Meredith's Kitchen Table

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I don’t know why I got cancer.

I’ll never know. Not in a concrete, conclusive way. And honestly? That’s still hard for me to sit with at times. I’m someone who’s always trying to figure things out, to fix things—especially when it comes to my health. There’s no step-by-step reason I can point to, no guaranteed roadmap for making sure it doesn’t happen again. And for a recovering perfectionist who lives with a low hum of anxiety (yes, I’m working on it), that uncertainty used to haunt me.

It still does sometimes.

At 18, I was your classic overachiever. I was a senior in high school: vice president of my class, taking college courses, playing two sports, working out daily, involved in clubs, and keeping a 4.0 GPA. I had friends, a social life, goals, college plans. On the outside, I was thriving. On the inside, I was anxious, self-critical, and stuck in a constant loop of “not enough.” I nitpicked everything about myself. Quietly, I carried a weight of internal pressure, and while no one would have guessed, I was struggling.

I never could have imagined that underneath all that effort and performance, a tumor was silently growing on my thyroid.

It wasn’t until a routine appointment at a free clinic—of all places—that a doctor took concern with the irregularities in my cycle and referred me to an endocrinologist. I’ll never forget that first moment: he felt a lump immediately. Even then, he reassured me it was likely nothing. I was 18, healthy, active. But within a couple of months, it became very real—it was cancer.

Everything changed.

I was a freshman in college, 19 years old, just beginning my life in a new city, and suddenly I was navigating biopsy results, surgery options, and radiation treatment. I missed my spring semester. I had a full thyroidectomy and had thirty lymph nodes removed (six cancerous, so it had started to spread). I started a lifelong regimen of synthetic hormone replacement. I was just a baby.

Now, ten years later, I’m 28. A mom of two. A wife. A woman with more life behind her. I’ve had time to reflect. But for a long time, I didn’t want to look too closely at it all. I didn’t want to confront what it really meant to lose an organ at such a young age, or how it had shaped my life, my health, my energy, my relationship with my body.

I still don’t know why it happened. But I have a gut feeling—a deep knowing—that my body was absorbing everything I wasn’t letting myself process out loud. The perfectionism. The self-criticism. The anxious thoughts. The internalized pressure. I believe those patterns created fertile ground for disease. I think my body tried to speak when I wouldn’t.

Yes, of course there were genetic and environmental factors. I’m not saying I caused my cancer. But I do believe the body holds our stories, and mine had nowhere else to store all the pain I was carrying. So it stored it in my thyroid.

No thyroid, thirty lymph nodes gone, and a decade later—I’ve made peace with it. Some days that peace is still shaky. But I’ve learned that acceptance is a practice, not a destination.

I used to hold a lot of resentment—toward my doctors, my parents, the healthcare system. I made decisions out of fear because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t have access to integrative or holistic care back then. Nobody handed me a map. I didn’t even know I could ask certain questions. I often wonder how things might have unfolded if I had spoken with a naturopath, if I had known there were other options. I align much more now with root-cause, whole-person care. Not the model that simply “cuts it out” and sends you home with a lifetime prescription.

But I can’t go back. I’ll never have all the answers—and that’s okay. I’m no longer willing to let those questions steal joy from my present.

What I do have is today. I have this body that’s carried me through so much. I have a deep respect for the healing power of food, herbs, nature, and rest. I believe in nourishing my body—not punishing it. I believe that what we consume, mentally and physically, shapes our health. I’ve learned that nobody is going to hand you the answers. You have to become your own advocate.

And maybe, just maybe, this experience happened so I could help someone else walk their own healing path with more clarity and courage than I had. Maybe this blog, this space, Meredith’s Kitchen Table, is the beginning of something I’ve felt brewing in my spirit for years.

I want to help others feel less alone. I want to use the worst thing that’s ever happened to me and turn it into something useful, something good.

Because healing isn’t just about medicine. It’s about living honestly. It’s about being rooted in reality, in acceptance, in knowledge, in love, in light. It’s about choosing life—not just survival.

So this is me—choosing life. Starting here.