Hindsight Replay

On the night of December 16, I didn’t sleep a wink.  Not a f***ing wink.  

I replayed the last two and a half years over and over in my mind, here is how it went:

“Okay, I stopped nursing Maya at the end of July 2018.  Boobs felt different but waited to see if my hormones would calm down after a few months.”

“Okay, fast forward and it's February 2019.  It’s snowing outside, I’m shoveling and I noticed both breasts hurt.  I go inside the house, I take a shower and do a breast exam.  I ask Tyler if he feels the lumps too, he does.  I call my primary care doctor and set up an appointment.”

“Now, I’m at my primary care doctor’s office.  She’s doing an exam along with a medical student.  They too feel the lumps and refer me to a mammogram.”

“Go to the mammogram and ultrasound appointment.  They complete all the images.  Have to take a few additional ones because of suspicious areas.  Conclusion: DENSE BREAST TISSUE!”

“2020 - F***ING PANDEMIC.  I go into mommy overdrive mode doing all the things.  My boobs keep hurting, I do breast exams several times throughout the year as masses are growing and becoming hardened.  I have the symptom check-list up on my phone, nope don’t have any dimpling or discharge. Shit, it must be dense breast tissue.”

“End of 2020, my boobs start tingling ALL THE TIME and feeling full and heavy.  Shit, maybe that wasn’t my IUD running out, maybe that was the cancer this whole time.” 

“Switched out IUD in January 2021, tingling and full breast feeling continued.” 

“Getting hugs from my kids and random bumps on my chest and my boobs would throb.  Boobs were constantly painful all through 2021.  My boobs must have hurt so bad because of the cancer?!”

“Yearly physical November 2nd, 2021.  I was given the choice to opt out of the breast exam but I chose to still have it.  She completed my exam in supine.  Maybe if it was done sitting she would have felt the lump?  Why did she say ‘NORMAL BREAST EXAM, JUST DENSE BREAST TISSUE?’ Why did I have to say, ‘I would like a mammogram, I have two young children and I would like to be safe than sorry.’”

“Six weeks went by and I still had not heard from anyone about setting up a mammogram.  I had to call my primary clinic to see if the order was in place.  I had to call to set up the mammogram.  Thank goodness they got me in so quickly”

“Shit. Maya and I baked our way through the pandemic, I literally fed the cancer all the sugar it needed to grow!”

After I processed the past two and half years of coulda, shoulda, woulda to death I started to think about my own death.

“F***. This cancer has had all the opportunity in the world to spread, what if this kills me? It’s going to kill me!”

The one thing in life that I have known with absolute certainty is that I was destined to be a mom.  

“What if I don’t get to finish what I started?” I thought

“I need to come up with a plan for recording videos to be shown to Lincoln and Maya for each major event.  I need to write letters for their birthdays, first partner, first break-up, graduation, first job, marriage, birth of their children…”

“F***,” my mind trails off….” I want to see my grandkids, I want to be there for all those moments…” 

“Why is this happening?”

“I literally did everything f***ing right. I nursed my babies, I thought that was supposed to protect me??? I don’t smoke, drink only on occasion. I eat healthy, exercise, manage stress, and get plenty of sleep.  There’s no cancer on either side of the family….”

“WHY? WHY? WHY? WHY?”  

And then it was morning….

Reflection —

Reading these words again — the fear, the fury, the heartbreak, the sleeplessness — feels like opening a time capsule sealed shut around a version of myself I barely recognize and yet remember intimately. The night I wrote this, I was drowning in “what-ifs,” retracing every step of the previous two and a half years, convinced that if I looked hard enough, I would find the moment I failed myself.

But now, almost four years later, I can see what I couldn’t then:

I wasn’t failing.I was surviving.I was navigating the unimaginable with the information I had.

Back then, every symptom, every missed sign, every delayed appointment became a weapon I turned inward, trying to understand why my body had betrayed me — or more truthfully, why the system had. Dense breast tissue. Dismissed symptoms. Delays. Assumptions. A checklist that told me I was “fine” because I didn’t fit the perfect picture of what cancer should look like.

I tore myself apart for not knowing sooner, not pushing harder, not being “lucky enough” to have it caught earlier. What I know now is that this is grief talking — not logic. Grief for the life I had before cancer. Grief for the years I felt were stolen from me in a single diagnosis.

And beneath the grief?A mother terrified of leaving her children.

The deepest wound of that night wasn’t the cancer — it was the fear of losing the chance to finish raising Lincoln and Maya. My mind didn’t wander to bucket lists or adventures; it went straight to planning videos and letters so my babies would still have pieces of me if I couldn’t stay. That is a kind of heartbreak only a parent facing mortality could ever understand.

Looking back, I want to wrap that version of myself in a hug. I want to tell her that her fear made sense. That her anger was justified. That every single “WHY?” she screamed into the dark was valid.

And I want to tell her something she couldn’t know yet:

She survives.She heals.She becomes stronger and softer in ways she didn’t even know were possible.

I no longer replay the past searching for the moment this all began. Instead, I focus on what grew from it: a deeper purpose, clearer boundaries, fiercer advocacy, and a profound gratitude for the ordinary days I once feared I may never see.

This reflection is not about tying a neat bow around trauma. It’s about honoring the version of me who endured it — and acknowledging the woman I’ve become because of her.