Content warning: This post includes talk of cancer and my mom’s very rough hospital stay.

Before this all happened, I won a trip to Finland. I was standing in the living room when I swiped down on my phone’s email app and the subject “Helsinki Happiness Hacks Awaits!” appeared on my screen. The contest I’d entered on a whim on TikTok, of all places, chose me and 13 other people from around the world to go to Helsinki in June to learn about why it’s the happiest place on earth.

It was 9:22 AM, 22 minutes into my mom’s first scheduled surgery for a tumor in her colon caused by rogue ovarian cancer cells. My mom had her ovaries removed in 2000 because of her first (of three) run-ins with cancer, but a few stubborn cells stuck around and decided to multiply 24 years later.

The Helsinki email stared back at me like a dream. I didn’t know what to do. I ran to the outside of my husband Ben’s kickboxing class so I could yell, “I’m going to Finland!” On the walk home, I decided that this strike of good luck was sure to extend to my mom’s very routine laparoscopic surgery currently underway, right?

Two hours later, my sister and I got a text from my dad that the surgery had not gone well, and that it hadn’t really gone at all. The tumor was larger than expected and would need to be removed in a larger surgery the following week. My stomach churning and adrenaline rushing through my legs, I got on the M72 and made the first of many trips to Memorial Sloan Kettering on the Upper East Side. It was suddenly an orange day–a term I use on days when the world feels as if it’s on fire. Things were not alright.

The surgery the following Monday was far more extensive than the first. She’d need to stay a few days, a week at most, to ensure she avoided the worst-case scenario, an anastomotic leak–one of the many medical phrases that would become part of my everyday vocabulary in the month ahead. Other words and phrases included Jackson-Pratt drain, low-oxygen saturation event, hypertensive crisis, MRSA, NG tube, and others I hope to never say again.

The Finnish competition announced the winners four days into my mom’s rocky recovery. I posted to social media with big smiles and waving hands and got through the day while staring at my phone for news from my dad.

Two days later, Ben and I headed to Jersey City for a wedding as the doctors made cryptic statements about my mom’s pain levels, wound distention, and blood pressure. We were sitting at the bar of Roman Nose for a pre-wedding cocktail when I got the message that my mom was being sent into another surgery. In an attempt not to worry me, my dad urged me not to leave the wedding since there was nothing I could do in the meantime.

Somehow not processing the weight of the situation–which was perhaps a blessing looking back–I danced at that wedding in the warm, spring air with a buzzing in my stomach that told me a storm was on its way. Dance now because I won’t for a while, pulsed through my head. It turns out that the worst had happened. Her colon was leaking and she had three types of infections, including sepsis.

Feeling helpless the next morning, I did what I always do when I panic about other people’s health, I bought gifts. I got her a cushion for the card ride that would go over her scar, a pack of colored pencils, and a sketchpad for passing the time in the hospital. Little did I know, it would take her over a week to focus her eyes enough to grab the cup of water in front of her, not to mention coming anywhere close to reading or drawing. I also went digging through the toy store on 72nd for a stuffed animal cat since I imagined my mom desperately missed the real cats back home. The storeowner and I dug through a pile of Beanie Babies and larger fluffier creatures before choosing the closest we could find–a rainbow cat unicorn that stayed with her through the stay.

None of these gifts made sense upon my arrival. The ICU floor at MSK on York Ave is oddly filled with bright, blinding sunlight. I got off the elevator and turned in the wrong direction before being stopped by a diminutive woman that I’ll call Jane who was sitting in one of the waiting room chairs. The help desk was empty.

“Can I help you find your person?” she asked with a worried and calming tone. “I’m here so often I basically have a job now.”

Jane went on to tell me how to access the ICU and ask to see my mom. We talked about how “our people” were doing and how we hoped to never see each other again–because that would mean that this nightmare had ended for both of us.

When I reached the room where my mother was being cared for, the nurse showed me how to put on the paper robe, gloves, and mask and how to remove it each time before leaving the room so nothing ever traveled with me into the hallway.

Now, there are details about this day and the over-30 days that followed during my mom’s hospital stay that I will not share simply because they’re not my story to tell. I also don’t want to put my brain through every detail since we are still, while much less so, in the thick of it. But I can tell you the bookmarks that stand out in my mind over the excruciating month of May.

I remember googling “Can someone be on a ventilator when they’re awake?” It turns out, yes, they can be when their lungs are not breathing well enough on their own due to a bad reaction to anesthesia. I remember involuntarily yelling “Gentle!” at a nurse as she sent fluids into a swollen IV in my mom’s ankle.

I remember the celebration of her moving out of the ICU. I remember her having her ventilator removed, having her NG tube removed, having the NG tube put back in, and learning the phrase “post-operative delirium.” I remember my mom telling me that I was wearing an excellent hat covered in flowers.

I remember the texts from my dad the night before Mother’s Day about her systolic blood pressure going up to 160, and then 180, and then 210. I remember the guy working at Lush giving me free gifts when I said that I was shopping for a Mother’s Day gift for my mom in the hospital and then crying as I tried to get out my credit card that was stuck in my weird wallet.

I remember getting home the night of the high blood pressure event and staring at the pile of Mother’s Day gifts and wondering what the fuck I was going to do with them. I remember the miraculous way her blood pressure went down the next morning and we had the clearest conversation in days.

I remember Maya, the woman in her 60s who shared a room with my mom on the step-down unit (the floor below the ICU), who coached my mom through a night of bad delirium. She wrote her phone number on a napkin and said to me as she left, “Tell Mary to call me. People need to know that other people are looking out for them in this world.”

I remember the day we got moved to an isolation room because my mom contracted MRSA, an infection that is often resistant to antibiotics. The robes, gloves, and masks went back on. Throw them out before you leave the room.

I remember the day when my brain broke. The tears wouldn’t stop racing to the top my sinuses as I rode the eastbound M72 and I wondered how I was going to hold it together for the whole day. By the time I did break, I kept it from my mom and left gracefully, but the nurses made sure I was alright before I left. I cried and wailed to Ben in the middle of Central Park–I always appreciate how New Yorkers let you cry in public–and then we ate chicken parm sandwiches, went home, and I went right to sleep like a toddler who cried herself tired.

I remember buying more gifts and taking care of her hospital room flowers and moving up to the recovery floor and seeing Jane again in the elevator and my dad texting to say that he’d met Jane as well! and getting more and more free coffee and bringing Ben for the day and then running into Jane one last time.

“How’s your person?” I asked.

“Not so good,” she told me, “I’m going to draft his obituary as I eat lunch.”

I couldn’t move. “Can I–,” I tried to say anything, “Can I buy you something to eat?”

“No, but you can give me a hug.”

I wish I had gotten her contact information. I still hope that the obituary was never used.

I remember checking the MSK patient portal 10 to 40 times a day, learning to read EKGs, and looking for the surgeon’s notes on her possible discharge date.

I remember the first time we rolled her into the hallway in a wheelchair with the PT team–the first time she’d been in a hallway and upright in four weeks. I remember packing up her room and walking home with one of her hospital room plants all the way across the island of Manhattan, from York to Amsterdam, as it bobbed in the summer breeze.

I remember lying on my back in Sheep’s Meadow when my dad texted me that they were in the ambulance and on their way to the New Jersey rehab center.

Before all this started, I won a trip to Finland. I leave in three days. I feel a bit like a wealthy Victorian lady getting sent off for “some fresh air for her nerves.” My nerves are not so great these days, so I am depending on that fresh air a bit more than I should. I get nauseous after I eat anything and I continuously feel like I have the chills just from being so tense. The body catches up with us, doesn’t it?

I don’t quite know what to do with all my extra time now that I can’t visit my mom (she’s in a part of Jersey where I would need a car and we very much do not have one). I don’t have to check the MSK patient portal anymore, though I did get a final email alert this morning. It was a discharge report, listing out every event that happened between 4/22 and 5/31. A list of medical terms that will never paint a picture of what really happened.

It was therapeutic to write this all out. The lump in my throat feels smaller. I can’t exactly end this post with any big lesson or optimistic wrap-up other than the news that my mom took 30 steps today.

Before this all happened, I had intended to fill all my free time in Finland with day trips and museums. Now I only hope for a bench with quiet and stillness and the city’s 19 hours of daily summer sunshine.