They say things happen in threes.
People say it casually, like a superstition you toss around after bad luck. A joke almost.
But when illness keeps knocking at your door, the number starts to feel heavier than that.
Three.
Three of what?
Three diagnoses?
Three battles?
Three times the body becomes a place of suffering instead of a home?
If things really do happen in threes, then maybe the third time is supposed to mean something. Maybe it’s the last one. Maybe it’s the one that finally sets you free.
But free from what?
From disease?
From fear?
From the waiting?
Life?
People also say bad things come in threes. And sometimes I wonder if that’s the rule my life has been following.
But the truth is, I don’t know if I believe that anymore.
Because I thought I had already paid my dues.
I’ve been fighting this body for so long it feels like it has followed me through every version of myself. Through every age. Every phase.
Preteen.
Teenager.
My twenties.
I was twelve the first time my body became a battlefield. Fifteen the next. Years where you’re supposed to be figuring out who you are, not how strong you have to be to survive.
And the strange thing about cancer is that sometimes the worst part isn’t even having it.
It’s surviving it.
Survival sounds like a victory, and in many ways it is. But surviving means carrying the weight of it with you. The memory. The fear. The quiet question that never fully leaves.
What if it comes back?
That weight is hard to explain to people who have never carried it. It’s heavy in a way that sits in your chest and follows you into every doctor’s appointment, every scan, every unexplained ache.
The waiting is its own kind of suffering.
And sometimes it makes me angry.
Angry that I keep fighting for something that keeps threatening to take itself away. Angry that this story keeps circling back to me, like I’m the one it chose.
Why does it have to meet me in every stage of my life?
But then I think about my children.
My twins.
My daughter.
Three again.
And suddenly the number doesn’t feel like a curse. It feels like the reason I keep standing.
Because the truth is, I don’t want to leave them. Not now. Not anytime soon. I want to watch them grow. I want to be there for the ordinary moments — the ones people take for granted.
The dinners. The laughter. The boring days that turn out to be the most important ones.
People say things happen in threes.
Maybe they do.
But maybe numbers don’t mean what we think they do. Maybe they’re just patterns we look for when life feels too big to understand.
All I know is this:
I’m still here.
And even on the days when the weight feels unbearable, when the anger rises, when the fear whispers louder than hope…
I’m still here.
And for now, that has to be enough.
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