I sat in the back of the chapel and shrank.

At the funeral of a friend who had lived with cancer for eleven years, the words rose around her like banners: fighter, warrior, fierce, relentless. She was a mother of three. She never gave up, they said. Their praise was full of steel.

I have stage IV cancer. I go looking for treatments that might hold it at bay. Not cure—just delay. Just slow the animal down. Let me keep my place here a little longer. Let me wake again to sunlight on the kitchen floor. Let me have one more ordinary Wednesday.

When I was ten years old, I was stretching in my Houston Ballet class when I felt a sharp pain in my back. At first, I ignored it. But over time, the pain began radiating down my right thigh whenever I walked or sat too long. I knew something wasn’t right.

I mentioned it to my parents only twice. I’ve never been much of a complainer, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, they were working long hours in clinics and hospitals. I didn’t want to add to their stress. So I masked my crooked gait, compensating with different muscles, forcing myself to stand straighter. Secretly, I was afraid of what a trip to the doctor might reveal.

I found my father’s training notebook on his nightstand.

At first, it reads like data. Dates on the left. Heights on the right. The record of his jumps, measured carefully, almost clinically. March, May, June, July, and so on. Page after page.

Then, the pattern shifts.

There are stretches where the entries thin out, then stop altogether. Blank pages. And then, suddenly, they return. New dates, new numbers, written with the same deliberate hand, as if nothing had been interrupted.

My mom spearheaded a move for her and my dad from New York to Florida, because northern winters were getting too uncomfortable. My mom looked forward to warmer winters and year-round golfing.

Their friends said it took guts for them to move, because they’d be leaving their core group of friends and family. My dad was initially reluctant to move because of this reality, but my mom’s persistence prevailed and move they did.

They liked the weather, which was indeed conducive to year-round golf. For my mom especially, golf was like gold. She joined a ladies’ golf league and enjoyed the camaraderie, the fresh air, and the exercise.

It’s a gut feeling.

That’s what my mother always says. Confidently, like a fact.

Her childhood in the Dominican Republic, full of domestic violence and poverty, tried to convince her that that would be her reality many times. However, she always had a feeling her life would change.

I didn’t understand what she meant.

It began in junior high when a group of neighborhood girls decided they were better than the rest of us. They wrote a song about their looks and personalities; they sang this every morning on the bus to school and every afternoon on the return trip home. These girls made me feel worthless and invisible.

I wish I had had the guts to stand up on the bus and silence them by telling them the harm they were causing. But I didn’t have that moral courage.

Dear readers,

When I think about which parts of my medical training required guts, what pops into my head is my very first clinical rotation: surgery.

You might think that I’d have been most fearful of what I’d encounter in the operating room–spurting blood and writhing intestines.

In truth, the thing that roiled my own guts was the hour that I’d have to report. The thought of getting up at 4:30 AM–to shower, dress, have breakfast, catch a bus to the hospital and trudge to the surgical ICU–filled me with despair.