter pushed against my stomach, and something inside my stomach resisted.

Something tense kept my stomach pudge (I called it 'my winter fluffyness' at school) from enveloping the edges of the counter, allowing my short torso to project my face- and thus, my eyeball- closer to the mirror for adequate visualization.

The resistance was not malleable or adjustable. It was a stiff preventative measure. It was not allowing me to get as close as I needed to do my mascara. Someone installed a hard muscle or something to keep that portion of my abdomen from being completely spongy.

I reassured myself that whatever-it-what, I didn't even want to know. Whatever that was, it could wait till I was eighty. Obviously.

I said the exact moment, but I cannot tell you when this happened. The summer of 2014? Spring of 2015? I have no idea when this occurred. I just remember this moment very clearly.

Then there is another thing that happened, which I chalked up to a hallucinatory dream.

I awoke in the middle of the night with sharp pains in my abdomen. I thought I was being stabbed to death. It was so excruciating that I sat on the edge of my bed trying not to scream. It literally felt like a massive knife being plunged into my stomach repeatedly.

I had 911 dialed on my phone but did not hit the send key.

Somehow I found myself in the bathroom, peeing tranquilly. The pain was gone and my phone was still waiting on a possible 911 call. I closed my phone and placed it on the counter. I told myself that I was having a half-nightmare. That somehow I was just a little bloated, and had imagined the pain in my partial sleeping state, clinging to the remnants of a nightmare full of violence and gore.

I eventually had to call bullshit on my own denial. I was sore the next morning from the pains, and developed symptoms for a bladder infection a few days later. There is no way that I imagined that kind of pain, on a scale of one to ten it was twenty fucking five. It was unlike anything you can imagine, unless you're really good at imagining that you've woken up in the middle of a surgery where they've sawn open your abdomen and took all your organs out and set them on the table beside the bed. If you can imagine that, you can imagine how that night felt.

And for weeks I actually believed my own lie, that it really wasn't so bad. It really was just reminiscent feelings from a bad, bad dream. Silly me.

Now came the long boring months of more lies that I told myself. That I believed I wasn't feeling a thing, I was feeling bloated. Bloating caused by allergies and a sensitive digestive system. I tried going gluten free and lactose free. I had such severe constipation it would make me sob. I would call my mom in a panic from work because I had terrible abdomen pains and couldn't figure out why. Meanwhile the bloating seemed more severe. I had trouble keeping rich foods down. I started getting really tired. I peed all the time.

I am a stomach sleeper. Was a stomach sleeper. I would toss myself on my bed and bask in blissful awareness knowing that my stomach and knees were not exposed to the nighttime. The comfort of being buried face-first in the pillow, arms tucked beneath myself, tummy protected against the mattress; miraculous.

Another 'exact' moment I can describe. Throwing myself across my mattress after work to check my laptop and grab a nearby book.

A preventive measure; the feeling at the sink was back. Something was blocking me. It was not a tense muscle. It was not a bloated tummy.