Surviving Chaos

In January 2018, Cortney Stevens moved from Wisconsin to Raleigh, North Carolina, to be with the man she had met on a runDisney message board. Ten months earlier she had run a 10K and a half marathon on back-to-back days at Disneyland and was in the best shape of her life. On July 1, 2018, a Sunday run ended with her left arm swollen and discolored. The county ER found a blood clot and sent her home. The next morning the hospital called her back: a chest X-ray nobody had looked at showed a shadow near her heart.
What followed was a mass in her chest, a biopsy that sampled the wrong tissue, and an oncologist who told her she did not have cancer and said he would bet his house on it. Her boyfriend's parents pushed for a second opinion at Duke. There, a surgeon biopsied the mass directly and pathology came back with the answer the first hospital had missed: Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage 4, with activity in her spleen, liver, and bone marrow.
Surviving Chaos follows the twelve rounds of ABVD chemotherapy that began August 17, 2018, the twenty rounds of radiation after them, the April 2019 remission, and the harder work that came after: the PTSD, the sixty-pound weight gain, the diagnosis that she would likely never carry a child, and the marriage and home she built anyway. Cortney writes the parts most patients keep to themselves, including the night in the bathtub she kept from everyone until her best friend saw through her. She was told she had less than a 40 percent chance of reaching the five-year mark cancer-free. She passed it.