There’s a particular kind of silence that comes with medical professionals dismissing your gut instinct. I know it well, even though I work in nursing. We’re the worst patients, you know. We google symptoms obsessively, then convince ourselves we’re being paranoid.
In 2020, during a year when everyone was exhausted and anxious, I woke up with an unshakable feeling. Not a symptom exactly. Just a bone-deep certainty that something was wrong. My bloodwork came back normal. I was relieved. I was also terrified, and I kept it to myself.
The problem with ignoring your body is that it eventually gets loud enough that you can’t anymore.
When Your Body Becomes a Stranger
I stopped going to doctors for a while. Embarrassment is a powerful deterrent, especially when you’ve already been told multiple times that you’re fine. But then the symptoms piled on like an avalanche. Extreme fatigue that made getting out of bed feel impossible. Acid reflux that wouldn’t quit. Pelvic pain. Bloating that made me feel like I was living in someone else’s body. Periods that didn’t make any sense.
When I finally went back, my doctor took one look at me and sent me straight to the ER.
A watermelon-sized tumor. An eight-pound mass that had been growing quietly while I convinced myself I was being dramatic. The ultrasound and CT scan revealed what my instinct had been screaming all along.
The surgery happened in a blur. I lost nearly three pints of blood. I lost a tumor. I lost an ovary. And a few days later, I learned it was cancer.
The Diagnosis Nobody Talks About
Stage 3A endometrial adenocarcinoma. Uterine cancer. The most common gynecologic cancer in the U.S., and yet somehow almost nobody discusses it openly. I found this strange online. All these cancer survivors sharing their stories, but endometrial cancer survivors seemed to vanish into some kind of ashamed silence.
At 28 years old, I underwent a total hysterectomy and bilateral salpingo-oophorectomy. That’s medical speak for removing my uterus, fallopian tubes, cervix, and remaining ovary. Everything. The surgeon said it was necessary. The pathology reports confirmed it.
What nobody adequately prepared me for was surgical menopause.
The hot flashes started immediately. The insomnia. The depression that felt like stepping into a room filled with fog that wouldn’t lift. I’d been relatively optimistic about cancer because cancer felt temporary. You fight it, you win or you lose, but there’s a finish line. Menopause felt different. Menopause felt like a permanent rewriting of who I was.
Grief is a weird response to saving your own life, but there it was anyway.
Sharing Your Story When The World Wants You Quiet
After chemotherapy and radiation, I had no evidence of disease. Treatment was over. I should have felt celebratory. Instead, I felt hollow and confused, so I did what a lot of people do now. I started documenting everything online.
My first viral video was me and my friends throwing a hysterectomy party. Pizza, dancing, saying goodbye to my uterus. It sounds absurd, but people responded. They needed to see someone surviving cancer without performing perfect gratitude. They needed to see the messy, human side of medical trauma.
I posted videos about every round of chemotherapy. The unexpected side effects. The small victories. Practical tips for getting through treatment. Slowly, an online community formed around these videos. People found each other. Found support. Found permission to feel angry and sad and broken instead of grateful.
That community carried me through months I wasn’t sure I’d survive.
The Part They Don’t Tell You About
Here’s what nobody really discusses about cancer recovery: you never actually finish. The treatment ends, but you don’t. Your body doesn’t return to what it was. Your mind doesn’t either.
While my friends were getting married and buying homes and having babies, I was living in waiting rooms. Waiting for scan results. Waiting to feel safe. Waiting to feel like myself, which increasingly looked like waiting for someone who no longer exists.
The hardest lesson was learning who I am in the after. I tried to reassemble the pieces of who I was before cancer, but they’d been surgically cut and radiated into a shape that no longer fit. I’m not the carefree woman in her 20s anymore. I don’t think I’ll ever be.
Most of me has made peace with that. Some of me still grieves.
What I Needed Someone to Tell Me
If something doesn’t feel right in your body, that feeling matters. Not because WebMD says so. Not because a doctor validates it. Because you’re the expert on your own body, and your instinct is data.
Endometrial cancer is most treatable when caught early. It’s also the kind of cancer that makes people uncomfortable because it affects women’s reproductive systems, which means we collectively decide it’s embarrassing to discuss. This silence literally costs lives.
If your symptoms don’t align with what you’re reading online, speak up anyway. If your doctor dismisses you, find another doctor. If you’re ashamed to talk about your uterus and ovaries and periods, get over it fast. There’s nothing more important than your life.
And if you’re in the middle of your own cancer journey right now, drowning in medical terminology and side effects and existential questions about who you’re becoming, know that you’re not alone. The version of yourself you’re grieving was real, and the version you’re becoming is too.
The question isn’t whether you’ll survive this. The question is who you’ll allow yourself to become on the other side of it.
