It’s a known truth that shitty things tend to happen when life is on the upswing.

You just turned forty-two—at the height of the COVID19 pandemic, no less. After parting ways with your fiancé and pushing through a mammoth mental and physical breakdown, armed with hardheadedness and a sizzling double-dose of Moderna vaccine, you scratch and claw your way to a near-perfect existence. A slick dream job with stock photo coworkers on top of their game. Gamja hot dog and vegan donut picnics with your friends in Christie Park.

You invest in a Vidal Sassoon–style haircut, as sleek and silky as a socialite’s mink coat. New clothes follow: a Max Mara jacket and Chloé handbag that salespersons gush over at Nordstrom. On Sundays you paint your fingernails Chanel Vamp Red in the hope of channeling Uma Thurman in the movie Pulp Fiction. On weeknights, you surf Hinge and trade witty, flirty barbs with upwardly mobile professionals within a twenty-kilometer radius.

With all this frippery comes something unexpected. Peace. And contentment. After years of waiting for a soulmate that might not exist, after leaping from one underpaying job to another to quell a deep-seated restlessness.

It’s gone now. Vanished.

To quote the kids, you’re living your best life.

The last piece of the puzzle is a soft, teensy, sticky-outy tendon-thing protruding from your right breast, that you discovered in the last month or so. According to friends and family members and Dr. Google, it’s no biggie. Boobs are supposed to be lumpy and bumpy. Your GP isn’t concerned. You’re young and have no family history of serious illness. The teensy tendon-thing is probably hormonal and should disappear in a few weeks.

It doesn’t.

When your GP finally examines you, his face grows serious beneath his surgical mask. He wastes no time in booking an ultrasound and a mammogram. You’re not worried. At the imaging center, waiting to be prodded and scanned and smashed, you joke on Instagram that it’s like a luxury spa, with the waiting room and robes and soothing chamber music piping through hidden speakers. More ultrasounds and mammograms. Another doctor says he’ll have to stick a needle in you. Still, no stress. The biopsy is gross. The puncture wound oozes and throbs for weeks. When you ask the doctor if you should be scared, he carefully responds that results are results.

He knows. Before you. Before anyone else.

After two weeks, a phone call. Breast cancer.

Blood drains from your face and fingertips. Somehow you hang up without puking.

How could this happen?

How. The fuck. Did. This. Happen?

Everyone in your family is so healthy. You must have royally fucked up to be the one bad egg. Was it your diet? Too much sugar and alcohol and carbs? Maybe it’s from living in the city for so many years, or not exercising enough. Cleaning products? The dust in your apartment?

What did you do?

Since birth, you’ve been the main character when all you’ve ever wanted is to slide through life unbothered and unnoticed. This wasn’t possible with your personality, which others charitably (and eye-rollingly) describe as “quirky,” and more often write off as plain weird. Now, your body must betray you and scream for attention as well.

Why, oh why would this happen now? When things are finally good?

Doctors assure that the cancer doesn’t seem too concerning and is likely in the early stages, to be confirmed with more scans and tests and surgeries. Late-night Googling tells a different story. Your biopsy report is spattered with terrifying phrases. Grade two or three tumor, HER2-positive . . .

There is no such thing as a “little bit” of cancer. You have it or you don’t.

There have been health issues in the past. An underactive thyroid, chronic bladder infections. But all mostly under control—not like this. Being young and invincible is baked into your identity. It’s gone now, for good. Even if you beat this cancer its specter will hover, fangs bared and dripping and waiting to strike.

It’s not dying you’re afraid of but losing control and helplessly watching, aware and present, as your lifeforce slips away.

I’ll no longer be pretty, you can’t help thinking.

Just like being young and healthy, “pretty” is your thing. In a world where women of color like you need every last bit of social currency they can get. It buffers your weirdness. You’re used to turning heads. Strangers buying you drinks at bars and restaurants. People at grocery stores asking if you’re a model, if you’re ten, twenty years younger than your actual age. They tell you you’re stunning, breathtaking, gorgeous . . .

Chemotherapy will make your hair fall out. After all the time and money spent fixing it! Indeed, when your BFF stops by to soothe you with McDonald’s food and gossip, the first thing she says isn’t, “Omg are you okay,” but “Holy crap, your hair looks amazing!” Cancer treatment might also kick-start menopause. Not that you wanted kids, but there goes that last chance all the same. Your melanin-rich skin will fade and wither. To say nothing of your immune system. It will be shit. In the middle of a global pandemic, no less.

And your tits. Good God, your tits.

They’re still high and firm and perfect. At best, a golf-ball size chunk will be excised from the errant breast. And at worst, well, let’s not think about it.

For a few days after The Phone Call, you take time off work to ugly-cry in bed. Face contorted, gasping, snot streaming in rivers, the works. Being around people is overwhelming, but neither can you be alone. Social media offers a compromise. Messages pour in, mostly kind and concerned well-wishes (aside from one or two jackasses oozing toxic positivity, whom you immediately block). Still, you feel lonely and lost and shiver nonstop, even when the thermostat is cranked.

Naturally, your parents are heartbroken. Your father repeatedly asks why God is punishing them. They rush to your apartment with fresh fruit and vegetables and stern orders to quit eating peanut butter and junk food. Your mother has stopped sleeping. She’s aged twenty years overnight. She, who’s always been so fresh and girlish, by and far the most beautiful in your family. She cries that she wishes it were her, that she could take away her baby’s pain. After so many years of overprotective helicopter hovering, her worst nightmare has come true.

She can’t know how scared you are.

When she’s in the other room, you crawl into your father’s lap and sob. He pats your back like you’re a small child and says you’re a brave, strong girl and that he and your mother will look after you.

You want to believe him. Really and truly. But they’re in the suburbs. The cancer center closest to your downtown apartment is among the best in the world. And the pandemic shows no sign of slowing down. Now, you must batten down your social bubble for as long as treatment lasts. A year maybe, longer. Not just to avoid COVID, but even minor illnesses like the flu or colds that a weakened immune system can’t handle. If your parents take charge of your recovery, they’ll have to stay isolated, too. They’ve only just started seeing relatives and friends again. Shouldn’t they be enjoying their life instead?

Your dream scenario is to recuperate at a plush facility for rich people, like in Pollyanna and The Bell Jar and Splendor in the Grass and Girl, Interrupted, books and movies you loved as a kid. Soft-spoken doctors and nurses in white, a Cotswold-esque view of the Hamptons. They betrayed you, these exclusively white fantasies. You’re neither Natalie Wood nor Sylvia Plath, let alone Angelina Jolie sucking cherries at an ice cream parlor. Most of all, you resent Katy Carr, the eponymous heroine of Susan Coolidge’s seminal classic What Katy Did. Spunky, brave invalid Katy who cured herself with the miracle of positive thinking. As though pain and sickness were some aspirational, cutesy, gingham-patterned life lesson that builds character. For fuck’s sake. It’s not one you can afford. Katy’s father was a doctor and she had servants. No wealthy benefactor will swoop in and rescue you, a brown middle-aged dumbass who didn’t think to buy medical or critical illness insurance when she had the chance.

You’re on your own with this one.

Along with the fear and anxiety is a pervasive tiredness. You don’t want to fight. Poked and pinched even more, sliced open and blasted as ravaging chemicals are pumped through your veins. Night after night, sleep is a blessing. If you never woke up, that horrible dread would disappear. Suppose you withdrew all your savings and hopped on a plane, spent the next year or so in a room overlooking the ocean? Open all the windows, let in the salty wind, jump into a warm pillowy bed. And close your eyes. Forever.

Of course that isn’t an option. Giving up would destroy your parents, the vast sparkling network of friends and former schoolmates and coworkers and aunties and relatives of all creeds. They check in daily to ask how they can help and send offerings of dewy milk cartons and pork buns and shrimp rolls and fresh herbs, sheet masks and chocolates, and even a Criterion Channel subscription. They assure that you’re in their prayers and beg you to please—please—fight this disease.

You break down during a video call with a friend from graduate school. He immediately buys a plane ticket from South Carolina to Toronto. When you lament about losing your looks, he responds that you make the world beautiful in other ways. He loves you and is here for you.

Your BFF, too, swears that she won’t let you deal with this cancer by yourself. No fucking way.

Finally, your older sister. When you mention how tired you are, she tears up and says that she needs you and would be lost without you. If you won’t fight for yourself, then at least do it for her, and her two children.

It takes a long, long time, but you finally get it.

Cancer is a lonely disease, but you’re not alone.

With everyone’s help, you’ll get through this.

I know you will.

-Suri Parmar

Suri Parmar (she/her/hers) is a writer, filmmaker, and professor whose output includes fiction that has been published in New Haven Review and The Spectacle, branded and editorial content for Yahoo, and short films that have screened around the world. Her hobbies include napping, trawling Little Free Libraries for used Danielle Steele novels, and online shopping for vintage Miu Miu and Max Mara clothing. Drop her a line and check out more of her work at suriparmar.com. Find her on Instagram @_hoodlumrock