Last year, novelist Marissa Eller woke up one day to discover she didn’t recognize herself anymore. Her heart was racing. Her face had swollen and flushed. Vivid nightmares of plane crashes and burning buildings tormented her sleep. She was losing weight, breaking out in cold sweats, and experiencing sudden spikes of excruciating pain that would strike like lightning and vanish just as fast.
She thought it was grief. She thought it was anxiety. She thought, maybe, she was just falling apart.
What it actually was: Cushing’s syndrome, a rare hormonal disorder caused by a tiny tumor on her adrenal gland that had been quietly secreting cortisol, the stress hormone, into her system for months. No one had told her the tumor existed. She’d found it herself, buried in a medical report she stumbled upon by accident.
This isn’t just a story about a diagnosis. It’s about what happens when the machinery of modern health care fails to communicate, and what it takes for a patient to get heard.
The Year Everything Broke
Eller’s 2025 started with surgery and never really stopped falling apart. Gallbladder surgery in January. Her grandmother’s two surgeries in February. Another procedure for herself in March. By April, her grandmother was on hospice. In May, she died.
The grief was real, and it was crushing. But something else was happening too, something her body was screaming at her in a language she didn’t yet understand.
The heart palpitations came first, or maybe the nightmares. The timeline blurred. Her anxiety medication got adjusted. Then she wore a heart monitor for three weeks and learned her heart rate had spiked to 180 beats per minute while she sat in a theater watching “Waitress.” A cardiologist told her she’d been in fight-or-flight mode for months.
The beta blocker helped. It calmed her pounding heart. But as the noise of that faded, she could suddenly hear everything else screaming.
The nightmares intensified. She began dying in her dreams, over and over, burning alive in car crashes and building fires. She’d wake up drenched in sweat, and the heat wouldn’t fade. Throughout the day, she’d break out in these strange feverish episodes. Her appetite disappeared and reappeared without warning. One day she’d stay awake for 24 hours straight; the next day she’d need to sleep by noon.
Her face changed. Her frame changed. Her mood tanked. Something felt profoundly wrong, but no one seemed to know what.
The Accident That Changed Everything
On her birthday in August, Eller had a follow-up appointment with her primary care provider. Before that appointment, she did what everyone tells you not to do: she went digging through her own medical records.
It was an accident, really. She found an old CT report from 2016 describing a small adrenal nodule that had never been mentioned to her. She dug deeper. A more recent CT from the ER showed it had grown slightly and was now listed as “indeterminate.”
Again, no one had told her.
Her PCP was furious, but not at Eller. “Why do my patients have to tell me these things?” she muttered, frustrated by the fragmented care Eller had received. She ordered a specific test: a single dexamethasone pill taken late at night, followed by blood work the next morning. If Eller’s body was functioning normally, the steroid would suppress her adrenal glands and cortisol levels would plummet. If a tumor was secretly producing cortisol, it would refuse to be suppressed.
The test came back three times higher than normal.
“You have Cushing’s,” her doctor said. It was almost anticlimactic.
What a Tiny Tumor Can Do
An endocrine surgeon showed Eller images of the mass, describing it as looking like a fuzzy mold spore perched on her left kidney. It was the size of a Skittle. But that Skittle-sized tumor had been orchestrating chaos across nearly every system in her body.
The agonizing episodes that kept sending her to the ER? Likely kidney stones, a side effect of the cortisol overload. The purple discoloration on her surgical scars from January? Excess cortisol preventing proper healing. The racing heart, the mood crashes, the inability to sleep, the weight gain, the facial bloating—all of it traced back to this one tiny nodule quietly flooding her system with a hormone her body couldn’t regulate.
The surgeon recommended removal. Leaving it alone, he explained, would eventually lead to heart attacks, blood clots, muscle weakness, broken bones. At not even 30 years old, Eller had decades ahead of her to suffer the long-term consequences of untreated Cushing’s.
Six weeks later, he removed the tumor and her left adrenal gland.
The Quiet After
When Eller woke up from surgery, something was different. The noise was gone.
“Not literally,” she clarifies. There was the beeping of monitors, squeaking shoes, staff chatter. But inside her head—the place where she’d lived her entire life and built her identity as a writer—there was quiet. The relentless, blaring anxiety that had defined her for months had simply vanished.
The recovery was rough. Her blood pressure crashed. She needed three doses of blood pressure medication to stabilize. She lay flat through a miserable night, willing her body to cooperate. But when the attending endocrinologist came by the next morning to explain that the sudden drop from excess cortisol to critically low cortisol had caused the crash, and that she’d need hormone replacement therapy for at least a month, Eller understood something her doctors told the medical students observing her case: she’d been lucky.
Cushing’s syndrome is rare, they explained. It usually takes far longer to diagnose. She’d had one crucial advantage: a doctor who believed her symptoms deserved investigation rather than dismissal.
The Privilege of Being Heard
Eller doesn’t frame her recovery as a personal triumph. Instead, she’s thought carefully about what actually saved her: it wasn’t her willpower or her research skills, though both played a role. It was access to a doctor willing to listen, a family with the resources to support her, and—she’s honest about this—her own privilege as a patient with the education and confidence to advocate for herself.
“In a deeply flawed medical system where so many people are either intentionally or subconsciously ignored, even self-advocacy is an advantage not all are afforded,” she wrote.
Think about that for a moment. In the United States, getting heard by your own doctor is a form of privilege. That’s not a radical statement. That’s the current state of affairs.
Eller discovered her own tumor. She had to read her own medical reports because no one else bothered to tell her the results. The images from 2016 vanished, and the hospital claimed she never had a CT scan that year. She caught the discrepancy. She pushed. She advocated. And even with all of that, even with money and education and family support, she still nearly missed her diagnosis.
How many people don’t have those advantages? How many symptoms go unexplained because a patient doesn’t have the bandwidth to fight? How many rare diagnoses remain rare simply because they go undiagnosed?
What Quiet Means Now
Months into recovery, Eller describes her mind as finally quiet enough to be almost boring. The panic, the nightmares, the incessant blaring of anxiety—it’s gone. Her face has returned to normal. Her energy is stabilizing. Her body is beginning to recognize itself again.
But she hasn’t forgotten what it felt like when the noise was so loud she couldn’t think. She hasn’t forgotten reading her own test results alone because no one else seemed to think she needed to know. She hasn’t forgotten being told her symptoms were anxiety when her symptoms were actually a tumor.
The real victory here isn’t just medical. It’s that one doctor refused to be satisfied with easy answers. That one doctor said, “I don’t like to blame physical symptoms on anxiety,” and actually meant it. That one doctor got angry at the system instead of angry at the patient.
What would Eller’s year have looked like if she’d encountered a different doctor? What if she’d been gaslit into accepting her symptoms as purely psychological? What if she’d never found that report? The margins between getting help and being dismissed in American medicine are terrifyingly thin.
