To Intuit

I’m one of those people who knows things. About me. About you. It just comes naturally and has for as long as I can remember. I get where you’re coming from and why — although, admittedly, I’ve honed the skill over the last 10 years.

At Christmas just over six years ago we were visiting my partner’s parents. We usually drove 16 hours from Toronto to Marathon (a small town on the north shore of Lake Superior) but this particular year we flew from downtown Toronto’s Billy Bishop Airport to Thunder Bay. We rented a car and drove a mere 3.5 hours, which to us was basically a short trip around the block.

A few days into our lazy Christmas vacation I knew I was pregnant. I didn’t need a test to tell me. Everything felt different. Smelled different. Was just … different. A week later we bought a pregnancy test and sure enough… pregnant.

Very early on I started thinking about two heartbeats. We didn’t want to tell anyone until the three-month-mark because we felt that was the most sane way to navigate pregnancy and all the excitement it inevitably brings with family and friends. But I had to tell someone. I’m lucky, I have known two of my closest friends almost as long as I’ve been on this earth (36 trips around the sun). So, I told my best friend, Eden. We can’t decide if we met in Junior or Senior Kindergarten, but we can tell you it’s been sisterhood ever since.

She had an-18-month-old boy at the time and I asked her “when did you start showing?” And she said “I would say about five months before it was obvious.” My response was “huh”, because I was 10 weeks and quite sure my pants were already tight and I was already bearing a mini-baby-bump. Looking back I now realize that yes, my dear friend Christine was right when she laughed at me at 12 weeks for showing my “bump”, it really did just look like a food baby.

Long story short: I was showing. It was twins. I knew before we really knew.

Here comes the next bought of big intuition. This time, for a less than stellar reason. 

It’s 2020. We’re into the fall months of the year. We’ve been in the COVID-19 Pandemic since the second week of March. Yes, the world’s longest March Break. I finally got those beautiful kids to Junior Kindergarten and it lasted all of six months before the never-ending remote schooling would begin. I was tired. Exhausted. Over it. I had never thrived being home with the kids, I love them and I was good at aspects of it. But I need adults. I need human interaction. I get a lot of who I am through my work and being appreciated. Living with 5-year-olds means, you’re never appreciated because you’re at their whim. Yes, yes, I’m the adult, but have you spent a pandemic with twins at home while remote schooling them, running your own business and still trying to find time to squeeze in SOMETHING to make you feel like you? Maybe you have. I digress. 

In the fall months, I started to question whether this never-ending pandemic fatigue was that. One day I had a little pity party (I only had a handful of these throughout the 24/7 pandemic parenting and general overwhelm, bless the SSRIs I’d started to take at the beginning of this shit show) and I said to my husband “I’m worried I’m going to make myself sick”. I just wasn’t handling the stress in a way I knew to be beneficial to me. I was too burnt out from juggling all the things and having none of the buffers that bring me back to life. Pilates + yoga classes at Goodbodyfeel with some of my favourite humans. Random coffee shop outings. Talking to strangers on the street. Having a minute to catch my breath. And so began the decline. 

In December I had to take my wedding ring off because I noticed my fingers were ever so slightly inflamed. I pushed through it. I raised my hands above my head. I went for painful walks. I did what I thought I had to do. I googled the hell out of it and found “Repetitive Injury Strain”. Swelling. Joint pain. Aches. All the things… seemed about right. After all, I’d been hauling ass at work in December sitting like a total unergonomic moron. Legs half crossed, super hunched over, leaning into the screen.

One night at the beginning of January, I pushed myself through a yoga class thinking surely, it would help my aches and pains. I went to bed that night wincing in pain and gasping in an almost comedic fashion. My husband actually called out to me from another room to ask if I was serious with all those noises. Um yeah… I was. So, as I laid my aching body on my pillow I picked up my phone.

I texted my dear friend and Osteopathic Manual Practitioner, Marcelle, “Hi friend — I sent you an email when you have a chance to check it out. Basically, my body is mangled and I don’t know what to do. [crying emoji face].” The next day I found myself in her capable hands. Her wizardry helping my body heal as she had for years. I felt relief to see her face and have someone to care for just me. This pandemic was wearing on all of us.

At the end of the session she said “I don’t want to alarm you, but I found a lump above your collarbone and I want you to go to your doctor.” Sure enough, I felt the spot she mentioned and there, like a glow-in-the-dark ping pong ball on full display was a spherical little bastard.

I went to the doctor the next day. With a “hmm, that’s odd” we scheduled an ultrasound and some bloodwork. She assured me enlarged lymph nodes are usually nothing. I texted Marcelle to say how stupid I felt for not noticing this giant ball poking through my skin. She told me to cut myself some slack — she forgot to tell me not to google it.

Hot tip: when you google left supraclavicular lymph node you get a lot of “signs something has metastasized”. So here I am, 36, mother and primary caregiver to twins. Business owner. Yogi. Entrepreneur. Wife. Daughter. Sister. Friend. Beating heart. Fully formed woman staring down the words “Left supraclavicular lymphadenopathy may be the sign of a metastatic tumour, mostly from lung cancer, gastric cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer and breast cancer.” I went down a proper rabbit hole. Noting that I didn’t really have any symptoms of these cancers and nothing seemed to show about my body basically failing me. All the joints, aches, pains, none of it quite added up. But something was wrong. My fatigue throughout the month of January told me something was wrong. My intuition told me something was wrong.

It just couldn’t be this. Could it?