I laughed in my doctor's office.
Not a polite chuckle. Not a nervous giggle. A full, ridiculous, are you serious right now laugh — sitting on the crinkly paper of that examination table, wearing a gown that tied in the back and exposed my dignity.
She had just said the words: high cholesterol, pre-diabetic, you need to stop eating anything that came from an animal.
Go. Vegan.
(And before any of you go typing "actually, plant-based eating is wonderful," I would like to remind you that I am Filipina-Chinese. Rice is not a food group. Rice is a love language.)
I told her, "Doc, I'm sorry, but I can't go vegan. I love to eat. And if you tell me I can't have rice — that's like asking me to stop breathing."
She did not laugh.
Then she leaned forward, and she said the thing that cracked the joke right out of me:
"You could have a heart attack."
Just a couple of weeks prior, my friend in the Philippines sent me a note. We grew up together. Survived things that I don't have words for yet — and maybe someday I will, but not today. Now we check in through screens, two lives spanned across oceans, catching each other up on who's still here, who's struggling, who made it.
She'd had her own health scares. She knew what it felt like to get news that stops you cold.
She wrote back: Keep moving, Dory. Don't let this happen to you.
And then she told me about the others.
So-and-so is on dialysis now. Twice a week.
So-and-so has breast cancer.
These are my people. The ones I came up with. The ones who were supposed to have already gotten through the hardest part.
I sat with that for a long time.
And then I thought: the hardest part isn't the past. The hardest part is staying alive long enough to enjoy the present.
I need to tell you something, because this is the part that matters.
For forty years, I was battered. Broken down. A single mother of five, just trying to keep us breathing, moving, not falling apart. I spent four decades in survival mode — and survival mode has a way of hollowing you out slowly, quietly, while you're too busy surviving to notice.
And then, somehow, it stopped.
My kids grew up. I found someone who didn't hurt me. A man who just... stays. Who loves me in the quiet, patient, completely unglamorous way that I had stopped believing was real. A man who cries when he reads what I write, and then wants to share it with his family, and doesn't even realize what that does to me.
For the first time in four decades, I could breathe.
We travel in our RV and he points at trees like they're old friends. He tells me the names of things — birds, wildflowers, the exact shade of light on a river at dusk — and I used to half-listen, and now I listen with everything I have, because I know how close I came to never having this.
A few years. That's all I've had of this. This quiet. This peace. This safety that doesn't come with bruises.
And I am not ready to give it back.
When the doctor said "heart attack," I didn't panic about dying.
I panicked about leaving him.
Please, I thought. I just found him. I want him a little longer.
I've already spent forty years without this. I cannot give it back. Not yet. Not now.
Here's what I've learned about health scares that nobody tells you: they hit completely differently depending on when they come for you.
If I had gotten this news twenty years ago, I probably would have shrugged. Twenty years ago, I was so deep in survival that I wasn't sure I deserved the good years anyway. Future health felt like a luxury for people whose present wasn't already on fire.
But now?
Now I have something to protect.
It hits different when your childhood friends are on dialysis at the same age you are.
It hits different when you just got permission to stop surviving and start living.
It hits different when you spent forty years wondering if you'd make it to tomorrow — and you finally did, and your body decides now is the time to send up a flare.
The diagnosis didn't scare me. The time did. All the years I didn't have. All the years I spent just trying not to break. And now, now that I finally have something worth staying for —
My body hands me a memo.
Ma'am, we need to talk about your choices.
I've been sitting at this desk since the books started working. Morning to midnight sometimes. Creating journals. Designing covers. Building something I hope might matter — to someone, somewhere, who needs it.
And the whole time, in the back of my head: Will anyone care about this? Will my grandkids even read it?
I was so busy trying to leave something behind that I forgot to show up for what's right in front of me.
I was sedentary. I was eating at my desk. I was, if I'm being honest, slowly disappearing into the work — and telling myself it was noble, that it was for the future, that it counted.
Nobody tells you when you're doing it.
Until your doctor does.
I came across something Princess Catherine said after her cancer treatment. She had climbed a mountain, and she talked about exploring life beyond diagnosis.
You are not alone. Life changes after this. But life doesn't stop.
My diagnosis isn't cancer. But I recognized what she was describing — that particular clarity that comes when something forces you to look at your own life and ask: what am I actually doing here? And for whom?
I have grandsons — two of them, with a third on the way — and I need to be around long enough to embarrass them at their graduations. I have four daughters and a son who are all, somehow, becoming extraordinary people, and I want to be there for every single one. I have a husband who still reaches for my hand like it's the most natural thing in the world — like he's been doing it for decades, even though we only just found each other.
I have people to stay for.
High cholesterol is fixable. Pre-diabetic is preventable. A heart attack can, sometimes, be stopped.
I have time.
Not unlimited time. Nobody does. But time.
And I am choosing, very deliberately, to use it.
To get off the desk.
To move this body.
To stop building legacy and start showing up for the people who are here right now.
To eat the vegetables. (Not without grief. But still.)
To take Chuck's hand when he points at the trees and actually, really, completely look.
This is not a story about getting healthy. Not exactly. It's a story about finally having a reason to want to.
Forty years is a long time to wait for a life worth protecting.
I'm not wasting a single day of it now.
If this found you in a moment where you're scared, or where you just got news that stopped you cold — you're not alone. And neither am I.
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