Cancer will humble you real quick.

For most, this shower likely evokes little or no emotional response. It is a handicap shower. You see them in hotel rooms, fitness club gyms and well, hospitals. I've never thought twice about a shower like this before personally, because I've been blessed as a healthy, able-bodied human for my entire life. But as we know, things change. Life changes. Intentions change.

I've actually never stayed overnight in a hospital before this past week when I spend 4 glamorous nights at St. Joseph's Hospital. My best guess at what staying in hospitals is like was based on shows like Grey's Anatomy and Medical Mysteries-- oddly enough, TV isn't the most accurate representation of real life.

Staying in the hospital as someone who was truly sick for the very first time humbled me in ways I just never even considered before. Consider being in the Emergency Room. They are so busy-- they have no time to be friendly. The doctor does not look like McSteamy and he does not care about your name. It is so incredibly loud with alarms and buzzers going off in every room. No one shuts them off, even if it is 3am and you are in horrific pain and trying to sleep. No one will offer you or your husband, who is sleeping on the floor, a blanket. They will leave you in the dark hallway after an ultrasound for an hour, alone, waiting for transport. They will also make you take no less than 6 pregnancy tests and ask you repeatedly in front of your mother if there is a chance you could be pregnant. If you know me, you know that is mortifying is many ways.

They want you to pay for services right up front, no matter your condition. There is no special treatment-- not for me, not for anyone. That's when a doctor I had never seen before came into my room and simply stated that I likely had cancerous lesions in my liver. Then she walked out without so much as introducing herself.  

In the ER, you are no more and no less than anyone else. 

When I was admitted to the hospital and finally received a room, I was still in a lot of pain as well as on very heavy narcotics, which made me unable to roll over, sit, stand or lift my right arm without assistance. This is a kind of helpless I have never known and even in my catatonic state, hated every single minute of. After nearly two days of pain, all I wanted was a hot shower, which my MVP husband volunteered to assist with, as both my parents sat in my hospital room. Once again, mortified (because I am still a child even though I am married). 

I couldn't even undress myself because I was so weak. Lifting my arm to remove my sports bra resulting me in yelping in pain and immediate tears rolling down my cheeks. As I stood naked in a sterile hospital bathroom, my husband sacrificed his dry socks to warm up the curtainless, drainless shower. 

He gently sat my broken, pale body into the bench seat and washed the shell of the women he married just over a year ago--a woman he has watched deteriorate for over 6 months-- as she sobbed and whaled over the most desperate of situations. His strength never wavered while mine felt like it may never exist again. 

In the hospital, you are no more and no less than anyone else. You are just as sick, scared and broken as the next patient.

Over the next 4 days, there were so many experiences that humbled me straight to the core. Shit hospital food all patients get scolded for not eating. People who come into your room at all hours of the night to turn on the lights, draw blood, talk loudly about blood pressure and such. Not to mention doctors who barely look you in the eye before delivering the next prognosis in medical lingo without any emotion. 

And when I got home the first night after my discharge and I laid in bed, hopped up on narcotics, hallucinating that my husband is a train conductor, I realized that this is now who I am, living with cancer. You never think it can happen to you, but it can and then you're part of the "anyone else" all of a sudden.

I am no more and no less than anyone else with this disease, which is perhaps, the most humbling of all for me.