What I Found While Packing Changed Everything!

The cardboard boxes were piled high in the living room, a skeletal blueprint of the life Dan and I were supposed to start. We were days away from moving into our dream hoView Postme—a lakeside cottage with a wrap-around porch and soil that promised a lush vegetable garden. But as I taped up the last of the kitchenware, a sharp, insistent tug in my right side made me double over. Dan, ever the optimist, insisted it was just a pulled muscle from the heavy lifting. I wanted to believe him, but by the third day, the dull ache had sharpened into a hot, rhythmic pulse.

Against my own stubbornness, I drove to urgent care. The doctors threw around words like “appendicitis” and “strain,” but the CT scan told a different story. The nurse didn’t use the word “tumor” at first. She spoke in the clinical language of “masses” and “further investigation,” but the way she wouldn’t meet my eyes said everything. In that sterile room, the world I had been so carefully packing away suddenly felt like it was disintegrating.