My body knew before I did. Danger. A muscle spasm in my leg. Unexplained tiredness. A feeling of being off-balance. Danger. Then, in the third week of March, I found the tumour. Danger.
The biopsy room was cold. Two technicians, no introductions beyond their roles. One operated the ultrasound. One held the needle. I was on the table alone in the way you are alone when the people in the room are working, not talking.
The screen showed the inside of my thigh. Grey shapes. A mass that didn’t belong. I watched it the whole time. The needle moving toward it, the technician’s hands steady, the image shifting. Nobody told me to look away. I didn’t think to.
There was a sound when the needle entered. A click. Mechanical. The kind of sound that belongs in a hardware store, not a body.
Four months of ultrasounds, MRIs, biopsies. Each one worse than the last. My body was fighting cancer while I made breakfast and went to meetings.
Twenty-five days of radiation. I decided to wear a different band t-shirt to each session. Nobody knew at first. On day two the lead Radiation Tech, Melody, complimented a shirt. By day three she was playing music to match. It became a thing.
On day twenty-one I went alone. The Ramones. Red lipstick, black jeans. In the parkade after, a man noticed the shirt. He was in his late sixties, sitting on a walker, blue jeans and white t-shirt, arms covered in tattoos.
“The Ramones. What a band, eh?”
He pulled me out of the check-in line. Played me two songs on his phone. The songs he’d chosen for his Celebration of Life. He had six months to live. He was also recording voicemails his son would leave on people’s answering machines after he died.
I regret not giving him my number. A pep talk from the grave would mean more than a t-shirt.
That was the only patient support group I attended. I could have talked to him all day.
Danger was everywhere.
My oncology physio, Kate, uses a term from pain neuroscience research: credible evidence of safety. The nervous system weighs evidence of danger against evidence of safety. Until something changes the equation, the body stays in protective mode.
The first stage of cancer treatment was mechanical. Like a train. Moving fast with no choice but to get on. I tried to convince myself I was the conductor, but I was more like a kid with a toy train and a paper hat, sitting there pretending. There was a plan. I followed it. One foot in front of the other. Keep going.
Danger came from the things saving my life, too. Radiation beams aimed at my leg. Intentional surgical trauma. Six days in a hospital trauma ward. Months of not knowing: is it still there?
For ten months, my body built up an expertise in danger. I can still feel it. Pain. Muscle guarding. Fatigue. Hyper-vigilance. Teeth grinding. Brain fog. Brain zaps.
My grandmother died on an OR table during a routine procedure. The kind of thing they tell you could happen, but almost never does. In my family, dying-on-the-table became lore. Then, a few years before this tumour, I did nearly die on an OR table. The nurse responsible is in jail.
So when I went into the hospital to have a sarcoma removed from my thigh, meeting the OR Head Nurse was my biggest fear. Within seconds of meeting Nurse Mark, the fear was gone. Calm, confident, careful, curious. Wheeling me down the long hallway, Mark asked:
“If it weren’t for this unfortunate surprise in your life, what would you typically be doing this week, the third week of October?”
I told him in a typical year, I’d have just finished teaching a one-week course, I’d be submitting grades and packing for a trip into nature. A canoe, a hike, anything out of the city.
“Well, next year I’d suggest Cape Scott. My favourite area. The grade isn’t too steep — perfect as you get stronger. It’s 20km. You’ll handle it.’
I arrived in the OR the opposite of scared. I arrived ready to get it over with. The sooner it was done, the sooner I’d be hiking in the woods again.
The OR team waited for the surgeon: two residents, two fellows, a student nurse, the anaesthetist, another nurse. Some were on their phones. One was wrapped in a blanket like a cape, staying warm. Quiet. Cold.
Mark announced to his colleagues, “Team, meet Kari. Even though Dr. C isn’t here yet, Kari is, and she’s the most important person in the room today. Why don’t we all introduce ourselves and brief her on what’s going to happen.”
Everyone moved.
Right before the anaesthesia, Mark asked if I had any other questions.
“Yes. When I was in pre-op, my daughter told my husband there are TikTok videos of surgeons blasting music in the OR while they work. We each made guesses for what Dr. C would play. What kind of music will he listen to?”
Mark responded, “The OR is more like a classroom, there are a lot of students, and Dr. C often can’t listen to music because he’s teaching. But if he does, it’ll be 80s rock.”
I fell asleep smiling. I’d guessed 80s rock.
Mark pushed me down the hallway to post-op recovery.
“The surgeon did play one song during your surgery. It was Dancing in the Moonlight.”
Dr. C removed all the layers of my quad muscles above, below, and around the tumour, down to the bone. A third of my overall thigh muscle is gone. He cut the IT band and reconnected it. He cut the nerves. He can’t reconnect those. The skin on my left thigh is permanently numb.
A medical resident told me they’d removed a mass the size of a large mango. Dr. C told me the total mass removed was more like the size of a Sunday roast that could feed a large family. I didn’t know my thigh could be so nourishing.
January 23rd. Three months since surgery.
At night, my thigh aches. The nerves along the stitches fritz. Looking for each other, trying to connect. Broken along my outer thigh. Determined to get back to whole.
The outer-left quad muscles won’t grow back. The rest of my quads, hamstrings, glutes, all the muscles I don’t know the names of, are fighting for a chance to impress me. And they are.
I’m proud of my leg. It sounds strange. It’s the truest thing I can say. I found the tumour in the third week of March. I walked a quarter block alone in the third week of November without it in my leg.
Now I can bend, turn, stretch, balance (barely), dance (almost), walk, sit, stand, squat (kind of), bike indoors, step up, step down. At least half of those verbs were uncertain a few months ago. They are my full-time job. Each month, the goal is simple: add more verbs.
I’m the conductor. Long days. A destination still far off. But in charge of the plan.
What used to take two hours now takes twelve. A time-lapse of my old life would show me zipping through two hours. Now I move in slow motion. Same tasks, same steps, same conversations, just slower. Moving slower, I notice everything. Every movement. Every word. Every connection.
It exhausts me.
My fuel for eight months was fear. Often the distilled version, terror. Eight months running on fear. I’m hungover from the cortisol and adrenaline. The hangover doesn’t look dramatic. It looks like snapping at someone for loading the dishwasher wrong. It looks like standing in the kitchen one morning waiting for the coffee to finish, and the sound of the grinder felt like too much. Too loud. Too ordinary.
The coffee finished. I poured it. That was the moment I noticed the fear wane. Not gone. Just no longer in charge. Eight months of my nervous system running a tab. Now it was settling.
My family doctor calls it the catch-up effect. The emotional and psychological catch-up. She says I’m right on time.
Cancer made me angry for many reasons. One of them: the threat it posed to turning 50. I’ve watched women I love move through their 50s and 60s and 70s. They seem cool. My 40s were good and brutal in equal measure. For a while, I thought cancer might take 50 from me. Like a cruel joke when I’d made it to 49.75.
Last May, someone I knew in passing asked what I was doing for my 50th birthday. Casual. The kind of question people ask in hallways. I opened my mouth and had nothing. Not “I’m not sure yet.” Nothing. No image, no place, no person. The screen was blank. I stood there for a moment, said something, moved on.
Something had gone quiet. I lost the ability to see past next week. Not in a dramatic way. In a daily, quiet way. A future trip, a birthday party, new directions in my work. All dark. I stopped imagining. I didn’t know who I was without it.
I was convinced I would die on the OR table. But I woke up.
My Oncologist called two weeks before our scheduled appointment. She called early in the morning, before her shift even started. My scans were clear. No cancer. No spread. No tumours on the full-body CT or the MRI. No longer a Cancer Patient. Now a Cancer Survivor.
Imagine a 50th birthday. A place to dance. People I love. Trees outside. A party.
Clear scans. An Oncologist scanning for danger so I don’t have to. My pain can ease faster knowing these are true. I have credible evidence of safety. Evidence changes what the nervous system does.
Kate shifted my rehab goals to nature-based experiences. A walk through a cedar grove near my house. Uneven terrain. Moving through trees in a hilly, rainy park. Walking on sand and small rocks at the beach. Snowy woods on snowshoes.
Inviting my body to find balance. On unpredictable ground.
My body knew danger before I did. Now it knows something different.
Safety.
Kari Marken grew up in Saskatchewan and has spent her life moving, around Canada and around the world, as a teacher, designer and writer. She now lives in Vancouver in a house with a yellow door and works as a faculty member at the UBC Sauder School of Business. Her personal essays move in, through, and out of the fractured and upended moments of life, hoping others might confront their own with a little more beauty.