Two Years Out: Bread, Fear, and the Strange Math of Staying Alive

Today is my two-year cancer diagnosis anniversary — my “cancerversary.”

And I’m still here. I’m still med. No evidence of disease. I’m one of the lucky ones: one of the 19% who didn’t have a recurrence in the first 18 months.

I also still have a 44% chance of being dead by my five-year anniversary.

Let that sit for a second…

Because I live in this strange, awkward middle ground now. Deep gratitude on one side. On the other, the quiet math of knowing I might be 40% of the way through the last five years I get in this body. It’s a weird place to build a life, but it’s where I live now.

The Part That Still Surprises Me

Emotionally, spiritually, mentally, I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been. The happiest I’ve ever been. The most at peace with life as I’m experiencing it. At 54 years old, this is the most content and fulfilled I have ever felt in my entire life.

How is that possible?

I don’t get it.

But I’m grateful for it.

I’m not going to pretend the fear isn’t real, though. When I let myself actually sit with that 44% possibility of being dead within three years, I’m completely terrified. Not so much of the illness, or of the act of dying itself — it’s the whatever-the-fuck comes next part that scares me.

Where the Fear Comes From

You see, I was raised Mormon by a single mother who I now understand had borderline personality disorder with way too many narcissistic features — or maybe she was a covert narcissist with too many borderline features. I don’t know. Either way, she wasn’t a safe, loving parent to grow up with.

Between her and the Mormon stuff, death was never just death growing up. It came with judgment attached, with a scorecard, with a God who was in a lot of ways just like my inconsistent, frequently rage-filled mom — only bigger, and way more powerful than her.

I’m still untangling that.

I don’t know if I ever fully will. But I can name it out loud now without it owning me for the rest of the day. That’s new. That’s its own kind of healing progress.

What I Do With My Hands Instead of Spiraling

Some days, instead of spiraling, I make bread. Eighty percent whole wheat sourdough, with a starter I bought from a local bakery for $5.

Here’s the wild part: last month I found out I don’t actually have celiac disease — something I believed and lived by for 16 years. Sixteen years of a story about my body that turned out to be wrong. I’m still catching myself reading every label in the grocery store for gluten contamination, out of habit. Wow.

Just wow, y’all, wow.

So, now I bake in pieces. I have severe ME/CFS, so it’s never one long, satisfying afternoon in the kitchen. It’s a few minutes here, a few minutes there. I get up. I fold the dough. I go lie back down. I rest. I get up again, fold again, go back to bed again.

And somehow every loaf turns out a little better than the last.

There’s something almost unbearably magical to me about that — water, flour, a pinch of salt, time, and a little patience, turning into something fluffy and golden and alive and delicious. And y’all, the crumb I’m starting to develop is so springy and satisfying!

The Cancer Itself

My cancer is uterine leiomyosarcoma (LMS) — a chemo-resistant cancer, which is its own kind of terror. If surgery doesn’t get it, there isn’t a hardy, foolproof backup plan waiting in the wings. That’s some freaky stuff to sit with. The gold standard with LMS is surgery: you get in and take out as much as you can.

I was lucky in a second way, too. My tumor was 7.5 centimeters — about the size of a peach — and it was removed entirely intact. If it had been cut up during removal (a process called morcellation, sometimes used to make tumors easier to extract), it would have spread, and I’d be stage 4 instead of stage 1B. Stage 4 uterine leiomyosarcoma has a five-year survival rate of 10 to 12%.

So when I say I’m lucky, I mean it — and it comes in layers.

Lucky they caught it early.

Lucky it stayed in one piece.

So lucky, and still so terrified. Both at once.

Bread, Water, Flour, Salt, Time, and Love

After all of it — the surgery, the diagnosis, two years of continual scans — this is what feels most magical to me right now this morning: bread.

Water, flour, salt, time, and love.

I don’t have a tidy bow to put on this. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that you can be terrified of dying and still be the happiest you’ve ever been, in the same breath, on the same random Friday. You can be rebuilding your relationship with your own body while literally building a loaf of bread, one fold at a time.

Two years out. Still here. Still kind of stunned.

Right now I’m folding dough between lay-downs, recording this from bed, laptop on my over-the-bed desk. My cat is in her hammock by the window with her chin tucked on the edge, watching the birds and neighborhood cats go by. I don’t know how that’s comfortable for her, but she loves it.

And that’s it. That’s the whole update.

I hope you have a rad Friday. Sending you so much love, bye!
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…if you’d rather listen and/or read along on YouTube, here that is: