E406 - Living Inside “I Don’t Know”: When Answers are as Rare as the Cancer

Courtney was in the best shape of her life — and also the most exhausted she'd ever been. Her body had started sending signals that no one, including herself, knew how to read yet. A stroke scare that turned out to be a misdiagnosed migraine. Weeks of worsening symptoms she chalked up to ordinary aches. And then, on a family trip to Mexico, a swollen neck that sent her home and straight into emergency surgery.

What followed was a diagnosis so rare that her own doctors didn't have statistics to give her — she was told, at first, that she had "the good kind" of cancer. She didn't. She asked, point-blank, whether she was going to die, and got the only honest answer available: I don't know.

Four years later, after a successful treatment, she's still living inside that answer. Courtney and Cody talk about the twelve days between diagnosis and chemo, the slow stretch from three-month scans to yearly ones, and the arm lump she's mid-wait on right now — a fresh round of "I don't know" playing out in real time.

They talk about the strange, hard-won gift of learning to trust herself after years of not being able to, the unsettling nature of strangers projecting their faith onto her, and why "I'll pray for you" can be the emptiest thing a person can say — and what to do instead.

And they talk about what she wants to leave behind for her kids: not a diagnosis, but a habit of kindness.

Find Courtney online as @cancercourtney and at https://cancercourtney-press.cliniewski.chatgpt.site

Dying to Tell You is sponsored by the Iliff School of Theology's Death Care Collective. Learn more about their educational programs for end-of-life care at https://www.iliffdeathcare.com