“But you’re so young! Why you have a cancer problem?!” my nurse Kyoung asked as she hooked my port up to that day’s iron infusion.
“I don’t know, Kyoung,” I said. “You tell me. Got any theories?”
She didn’t. But a few other people do—some hilarious, a few practical, and plenty of confounded looks, just like Kyoung’s.
At this point, the question is almost funny.
Or maybe I’m just desperate for some humor in this shit of a situation.
So I’m starting a little series about it.
Why Alli Has Cancer
Theory One: Bad Luck.
Two hours after I got the phone call from Angela, the poor woman at Fairfax Radiology whose job it is to call people and tell them their biopsy came back positive (or negative!) for cancer, I’m on the phone for an hour with the woman who will become my breast nurse care manager. Her name is Cami. She tells me she’s going to be my “breastie.”
I didn’t know Cami existed four hours earlier, when I grabbed a coffee on my fifteen-minute break from work—a break that would become my last, on my last day of work.
“A lot of people ask why—why me?” she says. “But cancer doesn’t care.”
“I know, Cami,” I say. “I know cancer doesn’t give a shit.”
Cancer doesn’t care that I teach yoga and meditation, or that I work for a human performance company. It doesn’t care that I don’t smoke and hardly drink. It doesn’t care that I have a dialed-in sleep routine, eat mostly organic, or wear an Oura ring. It doesn’t care that I buy sugar-free creamer, ketchup, pasta sauce.
It doesn’t care that I didn’t eat meat for over twenty years. That I track my macros. That I sauna, cold plunge, do breathwork. That I buy the cleanest home and skin products I can find.
It doesn’t care that I never licked the walls of the lead-paint apartments I lived in. That I don’t live near Chernobyl. That I never served in a combat zone with toxic exposure. It doesn’t care that I’ve never missed a mammogram.
Or, as my friend Katie’s husband said last night at dinner, “It is absolutely terrifying that this is happening to one of the healthiest people I know.”
The quiet part, said out loud.
I’d later learn that forty percent of breast cancer cases are tied to lifestyle. I did the best I could.
I’d also learn that ten percent are genetic. I was tested within seventy-two hours of my diagnosis—a rubber strip cinched around my bicep, the second needle of the day sliding into my arm while I stared out a cancer-center window at leafless winter trees.
The tech handed me an Ocean Spray CranGrape because I pass out with needles. When she was done, she pressed cotton to my arm and wrapped it with yellow tape covered in smiley faces.
Negative. No genetic predisposition.
I’d later learn that fifty percent of breast cancer cases are just bad luck.
That’s my category.
Or, put another way: cancer is a bomb.
And as My Unlikely Friend—who worked with actual bombs, so he knows—says:
“You can have all the training, experience, reps, intuition in the world—but sometimes the bomb gets a vote.”
This time, it did.
