APPENDICURE

On waking to a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis and the 24 hours that changed everything…

YOU HAVE CANCER.

These words didn’t just land. They crashed through me, leaving me numb — suspended somewhere between disbelief and fear. My heart was racing. That Apple Watch I’d never thought to silence kept going off, bearing witness.

Less than 24 hours earlier, I was okay. I was working out with my personal trainer, followed by a brisk walk. Moving. Living. Thinking life was steady and that so much was still ahead of me.

In less than one day, the world as I knew it would never be the same again.

The Hospital.

It was April 17, 2025. I found myself in an ER at the same hospital where I had delivered my son — my second child of three — 38 years before. That had been a happy day. The irony was not lost on me.

The original scans were “unclear.” A large mass — bigger than a football — filled my abdomen, hiding its source. They told me it was most likely ovarian cancer, and that it was advanced. Whatever that meant. I was just numb. Calls, tests, hospital corridors blurred together. My mind refused to process reality.

Anger didn’t come first. It arrived much later — slow, fierce, relentless — rising in waves I didn’t understand yet. In those first hours, there was only shock. And beneath the shock, a strange, eerie stillness.

The Voice I Couldn’t Explain.

Ten days before surgery, I was told what they’d need to do: a Total Abdominal Hysterectomy, Bilateral Salpingo-Oophorectomy, removal of my cervix, and of course the mass. I asked the surgeon to take my appendix too, while he was in there. He laughed. “Why would I do that?”

I told him I didn’t need it, right? I was too embarrassed to say the real reason: that months earlier, in a meditation, a small voice had started shouting inside me with a single, insistent word.

Appendectomy.

No context. No explanation. Just that word, repeating.

Under The Lights.

On the day of surgery, I was wheeled into a bright room filled with machines and what felt like at least a hundred people — all dressed like a medical drama on television — except I had the starring role. Two surgical teams: a gynecologist/oncologist and a colorectal surgeon, along with their residents.

Before I went under, someone asked me my favorite music. I said Green Day. Only Billie Joe Armstrong could accompany me for this descent. Hours passed without my awareness. At some point, my gynecologist/oncologist quietly changed the playlist to R.E.M. — one of my other favorite bands. How could he have known?

I woke to voices begging me to come back. Maybe I didn’t want to face what was waiting. That’s when I first heard the words.

“Appendix cancer.”

I didn’t know such a cancer existed until that moment. Stage 4. I had no symptoms until the morning I woke up looking nine months pregnant, unable to put on my sneakers.

That little voice in my meditation — the one I’d been too embarrassed to explain to my surgeon — had been right all along.

I don’t know what to make of that. I’m still figuring it out. But I think about it often, in the quiet moments that illness carves out for you whether you want them or not.

Next time: The surgery, and what it took that no scan could measure.

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This post is part of the Living in the In-Between series on Appendicure by Colleen Bailey – a community for appendix cancer patients and caregivers. If this resonates, you’re not alone.