I was 23 when I heard the words no one ever expects: You have colon cancer.
It wasn’t like I had been feeling perfectly fine. In hindsight, my symptoms had been showing up for years—fatigue, random digestive issues, things that never quite made sense. But every time I brought them up, my primary care doctor brushed them off. I was young, after all. Too young for something like colon cancer… or so they thought.
The only reason my cancer was even caught when it was? My routine gender-affirming care. I had started hormone therapy (HRT) in 2013, and my endocrinologist regularly checked my iron levels as part of my bloodwork. It was never a concern—until October 2017, when my iron suddenly dropped to an alarmingly low level. That was the red flag that finally got me a colonoscopy. And that’s when they found it: a tumor blocking part of my descending colon. Just like that, my life changed.
A few weeks later, I was in surgery, losing 20 centimeters of my colon and 25 lymph nodes. Two of them tested positive for cancer. I started chemo in early 2018, powered through it, and by September, scans showed no sign of disease. The small lung nodule they had noticed when I was first diagnosed? Gone. I was in remission.
I thought that was the end of it.
For the next two years, I focused on living my life. In February 2020, I was finally able to have facial feminization surgery—a long-awaited step in my transition that had been put on hold because of cancer. But in the middle of that moment of joy, everything changed again. I woke up from surgery unable to see out of my left eye. A rare stroke had left my retina permanently damaged. It was a freak thing, something no one could have predicted. But in a strange twist of fate, the scans done afterward revealed something even worse—new nodules in my lungs.
At first, the doctors weren’t convinced it was cancer. They were small, growing slowly. But after nearly a year of monitoring, a biopsy confirmed my worst fear: it was back. Stage IV. I had already beaten this disease once. Now I had to do it again.
By 2021, treatment had advanced enough that immunotherapy was now an option, and I responded well. My tumors shrank enough for surgery, so in August and September of that year, I had two separate lung resections. After that, more chemo. More grueling months of treatment. And finally, in January 2022, I was done.
Now, at 31, I’ve been in remission for over three years.
I think a lot about how close I came to not knowing. If my endocrinologist hadn’t been checking my iron as part of my HRT, my cancer could have gone undiagnosed for much longer. And the longer colon cancer goes untreated, the worse the odds get. Gender-affirming care quite literally saved my life.
And while I wouldn’t wish a stage IV cancer diagnosis on anyone, I also want people to know that it is possible to transition while navigating something as massive as cancer. It’s possible to live authentically, even in the middle of chaos. I’m proof of that.