2- How the Cancer Diagnosis Arrived

I'm not going to lie and say I'm not scared, or that I don't have moments where my soul drops to the floor just thinking about this new thing the gods, the universe, or destiny whichever you prefer have put in front of me.

I'm going to tell a bit of my story, at least from these last two years.

The Year That Set It All Up

I'm coming out of a brutal year. For anyone who knows me and has been close these last two or three years, or even just this last year and a half, it's no surprise: divorce, a separation with some very ugly things that came out along the way, which I'm not going to talk about here because it's not the point, and which I'm already writing about elsewhere.

What is the point is that I came back to Amsterdam, settling back into this house that had been ours, hauling boxes from a life that had spent a whole year packed away in Spain. At the same time I was fighting an intense battle to get my business back on its feet, to keep working at what I love, with Compassionate Inquiry, with my clients, who gave me as much life as the paperwork of the separation drained from me. And on top of that, there was everything going on with my son, which was no small thing.

My body did what it knows how to do when life throws everything at you at once: it disconnected. It disconnected the worry about me, the care for me, because in that moment surviving was the only thing that mattered.

The Medical Carousel

In the middle of all that, I started having bleeding outside my period. I'd still been getting my period normally, so at that point I hadn't entered perimenopause or menopause. But whenever I brought it up with friends, or even with the doctor, that's what we blamed it on.

This went on for two or three months. I've had anemia my whole life, so I recognize it right away: when I'm feeling bad, I go to the doctor, they give me pills, and I bounce back up for a while. We never figured out why I have it. I assumed it was simply part of what I was dealt.

But this time it was different. I started noticing I'd run out of breath just walking down a single street, or making the smallest effort. I recognized the symptom right away: anemia.

I went to the doctor, they ran a blood test like always, and that same day they called me. Here in Holland they don't usually get alarmed that quickly, so a same-day call already told me something.

The doctor told me, literally, that she didn't understand how I was still standing with the numbers I had. My ferritin, the body's iron storage, was at six, when it should be somewhere between ninety and a hundred and twenty. My red blood cells were at four, when normal is around nine.

I don't know where I was pulling the strength to walk from, but that gave me a lot of information. And it also scared me to realize how disconnected I'd been from my own body, not to have put the brakes on sooner.

I was referred to a gynecologist. Since I'd been in Spain, I'd gone two and a half years earlier. She told me it was probably fibroids, something I already knew about and that wasn't serious or cancerous. Two years earlier, when they'd checked, it hadn't seemed important either.

There could also be polyps, although she couldn't see them well on the ultrasound, so the plan was to go in and look, and if there were any, remove them right then. But for that I needed to be sedated, and with my iron and red blood cell levels so low, they couldn't do it safely.

My iron needed to come up first. They gave me more iron to see if I'd respond, and since it didn't budge, I ended up needing an iron transfusion through an IV.

They say a transfusion doesn't do anything to you. The truth is I spent about a week feeling like a rag. At the end of the day, it's an invasion of the body for a while, even if it does you good afterward.

We had to wait about six weeks for it to take effect and for the red blood cells to recover. In the meantime, they gave me progesterone to slow the bleeding, but I kept bleeding.

Those six weeks passed, and I finally had the procedure to remove the possible polyps and the fibroid, if they could.

When I woke up, the doctor told me there were more polyps than she'd expected, and they were also large, but that didn't necessarily mean anything. As protocol, they'd send everything off for biopsy, along with the endometrial tissue, for which they'd needed a full curettage instead of something minimal.

I wasn't worried, because the gynecologist didn't seem worried either. I believed the worst was already behind me, and that I'd be able to recover and get back to my life.

I didn't feel afraid in that moment, or not the obvious kind of afraid.

If anything worried me, it was mostly the practical side of things: I wanted the energy to get back in the ring, to keep functioning, being self-employed, with clients, with everything I'd built through sheer work these last three years.

They gave me an appointment for the end of August. It was the third.

No rush, they said.

The Call on August 10th

On August tenth, the hospital called me. The doctor wanted to see me the day after tomorrow.

That's when every alarm goes off.

I was surrounded by boxes, with a truck full of all my things that I hadn't seen in a year, unloading into a storage unit, when that call came in.

I asked the assistant directly: in Holland, they don't call you like this, out of nowhere, and they definitely don't move up an appointment if there's nothing going on. I need to know if I have to bring someone with me, because that would mean there's bad news.

She went to check.

She came back and told me yes, bring someone, it's bad news, and since I already knew that much, could I come in tomorrow.

The first thing I did was call my friend, who is also the wife of my first husband. The two of them have been among the people who've been supporting me very closely this last year and a half since my separation. She wasn't there, he answered. I told him, and he said not to worry, that the two of them would come with me the next day.

I don't remember how I got home that afternoon. Seriously, I don't remember the drive at all.

It was like being in another dimension.

And when I got there, to that house I was already trying to arrange to move out of, because the memories weighed too much, I felt an enormous emptiness. I didn't know whether to sit down, stand up, or call someone. Everything still felt very foreign, as if the information hadn't finished landing in my body. I was floating. It didn't feel entirely real.

I called my sister, to tell her the hospital had called. That was all it was: letting her know.

Once I managed to steady myself a little, a wave of helplessness and acceptance came over me. It was an "okay," one more on this tab.

Because when they tell you something like that, technically they haven't told you yet, but you already know. That's it. They did a biopsy, there's bad news, they don't need to say anything more.

That night I tried to find answers with my great friend ChatGPT, with Google, with anyone who might know something. The truth is I couldn't really talk about it with almost anyone else. The shock had left me paralyzed, mute.

Unable to sleep, I ended up chatting late into the night with a friend of my father's in Argentina, who has been with me through the adventure of writing a book this past year.

It helped me not to be alone with that news sitting inside me.

I think that was part of the blow too: realizing that in that moment I was alone with something like this, with no hug nearby, no one at my side. The divorce, the separation, suddenly became very real, very concrete. And they brought another layer of grief and sadness in that moment.

The Diagnosis

The next day we went to the hospital.

They told me I had uterine cancer, grade one, which out of all the possible cancers is one of the best ones to have, although that's not fully confirmed until they remove the uterus and analyze it thoroughly.

Not just the uterus. The ovaries would have to come out too, because this type of cancer is hormone-sensitive, and the risk of it coming back is too high to leave them in. So I'll be going straight into what they call surgical menopause.

I was referred to the AVL, the cancer-specialized hospital here in Amsterdam.

That was another layer where I understood this was serious.

The next day they called to schedule me with the new gynecologist, only about ten days later in total.

And the medical carousel began.

These are the facts as I know them right now: I'm having surgery in less than three or four weeks. Until they remove the uterus and do the dissection, they won't know how deep it went, and therefore what the actual stage of the cancer is.

In principle, with the grade one I have, removing the uterus and ovaries should resolve everything without the need for chemotherapy, but that won't be known for certain until after the surgery and the analysis.

Another detail is that I can't receive hormone replacement therapy once the ovaries are removed, to ease some of the effects of the imminent menopause, because my cancer is hormone-sensitive.

So menopause will hit me all at once, with nothing to soften it.

Those are the facts.

The Roller Coaster

It's been a roller coaster. I know it's a cliché, but I can't find another way to say it. There are moments where I feel a real calm, a kind of surrender, not like someone losing a battle, but like handing myself over to whatever needs to come.

I think that's been the great lesson of this last year and a half: letting go. Not clinging to things, not clinging to people, not clinging to dreams. Letting go with trust, because that's what the moment calls for.

And let me be clear: this doesn't mean I won't fight if there's a fight to be had on another level. But for now there's not much more I can do. And, curiously, that also brings a kind of peace.

That's as far as I can go right now with the facts. But something else showed up almost immediately, and it has nothing to do with the illness itself.

Letting Myself Be Loved

When the doctor asked me what I was feeling, what I was thinking as I heard all this, I had my first husband on one side and his wife on the other, both of them holding my hand. I started crying. And the first thing that came out wasn't about the illness. It was: I don't want to have to be a burden to anyone. I don't want to be a weight on anyone. And I'm going to be.

I said it, I noted it, I cried it right there. They held my hand tighter and told me not to worry, that we'd figure it out, that they were going to put together a group of people for whatever was needed.

It surprised me how quickly I recognized it in myself. The doctor had told me I was going to need three to six months of recovery, tired, needing people, especially in the first weeks after the surgery, down to the most practical things. And my first reaction wasn't fear of the illness. It was fear of depending on others.

I have this so deeply embedded in my body, so programmed, that I don't want to be a burden, that I don't want to be a weight on anyone. It comes from a trauma I've already worked on, that I've chewed over, that I can name with clarity. And even so, it keeps showing up. And when it shows up, it still surprises me, although now I can see it differently: without sinking, without hiding it. That doesn't mean I don't panic sometimes, because I've panicked several times these past weeks. But I've been so well received.

And this has to do with something I keep noticing in the people around me: letting myself be cared for is something I've never fully known how to do. I've always wanted it, but it was never something I could just let myself fall into, because my experiences in life were different.

And it's not just the more distant past. The last person I trusted like that, completely, was my last husband, and that trust ended in the worst possible way. Situations like that make those beliefs I carry inside, the very same ones I worked so hard on so I could open up the way I did with him, take even deeper root. And inside they tell you: see? You shouldn't have trusted. See? They don't love you if you trust and open up.

And I can't help but feel like the universe is putting the same test in front of me again, just in a different format: it's no longer a person, now it's my own body, my own community, asking me to trust again.

Realizing this now, in a situation I can't change, in which I need the help, confirms something I'd already started to understand that night with my brother: that letting yourself be loved isn't only about receiving, it also does good for the one who's able to give.

I know this because I've lived it from the other side: helping has been, in one way or another, my profession my whole life, whether as a producer, helping someone else create what they had in mind, or now as a therapist, supporting people through hard times.

It's okay to let myself be helped. To let myself be loved this way. It's the most honest and the most real I can be, toward myself and toward others, without guilt, without shame.

Although saying this, I'm already laughing, because I know the guilt is going to show up at some point. I'm not even operated on yet and I'm already thinking about this, already turning it over in my head. There are going to be moments of guilt, moments of shame, of not being able to hold myself up alone and needing logistical, financial, emotional, physical support. I know it.

But it's part of letting myself go, of what in English is called surrender, and in Spanish would be something like rendirse, though not the kind that loses. It's more like: the fight is over, that's it, you can stay here, and let yourself be loved in whatever way each person can manage.

This is my lesson from these weeks. And the incredible thing is how quickly the body adapts to what's happening to it, in a way the mind often hasn't caught up to yet. The mind arrives later.

🎵 I'll leave you with this beautiful song by Silvia Pérez Cruz, called "La Flor" ("The Flower")