The Good Patient is dead: How the medical system trained me to stop trusting myself — and how I got out
- Julie Granger
- Apr 22
- 33 min read
It was April 1, 2026
I’d obsessively checked and rechecked my patient portal all day for the results.
They were supposed to be posted today, but it was taking forever.
What a cruel April Fool’s joke, I thought.
Finally at 5 PM, I told myself –
If it’s not there by now, have mercy on yourself and stop checking. You’ve lived three days without the results. You can live another day.
And so I logged in, halfheartedly expecting that there’d still be no update.
Lo and behold, there it was.
I clicked “Radiology” and then the most recent scan report for “CT – Chest Abdomen and Pelvis with Contrast.”
This was easily the 30th or so one of these reports I’d read and scans I’d had — in the last 11 years.
I was basically a pro at this point – not only at doing the test, but also at reading the results, dealing with the waiting, all of the things.
My eyes raced from side to side as I scanned past every detail — evidence that someone else had been looking at every structure between my head and tail with a fine-tooth comb.
But the details didn’t matter at this point. All I wanted was the conclusion.
I got to the bottom of the page. It felt like it took me 30 minutes.
Why must they comment on the structure of the veins in my liver? Who the hell cares?
In reality, it was probably two seconds to find the part of the report that actually mattered.
Before I even looked at it, I closed my eyes, took a breath, and reminded myself that no matter what it said, it was going to be okay.
I sat alone at my office computer — the same one I’m sitting at now — with my elbows propped on my desk, my head in my hands.
I allowed my eyes to lift from the desk and look at the words right in front of me.
They confirmed what 99% of me already knew was true, but offered such a sense of reassurance to that 1% of me that wasn’t sure.
I took a deep breath. A big sigh released so much tension I didn’t even know I’d been holding.
A few tears welled.
And that was that.
As sense of dissonance fell over me.
I had imagined this moment would feel a lot bigger than it did.
Does that ever happen to you? You build something up, you think you’re going to feel so relieved, and then it’s just… anticlimactic.
I’d been working toward this moment — and all of the shedding of trauma, identities, routines — for 11 years.
And this was the moment that nobody else but me, alone in my office on April Fool’s Day 2026, was declaring me officially free.
I was free not just from cancer, but also from the system that had made me feel small and powerless as a patient.
I was no longer tethered to the surveillance appointments, the oncology visits, the endless bind to a place where I’d learned, over and over again, to hand over the dominion of my body to someone else … and despite my best efforts to be a Good Patient who was empowered, learn to stop trusting my own body.
It was year 11 since my diagnosis.
Usually at year 10 — if no cancer has recurred — you’re given the option of being free.
This was a year later than I’d hoped, for a reason I never saw coming.
And this is the part of the story I have never shared publicly — because the reason I was set free at year 11, not 10, was because of a really difficult, humbling, and overwhelming plot twist for me.
This is the first time I’ve felt safe enough, and processed-through-it-enough to gather words around it and share it.
And I share in the hope that if you’re facing something really uncertain and hard – whether cancer, a career pivot, an ending of a relationship, loss of a role or identity, a child leaving for college, or anything in between – that you can feel permission to experience it in the very real, very human way that often happens alone in quiet rooms, but feels like you’re carrying it alone.
And because it can feel really lonely, I also extend an invitation to reach out and share your own story if anything strikes a chord with you.
To take you through this plot twist, I have to take you back two years — to February of 2024.
At my 9-year follow-up scan for cancer, I received news that I genuinely did not expect.
I’d driven down to Atlanta, stayed in an Airbnb, gone to all my favorite restaurants, and tried to make something of the quick trip — even though I was thoroughly irritated and inconvenienced that after 9 years of doing this, I was STILL getting scans.
Every part of the experience bothered me — not because I was afraid of it. It was since long since I’d felt afraid of this. At this point, cancer had not recurred, and showing up was more or less a formality.
I knew I was fine. I had no reason to believe there would be a problem. But again, that was only 99% of me that knew I was fine.
There was always 1% that whispered: but what if you’re not fine?
And out of honor to that 1%, I dutifully showed up. Every time. Despite how sick of it I was.
I was sick of having to fast before a Monday morning appointment and then show up 90 minutes early to drink what felt like a gallon of barium — which is disgusting, by the way. #iykyk
I was sick of watching the radiology tech brush off my warning about my small veins with a prideful “I bet I can get it!” — to poke and prod without success – only to walk away with their tail between their legs to get a smaller needle, which then worked first try. Every. Single. Time. #toldyouso
I was sick of feeling my veins and bladder burn as the IV contrast worked its way through my system.
I was sick of holding my breath for 40 seconds while the scan took a 3D picture of every millimeter of my radioactive insides.
I was sick of paying $4 for parking.
I was sick of waiting 24–48 hours for results.
I was sick of walking into the oncology clinic as the strikingly healthiest and youngest person in the room, only to watch my oncologist read every word on the CT scan report I’d already read as if he was searching for some sign or morsel of disease. Something he could actually work with – only to somewhat halfheartedly shrug and say “everything seems fine.”
I was sick of being the Good Patient.
I was O V E R I T.
Being in the neverending cycle of being treated with kid gloves, like a sick person who was anything but sick.
Because that’s what this had become.
The sick cycle is a real thing — you test for something, you see something else tiny that happens to show up on the test, you then test for that, and it all ends up coming back negative.
But the “guilty until proven innocent” phenomenon in medicine – which is good when there is a real problem happening and you need to rule in or out certain things – is relentless.
Even when there is not a real problem.
But the medical system – which I was trained in too – is reactive and does not follow the US Bill of Rights.
Guilty until proven innocent is the Law of the Land.
So, in 9 years since cancer, I’d been through it time and time again.
Any time something even remotely “abnormal” showed up on a scan — even if it wasn’t related to the cancer at all (uterine fibroids, breast cysts, a random pocket of fat in my liver) — there were more tests, more waiting, more being treated like a body full of real perpetrators instead of a person with a real life.
I’d grown used to getting the follow up tests. I’d even grown used to pushing back and refusing them.
But this time, here at year 9, a new suspicious perpetrator showed up that I didn’t quite feel comfortable pushing back about.
Instead, as my oncologist read the scan report word by word and shared the finding, I was confused, shaken, devastated, and filled with rage.
“There’s a 6mm nodule in your left lung. It could be nothing. It could really be something. I’m not comfortable, given your history, just letting this go.”
All the air left my lungs. My heart dropped into my gut.
At first, my kneejerk response was “Ok, we’re just playing Bad Cop again. I know this drill. This is probably nothing.”
I was so tired of this dance that I knew was contributing to a growing pile of medical trauma that I couldn’t seem to work through fast enough, no matter how much therapy I was doing.
But at the same time, I also sensed that a lung nodule isn’t something you just play around with.
Especially given the backstory of the cancer itself.
The part most people don’t know — is that when I was diagnosed 9 years earlier with my OG tumor, Benedict (which is what I named it back when I was going through treatment) – careful review of my medical history found that he had been living in my lung since at least high school, if not early childhood.
From age 17 to 23, I’d had CT scans, seen pulmonologists, seen specialists for a suspicious mass in my lung.
I was a young, healthy, collegiate athlete. The mass hadn’t grown in 6 years of scans. They had zero reason to believe it was something sinister like cancer. They thought it was scar tissue.
So, they told me to go live my life and refuse any follow-up scans. A merciful recommendation to save me from further trauma, drama, and unnecessary testing.
So I did. Dutifully. Because I was a Good Patient.
But then we learned at 31 when my body finally got very sick that the type of tumor I had was extremely rare and extremely slow growing. We learned it most commonly starts in childhood and can live dormant for decades before it decides, for reasons medicine doesn’t fully understand, to start growing and making its human host very sick.
So – fast forward out of this backstory and back into February 2024 – and I now have the context and historical baggage.
There, as a new nodule showed up on the other lung, the oncologist’s caution wasn’t just bureaucratic vigilance. It was because I’d seen this film before, and I didn’t like the ending.
I’d been told it was innocent when it was in fact, guilty.
This time, “guilty until proven innocent” actually made reasonable sense.
Painstakingly, I found some words.
“So is this in any way related to my original cancer? It was my impression that this type of sarcoma doesn’t really metastasize.”
He said no, it probably wasn’t related to the OG cancer. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t its own form of lung cancer, or a metastasis from somewhere else.
Sitting there enraged and scared and alone in the exam room, I mustered every ounce of courage I had left — and miraculously found some more words.
“So…what’s the protocol for this? How do we monitor it? I want this thing figured out and gone ASAP. Do I need to get a biopsy? Let’s do it.”
I mean, the benefit of it not being my first rodeo was I knew (or thought I knew) what to expect.
He shook his head when I said “biopsy.” No, the nodule was too small. Nothing to biopsy. Poking around in there would cause more harm than good, and they might not get enough to sample.
Damnit.
He told me I’d need to wait and see.
The exact words nobody with any amount of anxiety or concern for their health ever wants to hear.
At the earliest, I could have a follow-up scan in 4–6 months. If there was no change, I’d have another in a year. Then a final scan in two years.
Then if all was good and the nodule hadn’t changed, we could rule it “innocent.”
When I did the math, that meant dealing with this for 2.5 more years instead of the 1 more year I’d planned.
I’d be in this sick cycle, going round and round on the merry go round – until at least mid 2026.
My throat felt like it was closing. This felt like an excruciatingly long wait to have peace of mind.
I pressed my lips together as I felt the sting of tears behind my eyes.
I vowed not to cry in front of this guy I barely knew.
I raced out of the office, paid my $4 parking fee, turned on my Taylor Swift playlist, and cried and sang the entire 3-hour drive home to North Carolina.
But wait. There’s more. This wasn’t actually the only “You might have a different kind of cancer” plot twist I was already holding.
I was also dealing with some suspicious breast lesions.
Just two months before this, in December 2023, I’d spent two agonizing weeks going through my first mammogram and breast ultrasound.
Because nothing says welcome to your 40’s like a good old fashioned boob squish.
Those tests came back abnormal, which earned me two urgent breast biopsies on Christmas Eve, plus an agonizing three-day wait for results over the holiday.
As if that weren’t enough, I’d experienced the worst of providers in that process. I don’t know if it was just how the chips fell and the people who were working the week of Christmas were the B team, but I almost couldn’t believe how much they lacked compassion.
Was it too much to ask for a baseline level of care and compassion not only for a breast biopsy, but also during Christmas week?
After the tests – which thankfully came back benign, I saw a breast specialist.
Much to my chagrin, she not only provided me incorrect and conflicting information, but also refused to take accountability when I gave her feedback on it.
I left the appointment shaken and disenchanted. Sure, there was no imminent threat looming inside my body. But based on the way I was treated over and over again, I never wanted to be seen in the breast imaging / specialty world again.
I had just 4 weeks between the breast biopsies and the ominous CT scan results.
My nervous system had had no time to recover.
Then five months after the lung news — there were more breast scans. Two more biopsies. More waiting.
Which means that in the course of six months, from December 2023 through July 2024, I dealt with unexpected breast news, unexpected lung news, and then unexpected breast news again.
More wait and see.
More robotic and dehumanizing care by people in the medical system, just moving me through as another number, another SOAP note to write, another part of the assembly line.
For extra funsies – I also had an extremely painful encounter during this timeframe with the medical system – not as the patient, but as the caregiver.
In April 2024 our dog Aspen — my most beloved other half — got really, really sick.
It turned out to be diabetes, which I was managing largely alone because Daniel was traveling.
Stabilizing a dog in a diabetic crisis when the dog can’t tell you what’s wrong and you can’t get reliable blood sugar data is its own kind of terrifying, even if you don’t have an already full plate of medical trauma and a nervous system that has been through the wringer.
Thankfully, we did all we could (thank God for pet health insurance) and got her stabilized.
But even with the very best of self care routines, external support, and doing everything I needed to do – it still was all too much for my system.
Thankfully, I had an escape on the horizon. Back during the December 2023 breast scare, I had the foresight to treat myself to Taylor Swift Eras Tour tickets in Paris in May 2024.
By the time I got on the plane, my nervous system was completely baked.
I know this because I woke up in the middle of the night somewhere over the Atlantic in a full vasovagal response — which, for the uninitiated, means I was hot, panicky, and threw up all over my seat.
It’s as awful and mortifying as it sounds.
But in that moment it also felt like a total release. My body had been holding so much. It finally had a moment to let go. It just happened to choose a very fast and furious way of doing it.
Go big or go home, I suppose.
As I sat there pulling myself together and sipping ginger ale – big thanks to the flight attendant flung a garbage bag and cans of soda at me just in the nick of time – I knew that as undesirable of an experience as that just was, it’s exactly what I needed.
Three months prior – after the lung news – I’d spent about a week just grieving and swimming in rage about how unfair it all felt.
It was an epic pity party, which mercifully made perfect sense. Of course my system was protesting.
I sank in with my grieving, angry, anxious, bitter, and “the world is unfair!” parts – who reminded me that for better or worse – I’d been here before.
This wasn’t my first rodeo with unexpected health news, with “guilty until proven innocent,” and with “wait and see.”
I had seen this type of film before too many times and no matter how much “practice” I’d had, I still didn’t like suspense movies.
But those parts also had something else to say. It wasn’t all doom and gloom.
This time, there was a difference. There was a stronger chance that this news could actually turn in a positive direction.
And one thing I’d learned in the entire cancer process is that our systems are wired to freak out when news is ambigious. We’re not built to easily tolerate the suspense of “wait and see.”
This doesn’t us weak. It makes us human.
In a world that offers quick fixes and answers at the swipe of your thumb, we’re not conditioned or trained to be comfortable with the not-knowing.
Compound this with exceptionally painful and challenging experiences inside the medical system as a patient – and no amount of “putting on a brave face” or “being the Good Patient” can protect you from the effects the sick cycle will have on you.
Even with the best of intentions – it can become a way of being. An identity.
You don’t choose it. It happens unconsciously, beneath the surface, based on how you are related to and treated from inside and outside the system.
From inside the system – it’s unfortunately rare to find the provider who sees you and treats you as a full blooded sentient being.
From outside the system – it’s also unfortunately rare to find the people who can hold you in the process without “othering” you – because it’s uncomfortable for them to see you suffering.
Some people – friends, family, neighbors – disappear.
Some people might overindex – only show up when you show signs of sickness or weakness – and then ghost you.
Some people might become a little too interested in your story – asking question after question to feed their own curiosity, forgetting that this is your life, not a medical drama TV show they’re watching (even though it very much may feel and look like a medical drama to you).
Along the way – and often outside of your conscious control – you start to become The Sick Person.
Or The Good Patient.
Or The Brave One.
Or The Inspiring One.
Or The-Friend-We-Don’t-Know-What-To-Say-To-Because-She’s-Going-Through-Something-And-We-Don’t-Want-To-Get-It-Wrong-So-We-Don’t- Say-Anything-At-All.
Either way, you start to take on roles and identities you never agreed to – and the people around you are part of that process whether they agreed to be or not.
It’s a cycle that happens in relationship and in community. It’s well studied and written about. But that doesn’t mean people realize they’re in it, realize how they contribute to it, and realize how to extricate themselves from it.
Somewhere along the way – I realized I was in it. I wanted out, yet I still “had to” be in it.
Hence – being utterly O V E R IT. Being so sick of it. Being reluctantly aware of just how awful it feels ot be part of it.
I’d done my own work around it.
I set boundaries on who gets to know what. I chose who could hold me in the ambiguity, in the process, and who couldn’t.
And I also chose how I was going to be in the process with myself. Because it wasn’t just my relationship with others that made being in the center of the cycle so difficult.
It was also my relationship with myself and the process.
And so even though there were big, big, big feels and frustrations, there was also … another option.
I could have easily allowed myself to be bitter, frustrated, and a rabble rouser within the system. I wouldn’t have blamed myself it I did.
But I could have also chosen to hold and allow joy alongside all of the hard and frustrating feelings.
Because what cancer had already taught me was: you can get the absolute worst news and still have a choice.
It’s not choosing joy to escape pain.
It’s choosing it alongside the pain.
Not because the pain might end your life. But because the pain is part of living. And so is joy.
It’s not live like you’re dying — it’s live like you’re living.
Back when I had been diagnosed with cancer and faced down the very real possibility that each step along the way – through chemo, surgery, and radiation – I might not make it to the other side, I realized that choice was mine.
Even when the system did all it could to “other” me or look at me as the Sick one.
Even when it could have been so easy to be swept into and carried in that current.
I remember asking myself– if this all works out, how do you want to have been with yourself in the process?
And in that way – I’d found hope in a time where it would have been reasonable to let go of hope.
And fast forward to 9 years later when I faced a deluge of unbearable “wait and see” moments – I knew I could sink in and lean on the parts of me that had walked this journey before.
The best parts of life didn’t have to wait for scan results to give me permission to fully live.
No, the best parts could live right alongside the worst parts.
This isn’t something you learn in school, it’s not something that is modeled in our world very often.
We live in an either-or, algorithmic world that says you can only be red or blue, good or bad, grief or happiness.
With all due respect, that’s not how life works.
Life works in the gray, in the nuance, in the both/and. And I was choosing exactly that.
To prepare for the trip to Paris in May 2024– alongside all of the pain and struggle that was occurring, I immersed myself in joy.
I was a new Swiftie. I marveled at the joy of discovering and learning all the songs and making friendship bracelets.
I started my first garden.
I got outside and went mountain biking.
I focused on building a new era of my business.
I surrounded myself with people who truly got me and didn’t reduce me down to a cancer story.
That six-month stretch — December 2023 through July 2024 — cracked me open in a way that going through actual cancer treatment never did.
I not only got in extra reps of “holding uncertainty and joy in the same hand”, but I also really grappled with my rage and my relationship toward clinical care and the sick cycle.
And that reckoning was a bit confronting.
I’d not only been the Good Patient, dutifully pledging allegiance to parts of the sick cycle.
I’d also been the Good Provider – doing good-natured things that, unintentionally, likely kept or dragged my patients into the same cycle.
Maybe it was perimenopause and I was just waking up to it (another gift of turning 40).
Maybe it was just me being exhausted with the whole thing.
Or maybe the accumulated weight of being dehumanized by a system and community I’d also spent years working inside had finally reached critical mass.
I started examining how I felt in every medical interaction — not only as a patient, but also as a provider and a colleague.
Not how I felt intellectually about, not what my thoughts were, not how easy it felt to problem-solve and understand a diagnosis and treatment and research and options, but also how I actually felt all the way in my body as the patient and provider.
Because so many times as a patient I’d had to leave my body entirely — intellectualize it all, go full colleague-mode, manage the appointment from the outside in.
Or it would feel so overwhelming that all the wind left the room and I’d barely be able to get words out — which I now understand means I was in a freeze response. I was not processing what was happening. Just surviving it.
I looked back over 10 to 11 years and examined, in my body, how it actually felt to be as a patient with certain providers.
I looked at what I’d mistaken for safety because I could intellectually understand what was happening, and what hadn’t actually felt good and I hadn’t clocked internally at the time.
I didn’t always have words for what I was detecting. I didn’t label them with trauma language or diagnose myself with some disorder or use nervous system / psych terms to explain what I was feeling.
I just…felt it.
And I let myself trust what my body was telling me.
(I want to pause here and say this is a process I did with therapeutic support, because for so many years I’d learned both as provider and patient that being in and listening to and trusting my body wasn’t a safe place to be. This is actually a somewhat reasonable and healthy response as both a patient with extensive complex medical history and also a provider working in a system that values your output and achievement at the expense of your own wellness. In both places, I was doing what I needed to do to survive. Not from a chosen or conscious place, but from a very wise place. And I want to highlight that for so many people, the phrase “listen to and trust what your body is telling you” is easier said than done.)
As I learned how to really listen to what my body – not my mind – was telling me about providers who looked good on the surface, but didn’t feel good inside –
I began to choose differently.
I held onto the providers where I felt safe, seen, and valid.
I noticed the ones where I didn’t have to armor up and prepare battle strategies, where I didn’t feel my chest start to race and my armpits and butt cheeks sweat into the paper on the table when I mustered up the courage to push back against their recommendations.
It’s one thing to push back – it’s another to do it in a way that doesn’t activate your system. ANd I learned that the fact that my body was activated and I was sweating before my mind could even discern why was reason enough to determine that maybe certain providers weren’t safe for me.
I noticed the providers where I didn’t have to write out every question in advance because I simply knew – somewhere deep inside – that I’d be able to come up with the questions in the moment.
These were the ones where true co-regulation was actually present.
These were the providers who were truly trauma-informed and patient-centered.
And honestly, as I went through what was an agonizing process of letting go of providers, trying again, kissing frogs, going through the pain of letting go again, trying again…
I realized that in the entire cancer process and everything that followed, including medical care that wasn’t even related to cancer, I could count on one hand the number of providers who truly operated from a real co-regulatory place.
And interestingly most of them were not the most credentialed, the ones who looked the best on paper.
All the while, I looked at the places I showed up as “Good Patient” even when I wished to be a little more brazen, a little more skeptical, a little more…me.
And of course, I looked at my experience as the provider, the coach, and even my experience among my colleagues.
I noticed the mentors and coaches preaching “community!” and “regulate your stress!” while working every Saturday, with their only community being a professional conference circuit, taking shots of ashwagandha to balance their nervous system but never asking why their nervous system is so activated in the first place.
I noticed the providers calling themselves trauma-informed — on their websites, in their intake forms, positioning it as a competitive advantage — and then sending patients home with ten-step laundry lists of everything they were doing wrong, running over in their sessions by 30 minutes and then resenting themselves and their patients later.
It’s not trauma-informed if you’re not also being kind to your own nervous system. It’s not coregulatory if you’re not aware of what’s going on inside of you because you’re so attuned to what’s going on inside of your patients.
These are the colleagues who seem so attuned. They name their attachment patterns. They can tell you why they go into a fawning response. They can tell you exactly what their cortisol levels are on their most recent labs (and what supplements to take to regulate that). They can tell you the evidence on polyvagal theory and walk you through a breathwork protocol to calm your vagus nerve.
But when asked to go inside their own bodies – their eyes dart around the room. They wiggle and say “I’m going to need to journal about this later when I have time and figure out what’s going on and then I can talk about what I”m feeling.”
None of this is wrong. It’s not a moral failure. It’s not bad practice.
It’s been conditioned over decades.
The clinicians are doing genuinely good work from a genuinely beautiful place — and still missing the person sitting right in front of them. And probably missing themselves – not as the provider, but as the human sitting across from their patient, also in a very intimate, sometimes very painful experience.
As providers we are so conditioned and trained to intellectualize, diagnose, treat, find the root cause, solve the puzzle – that we do it with our patients. And we do it with ourselves as the patient.
We’re aslo trained to ignore our own emotions, our own bodies, and our own needs, because we need to focus on everyone else’s.
And then as I sat with this – as a patient who was also a provider – I realized the true double whammy I was in.
It was wired into both my patient and professional identity to perpetuate the sick cycle, even with the very best of intentions.
The Good Patient and Good Provider were only trying to do their best.
And yet, “do no harm” ironically was doing harm.
I was watching — now from both sides of the exam table — how even the most well-intentioned care could leave a patient feeling like a number in a caseload instead of a human being.
And I was watching how it did the exact same thing to the providers in the system, too.
And then I realized – it wasn’t all lost.
I’d experienced really good coregulatory, trauma-informed care as a provider many many times.
Because we do it so beautifully in pediatrics – my original specialty and training area.
By default, we have child life specialists, music therapists, play therapists, therapy dogs, and psychotherapists visiting the kids’ rooms.
There are playrooms on every floor, there is a school program, there is hospital prom, there are dormitories parents can sleep in and business centers where they can work — because it’s inherently understood that if we don’t tend to the child’s and family’s emotional and psychosocial experience, we’re going to unintentionally traumatize them and cause harm.
To the people reading and going “That’s not how it is in ALL pediatrics! There is still bad care!” I know. It’s not perfect. But I’m illustrating that the attitude and orientation to care for kids is, at its root, entirely different than adults.
And the thing that has grinded (ground? what's the word here?) my gears since the moment of my early PT career when I saw how beautiful we tend to children’s hearts, souls, and spirits –
Is that when patients cross the bridge into adult medicine, all of that disappears.
You might find a therapy dog or someone playing the piano in the lobby.
You might see a hospital chapel or get a visit from a chaplain if you ask.
But the deep, relational, emotionally-attuned care? Largely absent.
The highly capitalistic, hypervigilant (or in some cases, hypovigilant) system that misses the mark in adult medicine? Highly present.
And I am such an example of that gap.
Let’s get back to the 2024 story.
I went to Europe that May for three weeks total.
I saw the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in Paris.
It’s an experience I still can’t fully talk about without feeling my chest and eyes well up.
Then I went solo to Florence, and then to a women’s retreat outside the city that was quite a reclamation.
Taylor said in the very opening line of the show: “It’s been a long time coming.”
I stood there in the upper deck of La Défense Arena and just sobbed, because yes — it really had been.
I was so grateful to the version of me who knew that I didn’t belong in the sick cycle, that I could choose joy alongside pain.
I was so grateful with how I’d been with myself during an excruciating process.
I came home renewed — refreshed, like I’d reclaimed so many parts of myself that had been shoved aside for years.
And in June 2024, I drove back to Atlanta for the first follow up scan for the lung nodule.
I opened the portal from the comfort of my home office to read the results.
In just 4 months, the nodule hadn’t changed.
But I had.
Parts of me had softened and strengthened in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
It had only been 4 months, but it had been a long time coming.
In the summer of 2025 – one year later – I had my 10-year follow-up scan for the lung sarcoma and 1.5 year follow up for the lung nodule.
The original tumor had still not recurred.
And that pesky, devastating, infuriating lung nodule that had thrown my entire timeline off —
Well, it had actually gotten smaller.
I knew it would. That 99% of me that always knew — it knew that it knew that it knew.
I had made it a year and a half through “wait and see” and “guilty until proven innocent.”
I had fully lived in the process, pain and uncertainty hand in hand with joy. I was really proud of myself.
And I was still so sick of being in the “oncology follow up” process. I’d reached the 10 year mark. The original tumor, Benedict, had not recurred.
Under standard circumstances, this would be my final curtain call.
But no, I still had another year to wait. One more scan to see if the lung nodule was innocent or guilty.
I still felt pretty salty about this. If we weren’t doing scans in the first place, we probably wouldn’t have even known about the nodule. I wouldn’t have had to experience all this drama.
And if the nodule hadn’t even shown up, I’d be set free right now.
It still felt really unfair.
I had an idea.
I showed up to the oncology appointment the next day prepared. Not in that armored-up way.
But prepared to trust myself to ask the right questions and ask for something I knew I probably wasn’t going to get if I didn’t.
My oncologist did his thing — walked through every line of the report I’d already read, explained every lab value. I let him.
When he finished, he said “Everything looks fine. I guess I’ll see you in another year.”
I was aghast, honestly.
He didn’t even acknowledge the milestone I’d just crossed. He, himself, had gotten so accustomed to doing this dance, to being in his part of the Sick Cycle, that he didn't even see that there was a potential exit ramp afoot.
I said: “Ok, so it’s been 10 years since cancer diagnosis. So does that mean technically I’m done with follow up surveillance for that tumor?”
He looked at his computer, looked at the calendar, and did some napkin math.
He admitted he had no idea we were at the 10-year mark.
FFS. Do a f*ckin chart review, man! This is a basic standard of care.
To his credit — he’s not the oncologist who diagnosed me.
He agreed — yes, we were here.
I asked him what that meant. He stumbled over his words and was hesitant to say I was free, cancer free, in remission.
I had to ask him directly, over and over again to say the words— Am I done with oncology follow-up? Am I cleared? Am I free?Am I cured? Is this remission? — until I finally got the affirmative.
I knew that a huge part of getting out of the sick cycle – even if I wasn’t technically out if it (thank you, lung nodule) was getting someone else to say out loud that no, I no longer needed to be in it.
But we aren’t trained to say that with such affirmation. Because something else could be wrong. There might be another puzzle to solve. I mean, there’s no guarantee right?
But I held the line. I knew – even if it was only on principle – that we needed to get this on the record.
I imagined a court stenographer somewhere typing into their little typewriter in shorthand: On the record, she’s done with this cancer.
He still never said “Cured” or “Remission” or “Free” but he did say “well, you have a choice now about whether or not you get yearly scans. You can get them. Or you can choose not to. But there’s also this lung nodule. You still need to do something about that.”
I was prepared for this part too.
I asked if I had to follow up with oncology for the lung nodule, or if I could see pulmonology instead.
I asked if the final scan had to happen in Atlanta or if I could do it in North Carolina.
I already knew the answers. I just needed to hear someone affirm them.
Finally, as he hemmed and hawed and had a hard time giving me an affirmative answer, I looked at him and through a shaky voice said: “It’s long and complicated and I won’t drag you through the emotional story, but I personally need to get out of the oncology system and the sick cycle. It’s nothing personal. I like you, but I don’t want to be here anymore.”
And finally, he looked at me like a human. He understood. He listened. He carefully considered. He offered options and let me lead.
Even though it took a bit of wrestling – and me pulling it out of him, and me having to go the extra vulnerable mile to tell him how I was feeling even though he didn’t ask – was what truly informed consent actually felt like. Not just what it looked like, but what it felt like.
I had to drive it, I had to make it happen. That’s not ideal.
But I trusted myself. I was truly in my body. I wasn’t armoring up. I wasn’t performing the Good Patient.
If anything, I had allowed myself to shift into Annoying Patient. Incredulous Patient. Real and Honest Patient.
And because of that, for the first time in my entire medical history, I was truly in control of my own destiny.
Even if I wasn’t quite physically free from the follow-up cycle just yet.
I knew I needed to commemorate the moment, to allow this cancer milestone to be celebrated.
I threw myself a ‘Ten years cancer-free’ party — choosing joy and aliveness while not pretending the lung nodule hanging overhead didn’t still exist.
I was still energetically in the sick cycle. I was still living adjacent to uncertainty and the unknown.
But I claimed that milestone anyway, because it deserved its own moment. I was told 10 years when I was diagnosed.
I made it to the 10 year mark.
If we’d not been looking at the tumor every year in scans, I never would have known about the nodule that – increasingly day by day – intuition told me was innocent.
But I wasn’t going to let one more thing I couldn’t fully control take this milestone from me.
I also wanted to make a bit of an energetic point, on principle, as an outward statement to extricating myself from the sick cycle.
We as a society are very good at gathering around people when they’re sick. This is a really good thing. Villaging works wonders in these circumstances.
But many people who have gone through cancer, tragedy, and complex and chronic health issues know that– as soon as you’re well or the noise quiets, people disappear.
The dissonance here can feel deafening.
And then – there’s no fanfare for becoming free — the medical system certainly doesn’t provide it.
And oftentimes, even if someone posts on Facebook “I’m 10 years cancer free, yay!” you might get comments.
But we don’t have a built-in system within our culture to truly gather and celebrate LIVING in the same way we gather and village around tragedy, death, hardship, or loss.
Sure, we celebrate everyone living another year and another year on birthdays.
But what about when they go from “almost dying” to “fully living?”
It got me wondering what message this sends us deep down.
I wondered how many people circle back to the same village and bring them together when they celebrate their own life. We “celebrate life” when someone dies from cancer. But what about when they live after cancer?
This felt wrong to me.
So I made my own celebration.
The theme was aliveness. There were bold colors, yummy food, friendship bracelets, and of course, Taylor Swift themes throughout.
Friends came from all over the country. We dressed up.
It was a summer soiree in my backyard on the August new moon — at the dawn of a new era, almost exactly 10 years after my diagnosis in August 2015.
There was one rule: there would be no talk of sickness or cancer. Nothing to perpetuate the sick cycle.
We would only talk about aliveness. Not to deny the truth of what happened to me, but to celebrate truth of what I became because of what happened.
It was full and loud and loving and we had sparkly rainbow cake and was exactly what I needed.
So, you already had the foreshadowing before. But maybe we should get to the end of the movie, eh?
I’d seen this film before – and all the times before, I didn’t like the ending. Was I going to like this one?
This brings us to April 2026.
Instead of having the final scan in North Carolina with a new specialist, I made the decision to drive back to Atlanta one more time for the final scan.
I can’t tell you why I decided it except it just felt right.
And let me tell you, it was a comedy of errors.
First it was in the hotel I booked — I walked up to my room and they’d never cleaned it.
I marched right back down to the lobby past garbage bags spilling out of garbage in the hallway and demanded a refund even though I was past the refund window.
I was not the Good Guest. I was the Annoying One.
I walked out and booked a hotel next door. It was a full 180 – so much better, but my room was next to the elevator and thankfully I had earplugs to block the whoosh I heard all night long.
The next day when I arrived at the radiology department, there were more little annoyances, obstacles, and things that went sideways.
This time though, I told the radiology tech in no uncertain terms to please get the small needle and not even try to get IV access with a normal size.
I told the person how to do their job. Did this make me not a Good Patient? Possibly.
But perhaps being the Good Patient – as viewed through the eyes of the provider – was dead.
Perhaps there was a new way of being the Good Patient – being good to myself. Speaking for what I needed without hesitation. Not taking “no” or “I don’t know” or any other dismissal for an answer.
Amidst the comedy of errors I realized: the universe is making absolutely certain that I am so annoyed, so done, so completely finished with this place, that I will close this chapter beyond any shadow of a doubt. That no part of me will ever want to be a part of the sick cycle in this way again.
I got in the car, drove past the oncologist’s office without stopping, and sang Taylor Swift with a smile on my face all the way home. No tears this time.
I never went back to see him.
I knew at this point that I could read the results myself the next day.
I didn’t need to sit through another appointment in an office where I no longer belonged.
On April 1, 2026, I opened the portal.
I scanned through the details and finally got to the conclusion, which read:
Impression:
1. Stable appearance of postsurgical changes in the right upper chest wall and anterior right upper lung. No developing local recurrence.
2. No developing metastatic disease in the chest, abdomen, or pelvis.
Translation: the cancer hadn’t come back. And the nodule was, by reasonable medical assumption, innocent.
I didn’t need anyone to tell me or affirm that I was free.
I declared it myself.
Two and a half hours later, I sobbed in my blue recliner as I watched Artemis II blast off from Cape Canaveral.
A woman was on her way to the moon.
Honestly — I felt like I was blasting off into a new unknown too.
I sit here today writing this on April 22, 2026. It is three weeks later, and I am still processing the gravity of what that freedom actually means.
This isn’t just about surviving cancer or getting good results on a scan.
It’s about how I wriggled my way out of the sick cycle, bit by bit. Tear by tear. Broken heart by broken heart. Devastation by devastation. Mistreatment by mistreatment.
It’s about how I reinvented my relationship with the clinical and medical world — saying goodbye to and reinventing my definition of both the Good Patient and the Good Provider inside me.
And it’s about finally declaring myself not only free from being tethered to a system where I once felt so powerless. Where I learned to make myself small, to not push back, to be grateful just to be tolerated.
I’m not in that system anymore.
I declared myself out.
As I write and finish this piece, I think about one of the five people who made the list of “providers where my system felt really safe.”
She wasn’t a specialist or someone with credentials.
She was an unnamed nurse who sat next to me during an unexpected procedure when I was about 5 years post-cancer – one of the many times something had showed up on a scan that required follow up testing.
She walked me through step by step exactly what was going to happen and asked me what would help make it comfortable. I said the thing we all often say: no, it’s fine, I have a high pain tolerance.
And without me even asking, she appeared at the table with a warm blanket and some water.
When the physician came in to do the procedure — she didn’t introduce herself, didn’t speak to me once, and treated me like a body for her to work on.
But then, I felt a hand reach for mine.
That nurse just intuitively knew – this was a human in a terrifying and vulnerable position who deserved to be seen and touched as a human, not as a body or another problem to diagnose and treat.
That was what I call a Conscious, Connected Clinician.
It was never about her. It wasn’t about getting me through the assembly line. It was about me and my experience.
We’ve all had moments as providers where we’ve been that nurse.
We’ve all had moments as providers where we’ve been that physician doing the procedure or trying to solve the puzzle.
And we’ve all — hopefully — had at least one moment as a patient where someone has seen us and treated us as a full-blooded, fully sentient human.
And I have some questions I want to leave you with, especially if you are also in the “double whammy” world of being a patient who also happens to work professionally as a medical provider.
How often do you walk into your own medical appointment and leave your body behind — going full provider-mode, managing the visit, speaking to the doctor like a colleague, intellectualizing your way through the whole thing instead of actually being the patient who is experiencing it?
How often are you brushing off or tolerating care that you know could be better — the rushed appointment, the lack of eye contact, the ten-step laundry list, the provider who stares at the computer screen instead of into your eyes — because you understand the system, because you know what they’re up against, because you’re making it okay for them when the patient in you is saying: that actually really sucked?
How often are you accepting “this is just how it is,” when maybe — you could choose differently?
This is the work I live and breathe.
Not the technical skill of medicine — the relational piece. The intimacy. The getting below the surface.
Because a true therapeutic alliance can’t be performed.
It’s not a list of trauma-informed questions to ask or boxes to check on an intake form or in an EMR system that sound really good on paper, that make it look like you're connecting with the patient - but may actually not feel genuine to the person in the paper gown, sitting half naked and sweating on the table.
It’s in your body. It’s in your ability to be truly present in yourself — emotionally safe, somatically grounded — so that you can actually do that for someone else too.
That’s what I help clinicians, providers, and coaches build in their careers.
Not more credentials. Not more protocols.
But the capacity to be in the room — fully, humanly, in their bodies — with the people in front of them.
Because it can revolutionize your care in a way that no certification or clinical skill ever will.
I’m still sitting with all of it. And I’m going to keep writing about it.
I’d love to hear from you — about your experiences as a patient, as a provider, as someone who has been both at once. How you’ve changed because of something you went through? What would you do differently?
And whether it’s in a medical context, or when you’re talking with your partner, or when you’re tucking your kiddo into bed – may we all even if for just a moment – pause and find the humanity in ourselves and others and remember – we are all just tender, beautiful, wild souls on the inside.
And people deserve our humanity as much as we deserve theirs. We may not get it perfect all the time, but we can try again – in every interaction – to meet someone in the eye, to pause and take a breath, to catch ourselves overexplaining – and drop in and remember – connection is practiced. We were born to connect, and it gets trained out of us. But we can always get up try again the next time.
Feel free to reach out and share your story!
Pictured: this is me watching, completely awestruck through tears, as Artemis II blasted off from Cape Canaveral on April 1, 2026. It's also the day that the Good Patient officially died and I launched into a new unknown of freedom.
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