The Scar, the Buffet, and the Phone Call

I told you before there’d been some medical issues I wasn’t ready to talk about publicly. I said maybe one day. Well, I’m going to start writing about it and see what happens…

Fair warning: this is the long version. It has a three-month trip, an ache I ignored for way too long, a hospital chair that deserves its own paragraph, and a phone call I will never, ever forget. Get something warm to drink. This one should take ten or fifteen minutes, so thank you in advance for dedicating that time of your day to me.

Three Months, One Ache

A few years ago, when the world had gone remote and nobody was going anywhere anyway, my husband and I did the thing everyone in our position was quietly doing: we took the flexibility and ran with it. We packed up our girls — all three of them, all still small enough to need help with their seatbelts — and spent three or four months on the other side of the world, visiting my family. It felt like the one good thing that whole strange year handed us.

By the time we left to come home, I could already feel it. A dull ache low in my back, on one side — not sharp enough to stop me from doing anything, exactly, but persistent enough that I noticed it every single day. It wasn’t debilitating. It was just there, the way a pebble in your shoe is just there: small, but it has your attention whether you want to give it or not.

I let it go for months. I told myself it was the flights, the different beds, carrying children who insisted they were too big to be carried and then fell asleep in my arms anyway. Normal mom-back. Nothing to make a fuss about.

From “Probably a Cyst” to “Oh, Oh”

The ache followed me home, and it followed me long enough that when I finally saw my dad — a retired surgeon, which is either the best or the worst kind of parent to have when something’s wrong with your body, depending on the week — I told him I needed to actually get it looked at. Not because it was unbearable. Because I was tired of being in some amount of pain every single day and pretending I wasn’t.

He sent me for scans. The first read was almost reassuring: probably a cyst, very common in that part of the back, nothing dramatic. Then, a few appointments later, the tone shifted the way it does in these situations — not panicked, just quieter. “It looks like it might be a tumor.”

Here’s the thing nobody tells you about that sentence: it never arrives alone. It comes bundled with immediate, aggressive reassurance from every direction. Every doctor I saw told me it looked encapsulated. Contained. Small. In a spot that would make it accessible if it ever needed to come out. Everyone encouraged me to stay calm, stay positive, not get ahead of myself.

Easy to say. Much, much harder to actually do while you’re lying there being told the word “tumor” now applies to your own body.

Good News, a Long Line, and a Complicated Date

Next came the biopsy. And if you’ve ever had one, you already know the part that actually breaks you isn’t the procedure itself — it’s the gap. That stretch of days between the moment they take the sample and the moment someone calls with an answer. I have never watched my phone the way I watched my phone during that stretch.

When the call finally came, it was good news, or at least the closest thing to good news that sentence can hold: benign. A relief so large I could have cried, and probably did. The only asterisk the pathologist attached was that these things can sometimes be stubborn — they occasionally form again after they’re removed. I remember thinking, fine, I can live with that. That’s a problem for a future version of me.

Because everything looked stable and non-urgent, I went on a waiting list for surgery instead of being rushed into anything. That was April. My surgery date landed on July 4th — which I started calling my own little Independence Day, half as a joke and half because I needed something to laugh about. It also happened to be my daughter’s sixth birthday. I missed it. That’s a sentence I still don’t love writing.

Five Days, Five Nights

The surgery turned out to be more than I’d braced for. I ended up staying five days and five nights in the hospital, and my husband — who is, without exaggeration, the steadiest person I have ever met — did not leave. Five nights, sleeping upright in a chair that looked like it had been designed specifically to punish anyone who sat in it for longer than an hour.

At some point I started handing him the sleeping pills the nurses gave me at night, because it was obvious he needed them more than I did. I had a hospital bed. He had a chair built for a much smaller, much more forgiving spine than his. We still laugh about that — him, hollow-eyed, insisting he was “basically fine,” while quietly pocketing whatever I offered him.

The Scar, the Buffet, and the Phone Call

Here’s something else nobody prepares you for: after they remove anything from your body, there’s a second analysis — a full pathology review of the actual tissue, separate from the biopsy that came before it. The biopsy is a preview. This is the real answer.

In my case, the real answer didn’t match the preview.

It was August. I still had faint marks on my lower back from the glue they use under the bandages, and a long scar running from the top of my backside up toward the middle of my spine — my husband still jokes that from behind, over the waistband of my pants, it looks exactly like I’m showing more than I mean to. We were at a kids’ resort, trying to give our girls a normal, fun summer after months of them sensing something was wrong without being told what.

We were at lunch, at the buffet. My husband had just gotten up to fill his plate. I was alone at the table with the girls when my phone rang. It was the doctor. He asked if it was a good time to talk, and I said sure — completely unaware that the next sixty seconds were going to flip my life over.

He told me they had the final results, and that it wasn’t what we’d thought. It was, in his words, actually bad. He gave me the full clinical name of it, a string of syllables I’d never heard before and have never forgotten since. And the entire time, my brain ran exactly one loop, on repeat: the girls are right here, you need to keep it together.

So I said, “Okay.”

He repeated the information. I said okay again. He asked, gently, if I understood what he was telling me. I genuinely don’t know what he made of how calm I sounded, because inside I was anything but — I simply didn’t have another option available to me at that table, in that moment, with three small faces in front of me who had no idea their lunch had just become the backdrop to the worst phone call of my life.

What My Dad Said

When my husband came back, I told him I needed to step outside to make a call. I was crying before I even made it out the door. I called my dad. I didn’t say a word when he picked up — I didn’t have to. He already knew.

The first thing he said wasn’t “I’m sorry,” or “tell me everything.” It was: “What did you understand from that conversation with your doctor?”

I said, “That I have cancer.”

(I just typed that sentence for the first time in my life. I needed a minute after writing it. I’m back now.)

My dad’s answer is the one I still hold onto, on the hard days: “No. It means you had it. And now it’s out. It was treated as if it was cancer from the very beginning — the margins are clear, you’ll still go through checkups and follow-ups, but as of right now, you are clear.”

I will never forget that reframe. Not because it erased what had happened, but because it gave me somewhere solid to stand while I figured out what came next.

What That Call Actually Started

That moment is really where the rest of this blog begins. It’s what sent me looking for every non-traditional way I could find to process something that, honestly, nobody understands the weight of until it’s happened to their own body. Nobody teaches you how to carry that and still show up, fully, for three little girls who deserved a normal summer and had no idea how close their mom had come to a very different conversation.

So I had to learn, fast and mostly on my own, how to actually calm a mind that had every reason not to be calm — without putting a single ounce of that fear on my daughters’ shoulders. Pretending everything was fine, every single day, while quietly rebuilding my own sense of safety in my own body: that was the hardest job I have ever had, by a wide margin.

One More Method: The 4-7-8 Breath

I’ve already told you about the two-minute morning visualization that got me out of bed on the hardest days. Here’s another one that earned a permanent spot in my routine, especially for the moments when my mind would spiral at 2 a.m. and my body needed to catch up with the reassurance my brain was struggling to believe: the 4-7-8 breath.

It’s simple enough to do anywhere, including a hospital bed, including the passenger seat of a car, including standing in a buffet line trying not to fall apart in front of your kids. Breathe in quietly through your nose for a count of four. Hold that breath for a count of seven. Exhale slowly and completely through your mouth for a count of eight, letting it be audible, almost a sigh. Repeat the cycle three or four times.

The extended exhale is doing the real work. It signals to your nervous system that you’re safe, that it can stand down, in a way that talking yourself out of panic rarely manages on its own. It won’t erase a diagnosis. It won’t undo a phone call. But it will, reliably, bring your heart rate down a notch when you need exactly that and nothing more.

Everything I just told you — the ache I ignored, the biopsy, the scar, the phone call, the breathing, the two-minute visualizations, all of it — is eventually what became Meditation for Beginners. I built it because, when I started this whole process, I went looking for something exactly like it and couldn’t find it: no woo-woo, no forty-step theory before you get to anything useful, just a plain, honest manual for someone who has never meditated in their life and needs it to actually work, today, in the middle of a hard year.

I wrote the book I wish someone had handed me at that buffet table.

There’s way more of this story I haven’t told yet, but that’s for another day.

Hope you make it a great day today! More soon. xx.

— L