Emotional Roller Coasters and Too Close to Home

I live in the mountains, so I’m accustomed to journeys having their ups and their downs. Uphill climbs and downhill coasts. I’m accustomed to valleys and mountaintops, to breathtaking views and challenging curves.

Life is a lot like those mountain roads, and I’ve definitely found the cancer journey to have a lot in common with them too. Nothing proves it more than my experience a couple weeks ago.

First came the high week–I had my brain MRI and full-body PET scan, and both came back clear. No evidence of cancer, praise God. My neurosurgeon deemed it a good enough report that he doesn’t think I need another one for six months (as opposed to the three-month schedule I’d been on since October 2025). Good news! I was thrilled, and since the week was full of other good things too–the release of The Spy Keeper of Marseille, a new contract from Tyndale, Xoe getting her drivers license, Awakened won first place in the Faith, Hope, & Love Readers Choice Award, and I sold the audio rights to Fathomed, so that will soon be out in audio–I was in a super good mood.

Of course, I know those good weeks don’t last forever. And I got my first glimpse of it when I had my follow-up appointment with radiation oncology a week after the scans. It was overall a very encouraging appointment, don’t get me wrong. I really like my team, and they are always so informative and build me up. But she said something that just really struck me: “We’re always going to be monitoring you closely.”

This is a good thing. This is what I want. But it also just really hit home–that this journey has no end, not for me. There’s not a point where I have reached the destination of “cancer free” and just get to go on with my life without looking back. I will be having regular scans forever. There’s no “looking at it in the rear view mirror” for my journey. Metastasis means a whole different category.

And my category is a strange one. It’s called Oligometastasis, and it’s not your typical Stage 4 (though it technically is Stage 4). It means that there was one isolated metastasis, and it can be treated aggressively, with a goal of curing it, of eradication. Usually with Stage 4, the goal is containment. So as metastasis goes, it’s the best case scenario…but it’s also rare. As in, there are hundreds of cases, not the many, many thousands. Which means no protocols in place.

Which means, as my radiation oncology team put it, my treatment is a conversation, and I have a voice in it. Which is also great…until I feel like I don’t have a voice in it. And that’s what happened at my last infusion. See, my original oncologist has moved to a different city, and I was put with someone new. I will miss Dr. Safi–he was not only a great doctor, he was personable and kind and genuinely cares about his patients. He was the kind to make a plan and then send a message saying, “Wait! I just read a new study that came out the other day, and we need to adjust the timing of this.” He was also the kind to come into an appointment and say, “I’ve been looking up your books. You’re very popular!” which just made me feel seen. Because that was something he did on his own time, in an effort to know me better.

But I was fully prepared to like my new oncologist too. I was expecting a long first appointment with her, because that’s how it usually goes, with them asking me to tell them in my own words about where I am and what I’m going through. This one didn’t do that. She was in and out in five minutes the first time. Last time (our second appointment), after these scans, I was prepared to engage more, and I asked about the plan now that we had two clear scans under our belts. Dr. Safi had said we’d do treatment for a year and then reevaluate, that maybe we’d do up to two years, but that he didn’t want to commit me to a lifetime of treatment for a disease I no longer have–that the risks of complications from treatment have to be balanced with risk of recurrence. This new doctor, however, just said, “This is forever. You can’t ever go off treatments. It was in your brain, we can’t risk it coming back. With Stage 4, it’s not a matter of if it comes back, it’s a matter of when it comes back.”

Cue that roller coaster plummeting so fast that I felt my stomach bottom out. Because forever was not what I’d been braced for. And my team had just reiterated two days before that this was NOT typical Stage 4 and COULD be treated for a cure. I pushed back. Reiterated what Dr. Safi had said. But I didn’t feel like she was hearing me. She just kept saying, “This is protocol.” I asked, “Could we talk about spacing them out more in the future, at least? Because this cycle is hard on me.” To which she said, “There’s no protocol for that.”

My husband is usually the one with all the questions, but he stayed silent. Because, as he said afterward, “You seemed like you were barely holding it together and just wanted her out of the room.” He wasn’t wrong. I was fighting tears, and I continued to fight tears the rest of the day. Thoughts I have never entertained began bombarding me. Thoughts like:

What is the point?
Why am I doing this?
Why am I considering a big surgery to give me a body I’m more comfortable in, if it’s guaranteed to come back?
How many years do I even have left?
Am I seriously going to be dealing with this forever? Feeling sick 1/3 – 1/2 of the time? Being so depleted of energy? 

I let myself feel all those emotions. I went to my infusion, and the nursing staff helped without even realizing it. Just by asking personal questions. Smiling and laughing with me. They even brought in a backpack of goodies that a local middle school team puts together for cancer patients, filled with blankets and socks and lotion and lip balm and even a Starbucks gift card. I messaged my friends asking for prayers and explaining the emotional crash, I called my mom and whined, LOL.

I slept on it. And then I messaged my physicians assistant who I adore, who promised to be with me through the transition to the new doctor, and I told her about my concerns at the lack of continuity. She promised to arrange meetings between the new doctor and the old, and to talk to them both, and fully understood my concerns. That helped.

But man, this roller coaster. The twists and turns, the loop-di-loops, the ups and downs. It’s hard. And there’s nothing to do but ride it, and to cling to the safety bars of faith, and to work through all the emotions.

One of my biggest “work through” methods in the last 9 months since this new diagnosis has been my stories. Especially Amazed, my third romantasy, which will release in December. I already wrote about this a bit in a post called “Strange Timing,” in which I shared that as I was developing this story, I created a character whose sole purpose was to die. We know she’s dying at the start of the book, this isn’t a spoiler. It’s the whole reason she and her husband are in the kingdom it’s set, to soak in the healing waters of their mineral pools–one of the few things that can relieve the symptoms of her (totally fictional) disease.

I’d developed this character and story line to progress the plot of my world. I decided to write her POV in large part to keep a good balance of male/female points-of-view. What I didn’t know when I decided on that was that I’d get my new cancer diagnosis just as I was getting to the point in the story where I was writing her first scene. I was literally riding home from the hospital after my oncologist told me I had Stage 4 cancer (and at the time, before all the scans, they assumed it must be all through me, they didn’t yet know it was just that one tiny spot) and would likely be on treatments for the rest of my life, when I realized the next scene I had to write was Iraja’s first scene. As in, the dying woman.

For a moment, I wasn’t sure I could do it. Then I realized that God knew. God knew what I would need to process my own emotions when He put this idea in my heart and in my head. That strange timing was His timing. And so, I poured myself into it. Though Iraja’s story is nothing like mine in pretty much every way, she became my way of exploring and expressing all the emotions I was dealing with, all the wrestling with my own mortality.

So as I’m sure you can imagine, I was a little nervous as people began to read it–my editor, my husband, and the “alpha” team of my P&P ladies, who volunteer to read the first draft. One of the questions I asked them at the end was “How was the Iraja line? Sufficiently poignant? Does it need any work? Was she as lovable as I claimed she was? (LOL)”

Thus far, everyone has unanimously agreed that they love her, love her line, and it was SO emotionally impactful.

Everyone, that is, but my husband. When I told him my editor said the book wrecked her in the best way and she was bawling (in the best way) and she LOVED the Iraja line, and she wanted no major revisions, David’s response was, “Really?”

Um…uh oh. When these notes came in, he’d just finished reading it two days before, and we hadn’t had time to talk about his thoughts yet. But it was right before we left for our anniversary trip, so I knew we’d have countless hours in the car. And we talked through a lot on that trip. Not just his thoughts on the book (he thinks we need some short stories about Iraja and Bleu’s adventures together, to come between their happily ever after in Consecrated and Iraja’s diagnosis 34 years later in Amazed–and I’m cool with that. I’ll be writing a trilogy of short stories for them entitled Beloved, in which we’ll see Raji making friends of enemies and changing the world with her loving outlook), but also his struggle with it.

Because it hit too close to home for him, which is totally understandable. While I used the story to process all those emotions, they hit him hard. Especially because in the story, Iraja tells her Awakened husband, who likely has centuries left to live, that he must live. He must move on, because she knows somewhere out there is the fated match like his parents have. That she can’t hold his “forever.” And as David held me close one night, he said, “That better not be you saying that to me. Because there will never be someone else for me.” To which I replied, “Their story is not our story. The emotions are mine, but not the details. Yes, I want you to live if I go first–but that doesn’t mean the same thing.” We had to work through it. We had to hold each other close. We had to wrestle together.

And there is so much of that in this journey. There is wrestling with emotions and realities and might-bes. There is prayer and there are tears and there are victories we embrace with both hands. There are ups and downs and twists and turns, and it isn’t a ride I can just get off of.

But there is also new depth. New discoveries. New Truths the Lord is so gracious as to show me.

These last couple weeks especially, I’ve been thinking about the legacy I will leave behind, whenever the Lord calls me home (hopefully many decades from now!). Will people still read my books after I’m gone, or will Roseanna M. White just fade away when I’m not putting out new stories? I look at the ECPA bestseller list, and I see those books that have been on it every month for literally decades (looking at you, Redeeming Love, LOL) and I see that I’m not on there, and I wonder…does it matter? All this work I do–does it matter? Will it last?

I can’t know if it will last. But I do know that it matters. I know it because people tell me so. It matters now. It matters for you. So I will keep writing, as long as the Lord gives me words. I will keep pouring myself into each and every book I put out, because what is the point otherwise? I will take my pain and my questions, my yearning and my discoveries, my faith and my hope, and I will put them into the stories of brave French Resistance fighters, of gentle-souled princesses with fatal lung conditions, of mystery-solving restoration historians, of beach shop owners learning to open their hearts.

I will write. And I will fight. And I will live. And I will love. I’ll keep bringing things close to home…and I’ll stay on the roller coaster. Because it’s just my beloved mountain roads, taking me on a journey. And oh, the vistas from the mountaintops. Getting to those views is always worth the plunge through the valleys.