This Body is Bullshit

Still Running

I think people assume I’m on the other side of this by now. That I’ve healed up, moved on, turned the page. And yeah — I’m alive. I’m lucky in real ways and I know it. But lucky and okay are not the same thing, and I think I’ve let people confuse them for too long.

Here’s what nobody tells you about survivorship: it doesn’t end. The surgeries stop — eventually, maybe — but the medications keep going. The scans keep coming. The side effects don’t get a finish line. My joints hurt. My energy is unpredictable. My bones are actually losing density from the drugs I have to take so I don’t die, which is a fun little irony. And there’s this number I carry around — ten to twenty years. That’s roughly when my cancer could come back, partly because I was walking around with it undetected for two years after my mastectomy. Nobody knows where those cells went. That’s just something I live with now.

So yeah. I wake up grateful. And also kind of pissed off. Both things are true and they coexist and I’ve stopped trying to logic my way out of that.

Life doesn’t pause for any of it either. There’s work — and I work hard, probably too hard. There are bills and texts and people who need things from me. I love my people. I love my life, genuinely. But some days the weight of all of it lands on a body that’s already asking me to lie down, and I just have to figure it out anyway.

I also shop when I’m anxious. Full disclosure. I know it’s not the move. I know I should be spending on experiences and fixing my house and saving for something. But when everything feels like too much, sometimes I just buy the thing and feel okay for twenty minutes. I’m working on it. Sort of.

And underneath all of it — the work, the body stuff, the just-keep-going — I’m still grieving. My mom died in 2021, right in the middle of everything. That same year I lost Gus, my dog, who had been with me through so much of the hard stuff. My grandmother was gone before that — she was my real anchor, and I’ve never stopped feeling that absence. I don’t talk about it a lot. I just carry it.

I think I’ve gotten too good at looking fine. I’ve been the strong one for so long that people stopped checking. And maybe that’s my fault. Maybe I made it look too easy. Maybe I got so good at showing up that everyone assumed showing up felt easy. It doesn’t. It just looks that way because I’ve had a lot of practice.

I’m tired.

Not dramatically tired. Just the real, honest, in-my-bones tired of someone who has been surviving on adrenaline and obligation for years and is finally, quietly, admitting it.

I want to feel good. Not inspirational-poster good — just physically, actually good in my body for a day. I want to spend money on a trip instead of a distraction. I want my house to feel like the home I keep meaning to make it. I want to stop living like I’m racing something, even though part of me still feels like I am.

I don’t need to be anyone’s beacon.

I just want to be Molly. Whatever that looks like now.

Seven

Let me back up.

After sepsis — or “after,” in the loosest sense of the word, because I don’t think my body ever actually fully came back from it — the expanders had to come out. My surgeon decided my body was rejecting them. So back into the OR. New expanders in. That lasted a few weeks before he decided to just move straight to implants.

Technically, fine. But nobody mentioned he was going to cut me from my chest all the way around to my back. I woke up with a scar I didn’t know I was getting. My body was already beat to hell from sepsis and healing at the speed of someone twice my age, and now this. The tightness. The pressure. The constant low-grade wrongness of it.

I went back to work. I functioned. I smiled. You know how this goes by now.

At some point I noticed something near my chest. Thought it was a cyst. It had been there a while — two years, maybe. I mentioned it. Got brushed off. Everyone seemed pretty unbothered by it. Eventually I saw a new doctor who took one look and said let’s take that off.

It wasn’t a cyst.

It was cancer.

I had already had a mastectomy. The cancer was supposed to be gone. I had already done the grief work of losing my breasts, survived reconstruction, survived sepsis, tried to find some version of normal — and the whole time, for two years, I was walking around with cancer still in my body. And nobody caught it.

I don’t even have words for that. I’ve tried.

Another surgery to remove it. Then radiation — thirty-one days in a row. Then the latissimus flap, where they take muscle and skin from your back to rebuild your chest. More expanders. More drains. Another infection. Another setback. Back in for more.

Seven surgeries. Total. For breast cancer alone. That’s not counting the hysterectomy, the oophorectomy, the gallbladder. My abdomen has been cut across twice. My body has been opened and closed so many times I’ve lost count of the drains and the stitches and the mornings waking up groggy in a hospital gown wondering what was new and broken this time.

I felt like a project nobody could finish.

And through all of it, I looked fine. That’s the thing people don’t understand about this. You look fine, you must be fine. You’re smiling, you must be okay. Meanwhile my body felt foreign and tight and heavy and nothing like mine, and I was just quietly living inside it trying not to make it weird for everyone else.

This is what survivorship actually looks like. Not pink ribbons. Not bell-ringing. Not the inspirational before-and-after. It’s missed diagnoses and infection and scar tissue and side effects you’ll be managing for years. It’s never getting to feel done. It’s the next thing, always the next thing, and somewhere along the way you just stop being surprised by it.

I’m still here though.

I haven’t quit.

The Part Nobody Saw

December 2020. Diagnosed with breast cancer.

I didn’t fall apart. I made a plan.

By March 2021 I was having a double mastectomy — both breasts removed, expanders put in the same day. I thought that would be the worst of it. I thought that was the scary part.

It wasn’t.

The morning of surgery, Matt drove me to the hospital and dropped me off at the front door. That was the rule — COVID. No one allowed inside. I looked at him before I got out of the car and we both tried to be strong, and I could see it on his face. It broke his heart to leave me there. He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. I know him. He cried on the way home — I’d bet everything on it. He would’ve been right next to me holding my hand if they’d let him. Instead he went home and waited and worried and held it all together from the outside while I went in and did it alone.

That’s a specific kind of alone.

About a month later I started feeling sick. Really sick. Convinced myself it was COVID, waited probably too long, and ended up at a local ER. That’s where they told me I had sepsis.

Sepsis was the scariest part of all of it.

My body was shutting down. My veins were collapsing. I remember lying in that hospital bed thinking this is actually it — I survived cancer and I’m going to die from something else. I didn’t tell anyone how bad it was until over a year later because I didn’t want to scare them. That’s what I do. I minimize. I keep the temperature down. But I was on death’s door, and I knew it, and I kept that completely to myself for eight days while I was, again, mostly alone in a hospital because of COVID.

That experience changed something in me that I don’t think ever fully changed back.

I left with a PICC line in my arm and had to keep doing antibiotics for days after discharge. And that was just the beginning. My plastic surgeon — let’s just say he disappeared when things stopped being textbook. When I became a complicated case, he became suddenly unavailable. His PA did a flush in the office that didn’t work. Another surgery. New expanders. More drains. More everything. That surgeon eventually cut me from my chest all the way around to my back, which I was not prepared for and took forever to heal from — my body doesn’t heal fast on a good day, and this was not a good day, or a good month, or honestly a good year.

Seven surgeries total before it was “done.” I put that in quotes because I’m not sure it’s ever actually done.

Through all of it, I kept saying I was fine. The world was already upside down. Everyone was stressed. I didn’t want to be a burden on top of a pandemic. So I smiled when I could and said the right things and people believed me, and I think part of me needed them to.

But nobody really saw it. Nobody saw me almost die. Nobody saw what was happening in those hospital rooms. And somewhere in there I think I just got used to carrying things quietly — like that was my job now. Like that was just who I was.

Sometimes I’m still not sure it isn’t.

The Weight of It

Today feels heavy. Not dramatic-heavy. Just the quiet kind — the slow ache that shows up when you’ve been holding it together for so long you’ve stopped noticing the weight.

My best friend just had a mastectomy. She’s in the beginning of it — everything raw and new and terrifying. She doesn’t want to take the medication. She doesn’t want the side effects. She doesn’t want to feel like shit all the time. And god, I get it. I sat with her while she cried and I felt that weird cocktail of heartbreak and… something else I’m still trying to name. Maybe grief. Maybe frustration. Maybe just the quiet hope that she finally — finally — gets it. Gets what it’s been like for me.

Because I’m not sure anyone ever really did.

And I never wanted anyone to have to understand. But sometimes I wish they could see the full picture. The surgeries. The complications. The fear I didn’t perform out loud. The years of just trying to feel okay in a body that hasn’t felt okay in a very long time.

Here’s the thing about me: I didn’t cry when I was diagnosed. I didn’t spiral. I didn’t fall apart. I just did the next thing. And the next thing after that. And honestly, I’m still doing that — checking boxes, holding pieces, waiting to exhale. I’m not sure I’ve actually processed any of it. I’m not sure I know how.

I’ve been surviving for years. But surviving isn’t the same as living, and I think I’ve known that for a while without saying it out loud.

I show up. I smile. I work. I love my people. But I don’t always feel like I’m in my body. I don’t usually feel good, actually — and that’s a weird thing to admit when everyone sees you as the fun one, the strong one, the one who cracks jokes instead of crying. I’d rather change the subject than sit in sympathy. I genuinely don’t know what to do with it. It makes me squirm.

So I’m not writing this for pity. I’m writing this because I don’t want to forget what this actually feels like — to have survived so much and still just want to feel well. To be allowed a bad day even when you look like you have it together. To want more than survival without having to justify that.

I don’t know if I’ll ever feel the way I want to. But I’m writing it down anyway.

Maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to let someone read it.