Purposefully Accidental

Chapter Twenty-Five

There's a traffic jam on the way back to Freddie's place, so I sit there in the car, staring out at the city and mentally blocking out the noises of honking from impatient drivers. Dr. Sharma's question about pregnancy plans keeps ringing in my ears, and it's shaken me more than I'd like to admit.

Ever since the ovarian cancer diagnosis, I haven't really thought about having kids of my own. My whole focus was on recovery. I didn't have time to think about anything else other than beating my cancer.

Three years ago, while walking at my campus, I had severe period pains—bad enough that I passed out and the clinic had to call an ambulance for me.

Period pains were always a normal thing for me, ever since I got my first period as a teen, so I didn't think much of it.

Not until the doctor found something concerning and referred me to Dr. Sharma, a gynecologist-oncologist, and had me whisked into a number of different medical tests.

The pains that I was having were caused by my menstruation cycle, but they also found abnormality in my bloodwork. An abnormality that warrated a visit with an oncologist. A cancer doctor.

After enduring more tests, it was found out that I had a cancerous tumor in one of my ovaries—luckily, it was contained within the ovary, and the cancer hadn't spread to the outer part of the organ, so all they had to do was remove the affected ovary and put me on a few rounds of chemotherapy to make sure there were no further cancer cell growth.

Like the doctors recommended, seeing that I was young, in a fertile age, and newly married, I had my eggs frozen before even starting the treatments for the cancer. One of the possible side effects of chemotherapy was infertility, so I agreed. Just in case.

The only problem was my diagnosis came almost at the exact moment the pandemic started to spread in New York City. The whole city was on lockdown at a moment's notice, and most hospitals were limited to treating COVID-19 patients. My treatments were delayed, and soon postponed, seeing that I was at low-risk and that my cancer was still in the very early stage.

There was nothing that could be done—not even with the help of Freddie's money and power.

Anxious and scared and locked down in a city so far away from the rest of my family, my physical health began to deteriorate, as if it was a direct result of my stress, when I had been feeling perfectly healthy before getting diagnosed. And when my brother unexpectedly died—

Truth be told, I can't recall much of what happened in those dark months. The next few months after Tony died was all a blur to me. I got married, then had my surgery, then months of chemotherapy. And by some miracle, I went into remission after completing my treatments. I've been in remission ever since.

I was lucky. The cancer was detected early, before it had time to spread into other parts of my reproductive organs—or, God forbid, other parts of my body. I was also young, and I was fit and healthy otherwise—my doctors told me from the start that I had a bigger chance of coming out of it unscathed.

It doesn't mean that beating cancer was easy. It doesn't mean that I didn't have my bad days, that I didn't wake up some mornings feeling like giving up.

All I know is that if I hadn't had Freddie to walk me through it all... I wouldn't be here today.

Which is why I owe him my life.

When I married him, kids were the last thing on our minds. Even having my eggs frozen was almost a second thought—it was just something my doctors strongly recommended, and Freddie agreed with, so I went through with it.

We never even discussed having children. It was never on the table for us. Both because of the nature of our relationship, and also because, despite my doctors' reassurances, I still had doubts about my own fertility as an ovarian cancer survivor.