Collide was published on June 1st, 2025, in Elephants and Tea, the only young adult cancer magazine in the world. This nonfiction story was featured in their physical and digital magazine as well as their social media pages. The story is based around the issue theme of “do things happen for a reason” and retells my experience with triple-negative breast cancer and my struggle with survivorship following the first few months into my recovery. I was also offered to read Collide at the magazine launch event in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 7th, 2025, as well as awarded a travel scholarship to cover expenses, but unfortunately had to decline such an honour due to the political climate in America at the time.

She’s gentle when she touches me, but still, it hurts. I’ve gotten good at staring at my feet avoiding any eye contact when I am naked and alone in front of these trusted strangers. She moves from breast to breast, then into my armpits with a precision that shows me I’m not the first body she’s touched. She jokes that this part, this search for enlarged lymph nodes, is just like a massage. I feign a laugh, as I have learned to do, but I don’t tell her my right armpit, which she presses deep into, where they cut the sentinel node out of me a year ago, is still incredibly tender. And even when she is being delicate, it still... fucking... hurts. 

When she finishes the physical exam, she picks up the clipboard and looks over the intake survey I filled out, and I can see the smallest frown form on her thin, chapped lips. She says that even though I’ve circled mostly ones and twos, which tells her I think I am doing well, it sounds like I’m still struggling, even eleven months out. 

“I’m just grateful to be alive,” I say. 

She tells me I’m brave. That I’m strong. And I smile, pulling the gown tighter over my chest. She gives me some advice about chair yoga and some pamphlets on intimacy after cancer and then tells me she will see me next year. I put my clothes back on, discard the gown in the laundry bin, and walk back down the hall towards the parkade.

I am sitting in my studio in the dark of the early autumn light, with a solitary candle lit to my left. I’m trying to work on a drama paper that’s due in a few days, but every idea feels superficial and weak. I struggle to focus. Words like peripetia mingle with pulmonary edema. Of anagnorisis with stage three. Of the importance of the protagonist’s downfall in tragedy with a 40% chance of recurrence. I reread the assignment question for the tenth time, go over my thesis and try to find another way in. No luck. I lean back in my chair, and when I look up, I catch my reflection in a mirror that hangs above my desk. I see myself looking back in the flickering of the light. I see the hair that is thin on the left side. The eyebrows that haven’t grown back. The scabs across my face from thin, easy-to-damage skin. Questions left unanswered. Goals that were once certain dim and fade. This person who looks back at me is not the one who hangs around my house in candid snapshots. This stranger named “me” with long hair, clear skin, bright eyes, and a life before her. A life that was promised to her. A life that swept wide with ambition. A life that no longer is. 

Where is she?

Every night, my body fights sleep. I lie awake, staring beyond the ceiling, as I have done many nights since getting the diagnosis. My therapist tells me to ground myself. My friends and family tell me that things happen for a reason. That I need to find my reason. But in these quiet moments, where Paul, my husband, lies next to me, whose soft breathing mingles with each creak and groan of the house’s settling, I am overcome. 

I am lying on my side in a hospital bed, feeling my heart pound in my chest, my eyes half closed and blurred. What little attention I have fixed on the cardiac monitor, watching its waves rise and crash with each fragile beat. Wires come and go, in and out, all over my body. An IVAD port is taped desperately down with several layers of itchy medical tape and sticks out from my neck, where it is connected to yet another antibiotic bag hanging above my head. Paul sits in a chair across from me, lost in his own world, miles away. We don’t talk. We can’t talk. I don’t have the strength. Nurses come and go. Doctors walk in every morning, talking to me, talking to each other, but I never know what they’re saying. I hear these strangers speak to or past me, but their words never land. They only echo through. The one person I recall is the healthcare aide who changes my diapers and washes my body without much dignity or mercy. During one of these baths, where she is silently moving from my stomach to my groin, I tell her with a rattled voice, “I never used to be this way.”

Paul is my star, emitting blinding light, centring me in the present while my mind is dragged between the past and the future. He listens to me, makes me smile or roll my eyes. He makes cookies, sandwiches and tea. He empties my barf bags and scratches my back. And without fail, when I am utterly ruined, collapsed into his arms, snot and tears streaking my red-hot face, he holds me close and exists with me. When I am done crying, and I’ve gathered what little I can of myself, I always tell him I’m sorry. For making such a scene. For getting so fat. For being so sick. For becoming such a burden. For changing so much from the woman I promised him I would always be when we exchanged our vows. For rich or for poor. For sickness and in health… Paul never interrupts me in these confessions. He only kisses my hands and forehead with immense tenderness and softness, and I know his lips and hands whisper a love to me that no single word could ever contain. 

But he knows it’s not enough. 

A disease lingers in my bones, my flesh. In a place at such depths that no medicine or scalpel could ever reach. Six months of chemotherapy, a lumpectomy and lymph node removal, twenty rounds of radiation and four months of immunotherapy and then I am sent flying back into the world, naked and scarred. There is no ongoing treatment to prevent triple-negative breast cancer from returning. There is only an enduring hope and a whispering fear that it could all have been for nothing. This would all be for nothing, and I will endure it again. And again. Until… 

This fear hangs over me daily. It whispers uncertainties into my present. What was the reason? What was the reason I had to spend three months of my life fearing I was terminal? What was the reason my body was poisoned, burned, and destroyed? What was the reason I struggled to breathe? Or to think? And what was the reason that I survived a very aggressive, late-stage, high-grade cancer when I saw so many others just like me succumb? Was my reason worth more? Was their reason simply not enough?

The next day, I drive again to university and am once more lost in thought. I sit at the front of all my classes and try to be present. Try to exist in this place that I begged for, that I cried for - dreaming of returning to a normal life for the last god-forsaken three years. But when I look in the mirrors in the campus bathroom, or in my car, or in my studio late at night, I don’t recognize myself. I see the six scars on my chest, and I see past them into deeper marks. Marks no one else around me seems to see or wants to see anymore. They cut the tumour out of me and threw it into flames. They removed the cancer and called me cured. But every night, I go to sleep and think about the next day of school ahead, my fingers trace my scars, still raw, and I feel myself slip back to that December day I got the news, and I ask myself if they even cured me at all.