01/29/26

This essay marks one year since life-saving surgery for SMAS and MALS — rare vascular compression syndromes that changed my relationship with my body, survival, and breath itself.

I am currently writing a memoir about chronic illness, trauma, resilience, and rebuilding identity after your body becomes unpredictable territory. Some of these essays are early chapters, others are reflections I never expected to share.

Thank you for reading something deeply personal.

One year ago, I handed my abdomen back to a blade.

Again.

One year since I signed consent forms that read like quiet ultimatums, and felt heavier than paper should hold. Each page a quiet contract between science and surrender. Between risk and the stubborn human instinct to survive long enough to be able to hold the people waiting in unwelcoming stiffening chairs outside double swinging doors again.

One year since I kissed my husband and children, knowing full well that surgery is never a guarantee; it’s a negotiation with fate, a gamble placed with trembling hands disguised as courage.

I climbed onto the hospital bed — my strange, sterile chariot — and rode toward the operating room like it was a carriage carrying me between two versions of my life. Between who I had been and who I might become if my body allowed it. I remember being escorted away from the people who tether me to this earth, from the fragile ecosystem of life I had built inside the unpredictable terrain of chronic illness. The hallway stretching longer than it physically was, like a tunnel between seasons, like time itself had decided to dilate around goodbye.

Macklemore’s “Glorious” played as the wheels hummed against linoleum, the rhythm matching the pulse hammering through my veins. It felt like an anthem for defiance. A song not about victory yet, but about the audacity to believe I might still have one.

The OR was colder than memory allows most rooms to be. Steel table. Blue drapes. Stainless steel trays clinked with the unmistakable music of instruments designed to cut, clamp, retract, and repair. Blinding halos of fluorescent lights, like surgical suns erasing shadows but never uncertainty, they hummed with the indifference of machines that witness life and death daily without ever choosing sides. The air bit at my skin, but my body didn’t tremble from cold. Adrenaline surged through me like electricity. Not panic. Not fear.

Contentment. A quiet, almost sacred surrender.

I joked with my surgeon while the room transformed into a battlefield disguised as medicine. My abdomen marked, mapping entry points like cartography of both destruction and repair. He told me he couldn’t understand my love of adrenaline. I laughed because how could he?

His adrenaline lives in sterile precision. In the responsibility of steady hands holding someone else’s survival between sutures and millimeters that hold arteries together and relieve compressions strangling blood flow. His aliveness is measured in steady, calm, successful outcomes, stable vitals, clean dissections.

Mine lives in the chaos of a body that has never asked permission before collapsing. I live inside a body where connective tissue stretches too far, where arteries compress, where nerves misfire, where organs fold inward like collapsing architecture. I do not know aliveness without instability. I have learned to measure existence by the proximity of catastrophe and the miracle of waking up anyway. I live straddling the fragile fault line between life and death, where control is a myth and survival is a daily improvisation. I do not remember what it feels like to be alive without holding death’s hand.

Living beside death has made every breath luminous. Death is terrifyingly luminous.

We laughed at our differences, two people standing on opposite sides of aliveness, meeting in the intersecting trenches of skill and surrender. He held scalpels. I held faith in forces neither of us could fully command. Around us, a room filled with people whose eyes were the only human parts not hidden behind sterile paper gowns, masks, shields, scrub caps, and gloves. Their eyes moved with the same watchfulness as the monitors and machines surrounding me; scanning, measuring, witnessing the fragile line between life and death. I searched them, hoping they hadn’t grown numb to the threshold they stood on every day. Hoping they still felt the gravity of the moment. Together, despite the machinery, the medicine, and the mystery, we shared one silent mission: keep me here.

Then Andra Day’s “Rise Up” floated into the room, filling the sterile air like a hymn written for bodies that refuse to quit, like a promise whispered by the universe itself. ‘I’ll rise up.’ They transferred me onto the operating table, narrow and unyielding. The metal beneath the thin padding felt like lying across winter itself. Nurses arranged warming blankets across my arms and chest, but cold seeped in anyway, not through skin, through anticipation.

Then my arms were extended and strapped down to arm boards, palms up. A surgical crucifixion, a sacrifice, an offering. That is always the moment my mind fractures open. My body vibrated with catecholamines, adrenaline, and norepinephrine flooding my bloodstream, dilating pupils, sharpening hearing, preparing every system for threat. (Trauma research tells us the body stores procedural memory long after the conscious mind releases it.) Every fiber of my body recognized this environment like an old battlefield. The memory of being trapped lives in my nervous system like an old scar that aches when the weather changes. Every sound sharpens. Lights grow brighter. Conversations overlap into static. Panic clawed up my throat, heaviness squeezed my chest. Tears slid down my cheeks and into my ears as if they were attempting to drown out the heightened sound.

Then came the time-out.

Before the first incision, the room shifts into ritual. A surgical “time-out.” A mandatory stillness. The entire team stopped, voices clear, deliberate, reverent in their precision. They spoke my name. My date of birth. The procedure. The site. Antibiotics confirmed. Equipment accounted for. It was science’s version of prayer, a collective agreement that this body on the table was not anonymous, not routine, not expendable. In that sterile pause, I was both checklist and human, protocol and person, and everyone in the room aligned around a single intention: do no harm, prevent the irreversible, get this right.

My anesthesiologist stepped closer, reentering my field of view. Her face exposed and vulnerable to my eyes, not like everyone else’s, already draped, covered, and shielded from the miraculous violence I was only moments away from. There was something intimate and calming about that exposure. While the others armored themselves for incision, she remained uncovered; the guardian of consciousness, the keeper of the threshold. The brevity of that moment secured an almost unreasonable trust in her pharmacology-calibrated hand. Her voice was grounding, rhythmic, warm, almost liturgical. She explained propofol, opioids, paralytics, ventilators, each medication a carefully calibrated negotiation with consciousness. She narrated physiology like poetry. Spoke of mind-numbing pharmacology as she was telling me a bedtime story.

Then the medication entered. Warmth climbs my veins like liquid dusk. My hearing folds inward. The ceiling dissolves. Darkness blooms like nightfall arriving all at once.

A deep, consuming quiet. An escape. A vacation from a body that has so often felt like a battlefield. A strange liminal space — not sleep, not death, an engineered absence of consciousness. Machines breathing for you and surgeons holding your organs in their hands while you float…..nowhere.

There is a small, forbidden part of me that always wonders if I could just stay there. Anesthesia dreams aren’t really dreams. Their silence. peaceful. Weightless. Free of monitors, pain, gravity, responsibility, and expectation. They are the closest my body has ever come to stillness.

But I always wake.

And waking is violent.

Pain does not ask permission when anesthesia, ketamine, fentanyl, and nerve blocks fade. It floods nerve endings like wildfire through dry brush, before memory returns. I don’t know how I survived those first days, time existed in fragments of a millimeter measured morphine fog, surgical wounds, alarms, and the relentless work of breathing through agony that demanded surrender. Not metaphorical work. Mechanical work. Each inhale expands a ribcage that protests, stretches incisions that scream through nerve pathways newly awakened.

Inhale: proof I am still here.

Exhale: surrender to pain I cannot escape.

A year has passed. Quietly.

The anniversary passed silently. No ceremony. No balloons or flowers. No pictures documenting the momentous milestone. Just me, standing in the stillness of an ordinary Thursday unfolding, realizing I survived a year I once believed my lungs would not carry me through— which is perhaps the greatest miracle of all.

The miracle of survival is rarely loud. It hid inside the mundane. Inside the boring, ordinary life nobody writes movies about, but I prayed to keep. Trauma teaches us to expect catastrophe. Healing teaches us to sit inside the terrifying calm of normalcy.

I survived long enough to see birthdays where candles flickered in my children’s eyes like constellations, and my children’s laughter felt like oxygen. The most beautiful reminders of why I chose to fight. Why I keep choosing chaos.

I survived holidays where I sat at tables tasting food with equal parts gratitude and fear, aware that digestion itself remains both nourishment and threat. SMAS and MALS taught me that arteries can strangle organs silently. That anatomy can betray survival without warning.

I survived bleachers and sidelines, cheering for my daughters, lungs burning, abdomen aching, heart swelling with pride that felt worth every scar stitching my body together by resilience and medical innovation.

Scars are strange biology. Collagen fibers lie in chaotic patterns, stronger than the original tissue yet less flexible. Proof of my survival, but also permanent evidence of trauma. My abdomen has become a topographical map of endurance, raised lines tracing the history of surgeons entering my body to give me another chance at breath.

I traveled again. Carefully. Each suitcase packed with medications, medical summaries, contingency plans — chronic illness advocacy lives in preparation. Living medically complex teaches you that survival requires both faith and plan B. I collected memories like fragile glass snow globes and shot glasses.

I drank coffee with my girlfriends. I skied. I walked slow miles where laughter became rehabilitation for my nervous system. Relied on social connection to literally rewire trauma pathways, lowering cortisol, and increasing oxytocin. Science quietly confirming what human hearts have always known: we heal in relationships

I sat through double dates and game nights, relearning how to laugh without calculating the energy cost of joy.

I survived family snuggles that turned into dog piles of limbs and blankets and warmth — moments where my body felt like home again instead of a hazard zone.

I found my way back to teaching Pilates, guiding others to inhabit their bodies while cautiously renegotiating trust with my own. Teaching movement after surgical trauma feels like conducting an orchestra inside a rebuilding cathedral. Every cue I give others echoes through tissues still learning elasticity and strength. Standing in front of a room of people depending on me has felt like both victory and terror. Every commitment is still a risk. Every class is an act of faith that my body will not hijack my life mid-sentence.

I risked being depended upon again.

Chronic illness breeds a deep fear: not of failure, but of disappearing mid-commitment. Of loving people and letting them down when your body stages a coup. Showing up has become my bravest act of faith.

I started writing my book, carving my truth into permanence so my purpose might echo long after my voice no longer can. Writing feels like building a lighthouse from the wreckage I’ve survived, hoping it guides someone else through their own storm.

Narrative medicine tells us that patient stories improve care models, research direction, and empathy. Writing is not just healing. It is resistance. It is legacy.

But survival has never been linear.

In this year, I have also endured five bowel obstructions. Five reminders that the very system that sustains my life can betray it without warning. I live with the constant paradox that nourishment — the thing I need to live — may also be the thing that sends me back to an operating table, another negotiation with mortality. Breathing is both miracle and uncertainty.

Eating has become an act of courage. Digesting, an act of faith.

Living inside medical complexity reshapes spirituality. I do not experience faith as certainty. I experience it as willingness — willingness to love a body that has broken me and rebuilt me repeatedly. Willingness to wake each day knowing nothing about health is guaranteed.

And still…

I wake up.

I show up.

I risk loving this life anyway.

There is a version of me who rode into that operating room believing she might not return. She lives inside every scar I carry, every flinch, every quiet gratitude that floods my chest when I realize I am still here to feel sunlight warm my face.

This year was not a loud triumph. It was something far more subtle and sacred. It was endurance. It was learning that survival is not a single moment of victory, but thousands of quiet decisions to stay.

One year ago, I surrendered to a scalpel, hoping it would save my life. Today, I honor something deeper. I honor the breath that never stopped fighting to stay. I honor the scars that stitched science and spirit together across my abdomen. I honor the seasons my body continues to survive, even when survival is quiet, ordinary, and terrifyingly beautiful.

Most of all, I honor the sacred, fragile miracle that I am still here to tell the story.