Then…nothing.

I woke up to bright florescent lights, shining far above me on the warehouse ceiling.

Next, a circle of faces swarmed in and bent over me.

“Are you okay?”

“I’ve called 911.”

“The ambulance is on its way.”

In that moment, more than anything else, I was horribly embarrassed. I wanted to hide.

But I could feel urine running down my leg, and while that embarrassed me more, it also stopped me from trying to get up.

Even at 11 years old, I knew this was a very bad sign.

I hadn’t just fainted. My brain had lost control of my organs. The silent, delicate engine that kept me alive had stopped cold.

The EMTs loaded me into an ambulance, as my uncle jumped in the passenger seat.

My mom drove toward the hospital in our car with my two little sisters, following right behind the sirens.

I’d find out later that the girls had screamed and sobbed in the back seat.

“Is Kinsey going to die?”

My mom cried, too, and gasped, “I don’t know, I don’t know,” shaking so badly she was barely able to steer.

One Battle After Another

For most of my life, I’ve thought of survival as an obstacle course. If I could just jump high enough, turn fast enough, dive deep enough — and if I never stopped sprinting long enough to let death catch me — I could outrun it.

At five years old, I was diagnosed with a bone marrow failure disease called aplastic anemia, and my parents were told I probably had four weeks to live.

When I was 11 years old, my heart stopped seven times in one day. Twice at a Sam’s Club food court. Once in the ambulance. Once in the ER. And three times in emergency surgery as doctors installed a temporary pacemaker. A virus had attacked my heart, causing it to beat at two different rates until it couldn’t continue — a condition called myocarditis.

(We later switched our membership to Costco.)

When I was 12, I was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism (or Graves’ Disease), which could have caused my heart to stop again if it had been caught any later.

At 19, I found out that I have the BRCA1 genetic mutation, which increased my risk of ovarian cancer to 44% and my risk of breast cancer to 87%.

At 28, I relapsed with aplastic anemia and learned I would need a bone marrow transplant to survive. That was the easy bad news. The hard bad news was I’d never be able to have children unless I went through an emergency IVF cycle before total body radiation during the transplant. That cycle would cost at least $20,000 out of pocket, and of course, might not work at all.

None of this felt fair — but I just keep running. I jumped through every hoop put in front of me and I stayed alive. I spent whatever it took and put my body through whatever it took to give my future children a chance at life.

I wanted to get to the top of the obstacle course. I thought maybe, after the bone marrow transplant, I’d get to ring a bell, to have my doctor call me and say, “You did it. The race is over. Now you’ve got a golden ticket to a long, healthy life, and you don’t have to worry about dying anymore. You’ve got all the time you need.”

The Only Guarantee

That call never came — and after 24 years of running, I’ve finally accepted that it never will.

Not for me. And not for you.

Did I survive the bone marrow transplant? Yes. And don’t get me wrong, that was a miracle — one that gave me the chance at a long and healthy life.

But surviving the transplant caused Graft-vs.-Host-Disease, which made my face swell to twice its size and presented like a painful, full-body sunburn. If left untreated, GVHD can kill you on its own. To try to cure it, I had to take steroids.

The steroids did calm down the GVHD, but they also caused my blood sugar to rise, which gave me pre-diabetes — devastating my plan to become an ice cream shop frequent flier this summer and providing yet another option for my eventual demise.

Did I take this news like a stoic? As part of God’s plan?

Hell no.

I was fucking angry. I still am.

These new diagnoses are both fairly treatable and reversible in comparison to what I’ve been through before, and I’m grateful for that. But I feel like I just finished climbing a mountain and instead of getting a medal, I got signed up to run two marathons at once the next day.

And you know what’s worse? Even if I could be certain I won’t die young from an illness, I could still die in a car accident, or in this country, get shot in a grocery store.

No matter who we are or where we live, whether we’re young or old, healthy or sick — we all live with the same single guarantee.

We are definitely going to die.

Even if that doesn’t happen soon, it will probably happen sooner than we’d like.

We will never have enough time.

As dark as that is, I’ve learned to feel a strange relief in it.

Because when you already know how your story will end, you can start doing everything for the plot.