The Unknown Hitchhiker

What if I told you that while looking through photos of that first vacation you took with that special person, you noticed something? Not a fingerprint smudge or a reflection, but an echo. Something about how they held their shoulder, the arm looking more swollen than you recall it looking, a ghost of the past whispering, "Was I already there?" I've come to refer to these as "moments with our unknown hitchhiker."

Building a strong foundation

The time before diagnosis when something wasn't entirely wrong yet, but it wasn't right. During the 6 months, my partner and I had to build our relationship before their metastatic breast cancer diagnosis. Was it already there? Would knowing change anything?

My partner, Steph, and I began our relationship amid a global lockdown and pandemic. We spent most of those first months having living room floor dates, late-night FaceTime calls, and driving, most of the time not going anywhere, just happy to be out of the house. The time I am so glad we spent building a foundation for our relationship. A foundation we would so desperately rely on in the coming years.

After remission, a return of metastatic breast cancer

A simple shoulder ache from falling asleep wrong on the couch, pushed aside by the difficulty scheduling a doctor's appointment amid a pandemic, and reassured by recent clean scans went unnoticed and, for the most part, ignored.

Time passed, and with it, so did summer; unbeknownst to us, Steph's breast cancer, after 4 years in remission, had returned and metastasized, slowly but efficiently breaking their upper arm and destroying the bone and surrounding muscles.

Like many new couples falling quickly for each other, we took photos, then took a trip to a family home where we stood in front of the mountain in the sunset, some of the first moments where we became a small family in the car ice cream clutched in our hands smiling at the camera, Steph on one knee with a ring box—images from that first summer that rival the best love songs.

Lingering over photos before diagnosis

After diagnosis, I went back through those photos lingering over each photo with my partner's right arm in it. Was it more swollen? How did we not know? Would knowing have changed anything? Questions that almost drove me crazy.

Knowing wouldn't have made a difference; once the cancer became metastatic, no amount of time, early detection, or treatment would have cured it. At first, that made me so angry. That there was nothing I could do, even if somehow I could build a time machine. After some time, I became grateful and made peace with the facts.

I am not grateful for cancer or that it broke my partner's bone. Instead, I am grateful that we had the time: time without the doctors' appointments, treatments, scans, and general chaos and stress that come with metastatic breast cancer. We had time to know each other and who we were before cancer because it changed us.

I still look at those photos and linger, gently tracing the lines of our smiling faces, zooming in to see if somehow, somewhere, there is a tiny neon sign announcing "cancer here." There isn't. There are just 2 people falling in love.