At The Edge
The Crush.
“My life is out of my hands.”
What unsettled me the most wasn’t just that something was wrong, but how fast it was happening. My body was changing and I couldn’t get anyone in my healthcare system to treat me with urgency. As the changes accelerated, I felt increasingly out of control of my own body, while my sense of hope steadily wore thin. The ambivalence I encountered from my healthcare only added more weight from waiting, making it a heavier burden than it already was.
There was pain—but more than that, there was momentum. Whatever this was, it wasn’t waiting. Between appointments and explanations, I was left carrying the hardest question to face alone: was this serious, or was it fatal?
A biopsy became the only way forward, not as reassurance, but as a line between imagination and truth.
This is what it feels like to stand at that edge, watching your body change before you understand why.
I learned I translate time and waiting into a physical sensation of weight—gravity adds to each moment of what I am going through.
In that space, I felt my mortality closing in. Even with family supporting me—loving me, reassuring me, standing close—this was something I had to carry alone. Facing your possible death is one of the most intensely personal experiences there is. No one else can do it for you. You can be accompanied, but you are still the one asking the short, tough question in the quiet moments: is this it? It feels like it is.
That question didn’t arrive gently. It came all at once—intrusive and disorienting—as if time slowed just enough for me to step outside myself and watch the moment strike like a rusty harpoon. My mortality flashed into view, sudden and unmistakable. Whether this was cancer or something else, it altered how I understood time, fear, and myself.
I was watching the “me” I had always known die, not knowing if there was something next.
The weight of that moment felt familiar from only one other time. Years earlier, I had left my better judgment on the beach at Waimea Bay on the North Shore of Oʻahu and swam toward my first-ever set of twenty-foot waves. The first monster wave drove two of us down, hard into the reef and held us there. I remember having just enough time to understand that this might be where I would die.
The Pacific pinned me. My breath was running out. Nothing I did changed the fact that the ocean was in charge. Facing a biopsy and what it might reveal—that same Waimea Bay feeling of being crushed returned. This time, tons of water were replaced by countless alien cells moving inside me—unnamed, unmeasured, unchecked. How could I estimate my odds when my repeated pleas for help were met with institutional endless delays?
The fear of what the biopsy might reveal was matched by fear of the biopsy itself—by not knowing what would happen once the procedure began. I had already been living with pain for months, and with bleeding more recently. The cancer had surfaced, grown, then broken open. I was left to do the best I could managing an open wound, while I waited…
Pain from whatever “it” is.
Pain from the biopsy that was meant to name “it”.
Pain from future treatments that might follow—up to and including the loss of part, or all of my penis, and lymphatic system.
And a growing fear “it” might be loose in my organs…
A Waimea tsunami—the night before the biopsy, all of this finally caught up with me. I remember lying there feeling crushed—not by a single fear, but by all of them pressing at once, including months of watching the cancer killing parts of me while it spread unchecked.
When my mind finally became overloaded, my body took over. Surprisingly time and my awareness narrowed. My breathing became something I had to remember to do. My muscles stayed tense even when I wasn’t moving, as if I was bracing for an impact that never arrived, but never went away. Sleep came in short, shallow stretches, interrupted by sudden awareness—my heart racing, while a strange, quiet sense told me to stay alert to survive.
Waimea Bay had taught me how quickly life can slip beyond our grasp, and now that lesson returned with sharp precision. I couldn’t think past the need to be released from what was happening. I couldn’t picture myself reaching the surface this time. The quiet calm of the hospital the next morning could not have been in sharper contrast to what was unfolding inside me—tumbling inside a tsunami.
Biopsy: A line between imagination and truth.
Turning my life over to an anesthesiologist I didn’t know and a surgeon I had met only a few times deepened my feelings: 1) no control, 2) my life in other’s hands 3) waking up and finding what?
I remember very little from the moment I walked into the hospital until I arrived back home. The next surprise came later, when I realized the surgeon had addressed the open wound that had been bleeding for months. No one told me what to expect. I had lived with this wound for months, it had become part of me. My journey was and is filled with moments like this—no one explaining important milestones and having them just appear suddenly. Where’s the check list of things to expect, the list of things that I should become familiar with ahead of time? Are doctors not taught to make lists?
When I was finally able to see the surgeon’s biopsy work, I froze. In that moment, I felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time: a partial return of my sense of survival. My fear didn’t disappear, and it didn’t even slow—but seeing the open wound now closed was my first positive treatment in many months. A small glimmer of hope appeared with the doctor’s wound care and for the first time, the future felt not entirely closed.
I made no mistake about my wound being sewn up. Tiny bandaids don’t save lives. I was still grasping for any life ring in the ocean. I needed the biopsy results to know what “it” was. My brief break from an open wound was not cancer treatment, it was the smallest of procedures, but when no treatment had been offered in 2023 or 2024, such a small repair procedure took on a larger importance for me.
What remained was the waiting.
WHAT REMAINED: TIME
Time: not the kind measured by clocks, but the kind that stretches inward, where each hour carries more weight than the last. It’s additive. Somewhere, tissue had been taken, labeled, stained, frozen, and placed under glass. Somewhere, answers were forming. I was no longer imagining what might be wrong—but I was not yet allowed to know what was true. And so I stood in that narrow space between relief and reckoning, waiting for the words that would decide for me how much of my life would change.
“Like treading water far out at sea.”