In January 2024, just days before beginning my final semester of college, I was diagnosed with an extremely rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer. What followed was a world I never expected to enter: surgeries, hospital stays, conflicting pathology reports, recurrence rates, treatment plans, revised treatment plans, hormone injections, bloodwork, scans, and more scans. Every plan I had stopped. Everything I thought I knew shifted.

Rarity is not a quality anyone hopes to find attached to a medical diagnosis, yet mine proved to be among the first of its kind. Following conflicting pathology results from several of the best hospitals in Boston– and therefore, arguably, the world– my family, medical team, and I found ourselves navigating largely uncharted territory. There was no specialist dedicated to this exact corner of the cancer world, no established roadmap, and no time to wait for certainty. Decisions had to be made anyway. The result was an experience defined by trust, relentless research, difficult conversations, and a level of personal investment in the science of my disease that most patients never have reason to develop. 

I am now more than two years cancer-free and living a life that often feels remarkably distant from those early days; yet the experience remains deeply embedded within me. Cancer occupied an enormous amount of space in my life, but it also created spaces I could never have anticipated. It opened intellectual, emotional, and spiritual pathways that only seem to emerge when life asks impossible questions with unusually high stakes.

Cancer created spaces in my brain of singular expertise and focus; the kind possessed by evil geniuses born knowing and wanting one thing, the kind a dog has with a bone. It also propelled me into a deeply introspective and spiritual existence. Becoming both subject and observer, I entered a state of relentless psychological auditing and excavation; for better or worse, I approached the maintenance of my psyche with unwavering vigilance. Meditation, spirituality, psychology, ritual, and meaning-making ceased to be interests and became disciplines. I became fluent in two languages: the language of scans and the language of the self, both invisible to the naked eye. This book lives at their intersection.

Part memoir, part auto-ethnography, and part philosophical inquiry, this book uses cancer as a lens through which to examine broader questions and observations of human behavior and social life. It traces the way disease reshapes out relationship to time, the body, certainty, agency, selfhood, mortality, and one another. It is a study of the narratives we inherit, the ones we create, and the systems of meaning that sustain us when the future becomes impossible to predict.

While rooted in my experience with ovarian cancer, this is not a book about cancer alone. At its core, it inhabits the space between science and story, medicine and meaning, biology and belief. It explores the tension of what can be measured and what must be interpreted; between the objective realities of disease and the deeply subjective experience of living through it. Ultimately, it is interested not only in what happened, but in how human beings make meaning from what happens to them.

This project remains very much a work in progress. Sharing it in its unfinished form is, in part, an act of accountability and an invitation into the process itself. My hope is that the work continues to evolve through conversation, research, and the many perspectives that will inevitably shape it along the way.

I look forward to the day I can share the completed project. I hope that part of its beauty is never finding a final form thanks to the hands that will hold it, the ideas it inspires, and the hope it creates. Until then, I am grateful for your interest in this ongoing project.

If you have thoughts, questions, reading recommendations, research suggestions, or simply wish to connect, I would love to hear from you.