“I thought thriving was when you finally put your life back together after cancer. My metastatic diagnosis felt like leaving the waiting room and finally entering the party.“
When Wildfire announced the theme for this issue— Thriving—I smiled. “I’ve got this.” Years after my stage III breast cancer diagnosis, treatment, and a string of clean scans, my husband and I made the difficult decision to pause treatment so we could finally have the family we had dreamed about.
Then our daughter arrived.
I thought I knew what thriving was. Until it wasn’t.
I was creating a course called Thrive from the Start. One lesson focused on facing mortality. I had written the script and recorded the audio, but when I sat down to build the workbook—the part another survivor might actually use—everything fell flat.
I wasn’t struggling to explain grief. I had arrived there.
After Jinora was born, sleep came in fragments between feedings. She would finally drift asleep against my chest, and instead of closing my own eyes, I would lie awake listening to the sound machine and the rhythm of her breathing.
My body was exhausted. My mind refused to rest.
Every ache felt significant. Every rising tumor marker felt like another warning. I buried myself in the literature, searching for reassurance. Pregnancy could raise tumor markers. Breastfeeding could, too. Most reports suggested they returned to baseline within six to eight weeks postpartum.
I held onto that timeline.
Then the numbers kept climbing. Reassurance only lasted until the next blood draw.
As the weeks passed, my world quietly divided into two futures. One with me in it. One without me.
Some days I clung to the life already unfolding—our family
photos, work I wasn’t sure I’d finish, and the ordinary moments I feared
would become memories.
I’d ordered Jinora a custom wooden keepsake box with her name burned into the lid. It was meant for the ordinary treasures of childhood—her hospital bracelet, her tiny hat, her umbilical cord, and the breastfeeding milestone stickers I’d saved.
First birthday. Sweet sixteen. High school graduation. Wedding day.
The letters I needed to write before it was too late.
But there was another future I held onto just as tightly. I imagined pulling an unopened letter from that box years later, smiling at the fear that convinced me to write it, and throwing it into the fire because I had outlived another milestone.
I never wrote the letters. Not because I stopped thinking about them. I never wrote them because I was waiting. For things to get better. Or worse. I don’t really know.
I was waiting for something to tell me which future I was living. Eventually, the waiting ended.
My first CT scan after giving birth was ordered because my tumor markers kept climbing.
I’ve always been the kind of patient who comes to appointments prepared, so when the report appeared in my patient portal, I opened it immediately. I expected reassurance. A clear scan that would send me back to my baby and prove that fear had been lying to me.
Instead, I read the report.
Multiple lesions.
Bones. Liver. Lungs.
I don’t remember reading much after that.
I walked into the bedroom where Brad was lying with Jinora curled beside him.
“The scans aren’t good,” I said.
Then I collapsed onto the bed. The tears came immediately.
Brad wrapped his arms around me while Jinora lay peacefully between us, unaware that our world had just changed. It felt like a bomb had gone off. Not with noise, but with silence. The kind of silence that settles after everything familiar has been blown apart.
We had prepared ourselves for recurrence. Maybe something in my breast. Maybe another surgery.
Not this.
And yet, somewhere deep down, I realized I had already drawn the line I wouldn’t cross.
Throughout those months, I had quietly told myself there was only one thing that would make me stop breastfeeding before I was ready.
This was it.
Metastatic breast cancer.
For a while, there was nothing left to explain away.
We grieved.
The anger built until I realized I needed more help than therapy alone could offer. I started Zoloft.
I began to believe I was worthy of healing.
The fog began to clear.
For months I had been living in imagined futures. Now there was one reality in front of me. Not the one I wanted, but one I could see.
This time, I didn’t rush into treatment. I waded in.
We resumed the treatment we’d always planned after pregnancy while we gathered new information. The liver biopsy revealed my cancer had changed, and a second opinion opened the door to a newly approved treatment.
For the first time in a long time, hope wasn’t something I had to manufacture.
Before I started the new treatment, we repeated my scans.
The report described my liver as having innumerable new lesions. I stared at that word.
Innumerable.
It felt impossible to imagine that my liver could ever recover from something that sounded so absolute.
One evening Brad looked up how long it takes a liver to regenerate. “About five months,” he said. I smiled. “Then in five months, my liver will be healed.”
Neither of us knew whether that would be true. But it was the first future we had imagined together since my diagnosis.
Treatment didn’t erase the fear overnight.
One infusion. Then another.
Between appointments, I learned that healing wasn’t just treating cancer. It was caring for myself—quieting my mind and finding my way back to the present.
My blood work began to improve. Each result felt like another answered prayer.
Still, I held my breath until the next scan.
When the results appeared in my patient portal, I opened them immediately. Instead of searching for bad news, I found myself stopping at two words. Interval resolution. Then another. Stable. I read them again.
“It’s working!” Brad wrapped me in a hug, and we both cried. Not because we were hoping for a response anymore. We were experiencing one.
For the first time in months, I wasn’t reading to find out how much time I had. I was reading to imagine how I wanted to spend it.
The urgency to write those letters disappeared. Not because cancer wasn’t serious. Not because I believed I was cured.
I had treatment. I had options. Most importantly, I had time.
Time to know my daughter before wondering how she’d remember me.
Time to let her keepsake box become what I’d always hoped it would be.
I thought thriving was when you finally put your life back together after cancer.
My metastatic diagnosis felt like leaving the waiting room and finally entering the party. Not because cancer is a gift. Not because suffering has meaning.
But because I stopped waiting for certainty before giving myself permission to live.
I thought metastatic breast cancer would take away my permission to imagine a future. Instead, it gave me permission to live in one.
I don’t know where my story will end. Some women get years. Others get decades.
But for the first time, I realized I didn’t need to know the ending to keep living it.
I’m not finding my way back to the version of thriving I had before.
I’m finding my way forward to a new one.