In high school my friend Lizzy and I discovered the possibility of the “prebuttal.” If you can anticipate and refute someone’s argument before they can give it, you can prebut rather than rebut. The closest I’ve come to achieving one in the wild has been leading off with “Crucially, I don’t have cancer” before telling people about the tumor I have by my lung.

Back in February, I had a sudden and intense bout of pneumonia.

“Hey Mom, if you cough up blood, that’s straight to the ER, right?”

“Yes.”

They diagnosed the pneumonia with a chest x-ray but, given the blood, they then wheeled me down the hall for a CT scan to make sure I wasn’t bleeding/clotting in the wrong places. I managed to make some solid small talk with the tech about how bad Georgetown’s basketball team is and to lay down for ten minutes without coughing up additional phlegm, blood, or my entire lung.

When the ER doc came back to my room to tell me how it went, he was pleased to confirm that I just had the standard pneumonia with no funny business re: blood clots. Then he turned the page on his report and continued.

“Now, when we do these scans, sometimes we find things. The radiologist did spot a mass in the area between your lungs. But don’t worry—we’re pretty confident it’s just a teratoma, which isn’t cancerous, but that is probably something you’re going to want to have looked at once you’ve recovered.”

Although I obviously wasn’t stoked to hear that, in the moment I was happy to fully believe his you’ll-be-fine estimation and stow that whole situation into the “Deal With Later” box on my mental shelf.

By April, after a few referrals, some blood work, and a MRI, I had secured the attentions of a thoracic surgeon who, while also pretty confident it was a (crucially) non-cancerous teratoma, given its size and location, started to plan for surgery to take it out. For a while I avoided learning how big it was because I was spooked enough trying to fall asleep every night imagining the mysterious occupant inside my chest. It was always discussed in centimeters which helped me maintain my ignorance, but eventually I learned that one of the dimensions was 11 cm, which even I know is too big. Plus every time someone described it they represented it with a whole fist.

I agreed with her assessment that the thing had to go.

On May 30th I drank my one permissible mug of black tea without milk and skipped breakfast. Three friends came over for a quick prayer and then my parents drove me to the hospital, list of asthma medications in hand and change of clothes in backpack. I was in a pretty good mood, all things considered—I’d never had major surgery before but I tend to have blind and complete trust in medical professionals. The thought of being under anesthesia for a few hours and then sitting on a couch for a few weeks didn’t sound so bad.

Given the pale faces and dropped jaws that people exhibited in response to my description of the surgery plan, perhaps I should’ve had slightly more sober expectations…

The Game Plan:

• Put me under
• Make a few little incisions on my left side between the ribs for the little robot arms and cameras to go through, as well as one for the chest/drainage tube (gross)
• Deflate my left lung so they can get to the tumor where it sits on top of said lung, next to (but, crucially, not attached to) my heart
• Cut/suction the tumor out (like into one of those vacuum-seal bags they used to make infomercials for)
• Send it to the lab to triple-check that I don’t have cancer
• Stitch me up, make sure I can walk around the next day, and send me on my way
• Tell me to not lift anything heavy or get on a plane for 4-6 weeks (so my lung doesn’t re-deflate aka collapse)

Bada bing, bada boom. Easy breezes.

—

After anesthesia, there is a couple-hour window in which you’re in and out of consciousness. People will talk to you and you might even talk back, but there’s no guarantee you’ll remember any of it.

Towards the end of my widow, I tried to confirm with my mom which fragments of my memory were real (because I felt it was important to win at recovery and to impress the nurse with my cognitive resilience).

“Did I ask you if someone had put chapstick on me and they had?”

“Yup.”

“And Dad said he had a hamburger for dinner?”

“Yuuup.”

“I think I had a dream that the guy surgeon came in and talked to me before y’all came back. He said they weren’t able to take it all out cause it was inside of my lung somehow. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

And I looked over at my mom who paused for a long time and looked back at me with very pitying eyes.

“You remember that? We were going to wait to tell you…”

When the surgeons put their camera into the space between my lungs they were surprised to not find a fist-sized tumor there. It turns out the MRIs and CT scans can have a hard time with some membranes, which meant that no one had been able to see that my teratoma was actually fully inside of my lung and enmeshed with the top of the lobe. The surgical team later told us they could only find two other cases of a teratoma in that location (don’t I feel special).

Being unable to make such a major pivot while mid-surgery, they cut into the lung to take a biopsy of the mass and then made a tactical retreat in order to regroup.

The Game Plan (as executed):

• Put me under
• Make a few little incisions on my left side between the ribs for the little robot arms and cameras to go through, as well as one for the chest/drainage tube (gross)
• Deflate my left lung so they can get to the tumor where it sits on top of said lung, next to (but, crucially, not attached to) my heart
• Cut/suction the tumor out (like into one of those vacuum-seal bags they used to make infomercials for)
• Send it to the lab to triple-check that I don’t have cancer
• Stitch me up, make sure I can walk around the next day, and send me on my way
• Tell me to not lift anything heavy or get on a plane for 4-6 weeks (so my lung doesn’t re-deflate aka collapse)

A different set of nurses rolled me to a different wing of the hospital and parked my bed in a small room at the end of the hall. The Gen Z nurse made sure I had my phone and AirPods within reach before they rolled me over and wiped me down. Mom came back to the room after securing permission to stay the night and then I ordered a quesadilla from the 24-hour grill, truly over-estimating my digestive system’s capacity at midnight after surgery.

I fell asleep after a few bites despite sitting upright in bed, drainage tube coming out of my side, unable to inhale fully, and with no clue what the new plan would be.

(Sorry, I never thought I’d do a cliffhanger for an article but this is already quite long. Stay tuned for part two but don’t worry about me in the meantime, it’s all gonna work out!)

Christina Ribbens

Christina Ribbens (’19) studied history, studio art, and data science at Calvin and public humanities at Georgetown. She now lives in the part of Virginia that’s almost Washington, DC where she helps award grants to arts nonprofits. She takes a lot of walks to admire the landscaping in peoples’ front yards, mostly listens to British comedians’ podcasts, and likes to make friends via sports.