There wasn’t a moment where everything stopped.
No dramatic silence.
No slow-motion collapse.
Just a room… a chair… and a doctor choosing his words carefully.
“Terminal.”
It’s a strange word when it’s yours.
It doesn’t sound real at first.
It sounds like it belongs to someone else — someone in a movie, someone you pity, someone distant.
But then it settles in.
Not all at once.
Not like a shock.
More like a weight… pressing down, day by day, until you realise it never lifts.
They gave me time.
Not a cure — just time.
Stereostatic surgery, they called it. Gamma radiation, Precision. Targeted. Advanced.
It bought me something… but not everything.
It didn’t give me my life back.
It gave me a version of it.
Now I live in the space between living and leaving.
Every day starts the same way:
Not with energy… but with assessment.
How bad is it today?
Where does it hurt?
Can I stand long enough to function, or is this a survival day?
Pain isn’t sharp anymore.
Sharp would almost be easier.
This is constant.
Dull.
Relentless.
Like background noise you can’t switch off — only sometimes ignore.
Fatigue wraps around everything.
Not just “tired.”
It’s the kind that sits in your bones.
The kind that makes simple things feel like decisions.
Shower… or save that energy for later?
Eat… or lie down and let the wave pass?
Then there’s the medication.
The routine.
The cycle.
One pill to manage the condition.
Another to manage the side effects.
Another to manage what those side effects cause.
A chain reaction… inside your own body.
Nausea.
Dizziness.
Fog.
Some days it feels like I’m less myself… and more a system being chemically balanced just enough to keep going.
And then there’s the cost.
No one really talks about that part.
Every month, it comes around again.
Appointments.
Prescriptions.
Each one necessary.
Each one another reminder that staying alive… isn’t free.
You don’t just fight the condition.
You fight the system around it.
But here’s the part people don’t expect.
I’m still here.
Not fully.
Not the way I used to be.
But I’m here.
I see things differently now.
Time isn’t something abstract anymore — it’s measured.
Felt.
Counted in moments that matter more than they used to.
A quiet day without pain spikes.
A conversation that actually lands.
A moment where I feel like myself again… even briefly.
This isn’t a story about giving up.
And it’s not one of miracle recovery either.
This is what it looks like to live… when you know time isn’t guaranteed.
To keep going — not because it’s easy,
but because stopping isn’t an option you’re ready to take.
I’m living on borrowed time.
But it’s still time.
And for now…
I’m using it.