Welcome back to Stories from Tina. Grab your Philz—an iced Tesora with heavy cream and sugar if you want to do it right—because today, we are skipping the small talk and getting straight to the heavy stuff.
This space has always been about boundaries, personal growth, and unfiltered accountability. Usually, I’m dissecting the world around me, but lately, the biggest battle has been happening entirely within my own body. This has been weighing incredibly heavy on my mind, and I just need to get it out.
There are some things in life that make you sit down, stare off into space, and wonder how in the world you ended up in the middle of this particular story. For me, this is one of those seasons. So, here is the blunt truth: for a while now, I’ve been living with two tumors.
The doctors, in all their clinical wisdom, have told me I need surgery to remove them. They say it like, “Oh, just get it removed,” as if my body is a package and somebody’s just going to gently open it, fix what’s wrong, and send me on my way with a lollipop and a calm little recovery plan. But here is the kicker, and the reason I keep pushing the dates back, avoiding the calls, and delaying the inevitable: because of where these tumors are located, it is not exactly guaranteed that I will make it off that operating table alive.
There is no shiny, gold-plated promise that I’ll wake up in recovery. And that is a gamble I am just not ready to take.
Being a nurse myself, I know what goes on behind those swinging double doors. I know the risks aren’t just fine print on a consent form. My brain automatically starts charting out the pros and cons of this nightmare, and neither side of the list feels like a victory.
The Pros of Surgery:
In a perfect world, I go to sleep, the surgeon has the hands of a god, they remove the tumors, and I wake up. The migraines stop. The nausea fades. I get my life back, tumor-free.
The Cons of Surgery:
The reality is far darker. The location of these tumors means one wrong move, one fatal slip of a scalpel while they are trying to cut me open, and I don’t wake up. A surgeon kills me on the table, and my kids lose their mother in a sterile hospital room while I am unconscious.
The Pros of Delaying (No Surgery):
I wake up today. I see my children. I get to hug Noah and Maureen. I keep control over my life, my body, and my narrative for just a little bit longer.
The Cons of Delaying:
I have to live with the physical torture these tumors inflict on me daily. I let the disease run its course, knowing it might eventually be the thing that takes me out.
My hesitation isn’t about the fear of pain or the hassle of recovery. My hesitation is 100% about my kids. I grew up without a mom. I know exactly what that specific, hollow ache feels like. I know what it does to a child’s foundation. I refuse—absolutely refuse—to be the reason Noah and Maureen ever have to feel that kind of devastation. Noah just turned 11, and he and Maureen are watching my every move.
The thought of them growing up without me is infinitely more terrifying than any medical diagnosis. I would genuinely rather live with these tumors, let them run their course, and let the disease be the thing that takes me out, than willingly go under the knife and have a surgeon make a mistake. There’s also this fiercely protective, borderline obsessive need for control when it comes to my children. If there is life-shattering news to be delivered, I need to be the one to tell them. The thought of some doctor, or a well-meaning but clueless relative, sitting my son or daughter down to deliver bad news without me there to hold them? Absolutely not.
I promised unfiltered accountability, so here is the darkest, rawest truth I can offer. There are days when I sit with my own thoughts, and they are incredibly bleak.
Some days, I genuinely feel like I’d rather not be here. The pain, the stress, the endless fighting—it makes me think I would be a lot happier and at peace if I were just gone. I am so deeply, profoundly tired of what I’ve been through and what life keeps throwing at me, as if I deserve any of it when I know I don’t. It gets to a point where the exhaustion isn’t just physical; it’s in your soul.
Honestly, when people threaten me—and yes, people have threatened to “end” me—it doesn’t scare me in the slightest. In a twisted, dark kind of way, I look at them and think, You’d actually be doing me a favor. They think they are intimidating me, but they would just be taking this heavy burden off my shoulders, while in return, they end their own freedom and spend their life in a cell. It’s almost comical.
Let’s talk about the day-to-day “glamour” of this situation. These two tumors haven’t exactly minded their business. They have hijacked my entire system.
My vision gets blurry at the worst possible times. My hormones are throwing a daily, unpredictable temper tantrum. I’ve become anemic, the migraines make my head feel like it’s hosting a violent protest, and I’m throwing up entirely too often. It’s a literal physical nightmare. My body is fighting a war with itself, and I am just the exhausted bystander trying to keep the peace.
I know some people reading this might think I’m crazy for choosing the symptoms over the scalpel. But let’s be real for a second. If I die, whether it’s on the table or from the tumors, it’s not like there won’t be a parade in certain quarters.
Let’s start with the baby daddies. Oh, I can see it now. The performative grief. The fake “we co-parented so well” posts on social media. Behind closed doors, though? They would be popping champagne. Why? Because my death means the absolute end of accountability. No more Tina holding their feet to the fire. No more Tina setting strict boundaries. No more Tina demanding they step up and actually be fathers. They would absolutely love to play the grieving, single-father victim role to anyone who would listen, soaking up the sympathy while secretly breathing a massive sigh of relief that they no longer have to deal with my standards.
And my “enemies”? The people who couldn’t handle my bluntness, who hated that I called them out on their nonsense? They’d be putting on their Sunday best for the funeral just to make sure I was actually in the box. I can already hear the eulogies from the people who found my boundaries too strict. They’d be quick to swoop in, pretending to fight for my kids’ happiness, using my absence as a vacation, saying things like:
• “I’m so glad I no longer have to deal with her.”
• “She was so difficult to deal with.”
• “She made my life hell.”
Yeah, I made your life hell because I didn’t let you get away with the bare minimum. To those people: you’re welcome for the thought of a vacation, but I’m not giving you the satisfaction of tapping out easily. I’m a Leo. We don’t exactly go down without a fight, and we certainly don’t let our critics rewrite our story with their own bitterness. Staying alive out of pure spite is a valid coping mechanism, and I highly recommend it.
Speaking of eulogies, let’s talk about the ultimate comedy show that would happen if I didn’t make it off that table: the people who would suddenly come out of the woodwork to give a speech.
You know exactly who I’m talking about. The people who never once communicated with me when I was alive. The ones who never spent time with me, never called me just to hang out, and conveniently disappeared whenever I actually needed help or was struggling to keep my head above water. If I die, mark my words, these same people will rush to the microphone. They’ll give tear-jerking, dramatic speeches about what I meant to them, how much I “affected” or “influenced” them—things they never had the nerve or decency to say to my face when I was actually breathing.
In reality? These are the people who actively wanted to keep their distance. The ones who blocked me on absolutely everything. The ones who literally went behind my back to get a restraining order, playing the ultimate, tragic victim because they wanted to make sure I was hurting just as much as they were. Instead of doing the adult thing—communicating with me about how I supposedly hurt them so we could actually fix it—they’d rather wait until I’m six feet under to play pretend.
They will put on a whole Oscar-worthy performance acting like we were besties. Let me set the record straight right now for anyone who might attend that circus: we weren’t. When I was alive, they weren’t there. I didn’t have a sprawling circle of friends. I was always alone, perfectly content in my own peace with my husband and my dogs. Just me, Mo, my little white Shih Tzu, and my tan and white pup. That was my entire circle. Anyone else crying at the podium claiming otherwise is just looking for an audience.
If my enemies, the fake besties, and the baby daddies are the reason I want to stay alive out of sheer defiance, Muhammad is the reason I want to stay alive out of pure love.
This is where my tough exterior cracks. If I don’t make it off that table, Mo would be absolutely devastated. It would break him.
While everyone else gets the polished, smiling Tina, Mo gets the Tina who collapses at the end of the day. He’s the one who sees the blinding migraines. He’s the one who holds my hair when the nausea takes over, who sits with me in the dark when the anemia has drained every ounce of color and energy from my body, and who silently carries the weight of this terrifying reality right alongside me.
If I don’t wake up, he is the one left standing in a sterile waiting room, his whole world ripped out from under him. He’d be the one trying to piece our life back together. He’d have to be the one to look Noah and Maureen in the eyes and explain why Mom isn’t coming home. The thought of breaking his heart, of leaving him alone to navigate a world without me, is enough to make me cancel a million surgery dates. He loves me in a way that makes leaving this earth feel like a crime. I can’t do that to him. I can’t let my husband become a widower just because a surgeon’s hand slipped.
If I’m honest, one of the hardest parts of all of this has been the pretending. People see you smiling, see your wig sitting right, see your kids looked after, and they assume you are untouched by pain. Meanwhile, inside, your organs are arguing like a family reunion gone wrong.
Every single day, I wake up. I fight the nausea. I push through the migraines. I put a smile on my face, and I don’t say a damn word about the chaos happening inside my body. I show up for Noah, I show up for Maureen, I show up for Mo, and I keep moving.
Sometimes humor and a heavy dose of sarcasm are the only things standing between me and a full emotional collapse. If I do not laugh a little, I might stare at these tumors and say, “You have got to be kidding me,” with my whole chest. We all have invisible battles we are fighting. We all wear masks to protect the people we love because life does not stop just because your body is in crisis.
I am not writing this for pity. I am writing it because sometimes telling the truth is the only way to breathe.
I don’t have a clean, polished ending to this. I am still deciding, still wrestling with fear and motherhood and a body that has stopped being obedient. But for today, I’m choosing the devil I know over the surgeon’s knife I don’t. I’m choosing to stay here to annoy my enemies, to hold the baby daddies accountable, to ruin the fake besties’ chance at a eulogy, to protect my kids, and to love my husband. I’m still here, I’m still smiling, and I’m still doing it exactly my way.