Blog 2: I Woke Up Different.

The Relief. Then the Reality.

I came out of surgery with no pain for the first time in what felt like forever.

The relief was immediate — until I looked down.

Two bags. Hanging from my abdomen. An ileostomy bag. A colostomy bag. One because of the obstruction. One because my colon had been rupturing and needed time to heal. My body had been through something I was only beginning to understand, and now I was staring at it.

The surgeon told me the tumor appeared to be adenocarcinoma of the sigmoid colon. Pathology would confirm in a few days. I didn't fully understand what that meant yet. But I understood that my body would never look exactly the same.

Learning to Live in a Body I Didn't Recognize.

In the days that followed, I lay in that hospital bed learning to care for bags attached to my stomach. I learned the schedules, the routines, the changing process. I stared at them. Some days I couldn't look at them without feeling something I couldn't name — grief, maybe. Or shame. Or both.

People tell you cancer is a fight. What they don't always tell you is that sometimes the fight is waged against your own reflection.

I had been a healthy, active woman. I walked over 20,000 steps a day. I created art. I laughed easily and loved freely and thought I was doing everything right. And then one morning I woke up with a body I didn't recognize and a diagnosis I couldn't absorb.

The War Between Hope and Despair.

The physical and emotional challenges of those first days were more than I expected. It wasn't just discomfort — it was the weight of a new reality forcing itself onto me before I had any chance to catch my breath. Some mornings I felt close to acceptance. Other mornings, the sight of those bags pulled me under.

It was a constant war between hope and despair. Between accepting what was and mourning what had been.

But here is what I want you to know, whether you are facing this exact experience or your own version of it: you can be grateful to be alive and still grieve the body you had before. Those two things are both true. Both are allowed.

I had a strength I hadn't yet found. I just didn't know it yet.

Still Here.

Underneath all of it — underneath the fear, the grief, the confusion — I was still here. Still breathing. Still waking up each morning.

And somewhere in that truth, I found the edge of something I couldn't fully hold yet.

The beginning of my fight.

— Von Unfiltered