When writing about your own health, the hardest thing is not to sound self-pitying. So I’ll stick to the facts.
A few weeks ago, I was at dinner with Emi at one of our favorite restaurants in New York. I picked up my phone to take a photo, saw two missed calls and a voicemail from Ezra, and thought: fuck - I have cancer.
I’m not a hypochondriac. If anything, I lean in the opposite direction. But I’ve done dozens of Ezra scans over the past seven years and I’d never gotten a call before. Not once. The reports were always uneventful, almost boring in their normalcy. I liked that. I liked knowing things about my body. I liked being in an MRI machine. I had the kind of blind faith in my health that tends to come easily when you invest in it daily, deliberately.
Emi saw the panic on my face and told me to call them back.
I didn’t have cancer. But the neuro portion of my scan had picked up something else: a 2mm brain aneurysm.
I stared at my plate. The food looked wrong, inedible. I tried to stay focused, tried to absorb what the Ezra doctor was saying: yes, it was a serious finding. No, I wasn’t in immediate danger. Aneurysms that small have a 0.1% chance of rupturing. I heard that number and nodded as if it meant something - that it was enough. It wasn’t.
I wanted to understand. Why did this happen? How did it happen? What did it mean?
The radiologist who read my scan had recommended a follow-up diagnostic scan in six months. I asked the doctor why I’d wait that long. She agreed - I shouldn’t. As soon as I hung up, I opened ChatGPT and asked it to teach me everything about brain aneurysms. Emi was already texting friends to help us find the best neurologist in New York.
This happened on a Friday, which meant I’d have to wait until Monday to get real answers. For the next 48 hours, I compulsively added bullet points to a new note in my phone titled simply: brain aneurysm.
What exactly is an aneurysm, and how does it form?
A bulge or ballooning in the wall of a blood vessel, usually an artery, caused by weakening of the vessel wall. Over time, pressure from blood flow can cause the weakened area to stretch and enlarge, increasing the risk of rupture, which can lead to life-threatening bleeding.
(I chose to cling to “over time” rather than “life-threatening”.)How can we know for sure that this is an aneurysm?
Medical imaging is the only reliable method. A CT or CTA (Computed Tomography Angiography) would confirm the MRA findings.
(I knew I wouldn’t be able to get a CTA first thing on Monday but secretly hoped for a miracle.)Does its shape and position make it riskier?
Yes - because mine was located in the anterior communicating artery. This is one of the most common sites of rupture.
(I didn’t know how to reconcile “common” with “catastrophic.”)Can I still lift heavy weights? Do HIIT?
Avoid any activity that involves straining, breath holds, or spikes in blood pressure.
(I texted my coach to change my training for the week and felt stupid for mourning my latest lifting PR.)What about pregnancy?
Blood volume increases by 30 to 50 percent during pregnancy, which could theoretically increase risk. Labor and delivery are even more complex - especially if pushing increases intracranial pressure. IVF drugs might also play a role, but there’s no clear consensus.
(None of this felt like information I could use - it was all conditionals, contingencies, maybes.)How can I make sure it doesn’t rupture?
Monitor for changes in size. Avoid all known risk factors - especially high blood pressure.
(I started checking mine compulsively: morning, afternoon, evening. Always normal. Still, I checked.)Why would I have an aneurysm if I have no family history, never smoked, and have normal blood pressure?
Some answers said “idiopathic.” Others said “possibly congenital.” One said, bluntly: bad luck.
(I didn’t like that answer. But it made a kind of intuitive sense.)Will I die?
Not now. But maybe eventually. Maybe suddenly.
(I didn’t write this one down at first. I didn’t want to make it real. But it was always there.)
I thought information would steady me. That if I could map the mechanisms - blood vessel walls, hemodynamic stress, rupture risk - I could reason my way out of fear. But even as I catalogued everything, I was still inside the fundamental uncertainty: something in my brain might be dangerous, or might be irrelevant.
There’s a particular kind of waiting that isn’t illness, or recovery. Just a suspended state where you’re both fine and not fine. Nothing visibly wrong, and yet something in your brain that could kill you. Or not. You don’t get to know yet.
In those 48 hours, I lived inside that uncertainty. I made coffee. I answered emails. I went to the gym. And quietly, I imagined my funeral - how sudden it would seem, how unfair. The kind of death that makes people say, but she was so healthy.
On Monday morning, we spoke with a radiologist friend. Based on the MRA images, she agreed - it looked like an aneurysm. Another friend referred us to a top neurosurgeon at NYU Langone, one of the leading neurology centers in the country.
There’s a strange kind of hope that blooms in the presence of authority - not in spite of it, but because of it. Even after hearing confirmation from a radiologist, part of me clung to the idea that the next expert might see something different. That with enough credentials, someone could edit the narrative, undo the threat. I wasn’t looking for a second opinion. I was looking for a better one.
And there it was - in the neurosurgeon’s relaxed tone: “We’ll need the CTA first, but it could be nothing.” We spoke on the phone. I found myself pleading - I’m only 35, I’ve never smoked, there’s no family history - and he, politely but firmly, said it didn’t matter. Still, he reassured me: even if it was an aneurysm, something this small wouldn’t require intervention. Just monitoring. A management plan we’d discuss at our appointment.
After a few more phone calls with the neurosurgeon’s office and a stack of intake forms, I finally had an appointment - two weeks out. Plenty of time to think. About how lucky I was to have access to Ezra, to top doctors, to a supportive family. And about how fickle health really is.
I had spent years treating my body like a project - something to refine, optimize, protect. I wore a continuous glucose monitor. I tracked my cycle. I ate well, worked out, slept eight hours. I had quantified nearly everything I could. And yet here was this unquantified thing, tucked into an artery in my brain, discovered not because of a symptom but by accident. It felt like a betrayal - not just of my body, but of the entire premise that effort creates immunity. That if I just did everything right, I could stay ahead of chaos.
But that’s the reality of the body. It doesn’t always submit. It lives out its own version of events, often in direct contradiction to how we see ourselves.
Mentally, I oscillated between feeling like I had a ticking bomb in my skull and moments of forgetting entirely, like a phone left on silent.
A few days before my appointment, I got a call: the neurosurgeon would be in surgery and wouldn’t be able to see me. I could still do the CTA, but no consult - more waiting. And waiting is not something I’m good at. It only expands my capacity for adding questions to an already embarrassingly long list.
But by the time I made it through the freezing corridors of NYU Langone, I was calmer than I’d been in weeks. Unlike most people, I like hospitals. I like observing how quickly doctors and nurses move. The protocol and precision feel soothing to someone so tethered to control like me. I’m also fascinated by the human body - and the systems we’ve built to study, treat, and care for it. Admittedly, I’d never been sick enough to see the other side of that fascination. To feel it as a patient. To experience the medical system not as theory, but as scaffolding you have to lean against. I counted my blessings again. Most people don’t get a second scan. Or a neurosurgeon’s cell phone. I was lucky, and I know it.
Once I was lying on the table, IV in, contrast fluid sending hot flashes through my body, sadness crept in. Maybe it was self-indulgent, but I didn’t want to live with this. I didn’t want to know there was something inside me that could - even if unlikely - one day kill me. I didn’t want to change my lifestyle. I didn’t want to stop doing the things that made me feel good (like hard workouts) or be afraid of delivering a baby someday. I didn’t want to live in fear.
A CTA, however, is over faster than I can run through all the worst-case scenarios (my ability is uncanny), so I got up and left with nothing but the metallic taste of contrast in my mouth. Emi had told me that radiologists prioritize CTs over MRIs and other modalities, so I knew the results would come quickly.
A few hours later, I was on the treadmill, trying to sweat out the contrast, when I got the text. My results were in. I read the report three times just to make sure I wasn’t misunderstanding. But the words were clear: I did not have an aneurysm. Instead, I had a congenital fenestration - an artery that splits into two before rejoining. I ran upstairs and showed Emi the report. It was the best news I’d gotten in a long time. Maybe ever. I joked that a congenital split artery felt appropriate for someone who often felt like she had multiple personalities.
I still needed to speak with the neurosurgeon, but the fear had evaporated. No more ticking bomb. No more waiting.
When we spoke, he confirmed the result. The split creates a small bulge, which on an MRI can look almost identical to an aneurysm. That’s exactly why a second, diagnostic scan is always needed with findings like these. I still had questions, and he obliged. No, the fenestration wouldn’t increase my risk of developing an aneurysm. Yes, I could work out, travel, have babies, do everything I wanted to do. It was probably always there, he said. And it will continue to be there. Forget you have it.
But I didn’t want to forget it. I wanted to write about it.
This is what the medical world calls an “incidental finding” - something discovered during a scan meant to screen for something else. It’s one reason some doctors discourage proactive scans like Ezra. They argue it causes unnecessary anxiety, that the emotional toll of a potential false positive isn’t worth it if the finding turns out to be benign.
I disagree. A few weeks of anxiety is a small price to pay for clarity. What if it had been an aneurysm? The best outcome is not having one. The second best is knowing that you do. More than half of people whose aneurysms rupture, die. Many never knew they had one. But if you do, you likely won’t die from it. You’ll have time. You’ll have choices.
I’ve always said that the small, daily habits - the food we eat, the way we move, how we sleep, how we care for our minds - shape our long-term health. That will always be true. But prevention is part of the equation too. Lab tests, cancer screenings, mammograms, colonoscopies - all the things we don’t want to schedule, that someone has discouraged us from doing, that feel like too much hassle. Those are the things that save lives.
There are really only two outcomes: you find something early and get to act. Or you find nothing, maybe with a detour like mine. But either way, you return to your life. With relief. With peace. Or, as my doctor put it: forget all about it.
Love this 💛 Thank you for sharing your story with us so we can all learn from your experience in this!