Why This Column Exists

If this piece hits you in the gut, makes you feel seen, or just fired you up? I wrote it for you.

And if you want more? You’re in luck. This is just one of many powerful columns in the latest issue of EmpowHER, a magazine built for women who refuse to be silenced.

Check it out, support the voices that deserve to be heard, and keep the fire burning.

https://link.rachaellemon.com/empowher

POWERFUL WOMEN DON'T JUST EXIST IN HISTORY BOOKS

We don’t just live in speeches, in statues, in black-and-white photographs.

We’re here. Right now. Fighting. Surviving. Refusing to be erased.

And I know that because I am one of them.

It only feels right to start this column, the one meant to honor the fiercest women in history, by telling you why this matters so much to me. Because before I ever studied revolutionaries, before I ever admired the women who defied the odds, before I ever understood what resilience really meant...

I became it.

THE REALITY CHECK: WHEN DOCTORS GASLIGHT YOU INTO A GRAVE

If I had a dollar for every time a doctor told me I was "fine," I could probably fund my own goddamn hospital by now.

Spoiler alert: I wasn’t fine. I was dying.

But when you’re a young woman, especially one who isn’t a frail, coughing mess straight out of a sad cancer movie, nobody takes your pain seriously.

I was 12 when my body started waving giant, flaming red flags. Running in gym class felt like my heart was trying to escape through my ribs. I couldn’t breathe. My chest felt like it was being steamrolled. But did I question it?

Nope. I was told I was just out of shape.

At 17, my body hit the brakes. I was drowning in exhaustion. Not oh, I need a nap tired. I was five-naps-a-day, dead-to-the-world, comatose tired. 14 hours of sleep, and I still woke up feeling like a corpse.

Doctors? "That’s normal."

Me: "B*tch, where?"

I kept pushing. "Hey, I’m sleeping like I was personally cursed by a vengeful sleep demon."

Doctors: "Teens need sleep!"

Me: "FOURTEEN HOURS? And I still feel like I got hit by a truck?"

Doctors: shrugs

Then the chest pain started. Not cute, little "oof" pains. I’m talking somebody’s-sitting-on-my-lungs, oh-my-God-I’m-dying, I-see-black-when-I-walk-up-stairs pain.

I went to Hackensack Hospital. Twice.

Did they run tests? Nope.

Did they give me imaging? Nope.

Did they gaslight me into thinking I was crazy? BINGO.

"Here’s some ibuprofen. Go home."

I walked out of that hospital with a massive tumor suffocating my heart and ibuprofen. I wish I could say that was the moment I lost faith in the medical system, but no. It got worse.

By 2018, walking across the street to class felt like I was scaling Mount Everest. One minute, I was walking. The next? Everything went black. My body was straight-up shutting down.

At this point, even my paranoia was on high alert.

This isn’t normal. This isn’t normal. This isn’t normal.

So, I did what any reasonable person would do. I WebMD’d myself into oblivion and diagnosed myself with a pulmonary embolism. (Was I dramatic? Maybe. But guess what? I wasn’t far off.)

I dragged my ass to Hudson Medical Center and, for once, the universe put decent humans in my path. I said, "Hey, I’m passing out. I see black when I walk. I think I’m dying. Please, for the love of God, GIVE ME A CT SCAN." And instead of rolling their eyes and shoving me out the door, they were like, "Okay."

That’s how I found out I had a 17 x 10 cm tumor in my chest.

LET THAT SINK IN.

A tumor the size of a fetus had been sitting on my heart for DECADES, and it took me practically diagnosing myself to finally get answers. So when people ask, Why are you so angry?

THIS. THIS IS WHY.

Women die all the time because doctors don’t listen. Because they assume we’re dramatic, anxious, "too young" for serious illness. Because they’d rather hand us ibuprofen and a patronizing smile than run an actual test. I fought like hell to find out what was wrong with me. And that fight? It nearly killed me.

And this was just the beginning.

THE RISE: HOW I BECAME A LEGEND (AGAINST MY WILL, TBH)

Alright. So I finally had my answer.

A 17 x 10 cm tumor chilling in my chest like an uninvited houseguest.

And let me tell you, it overstayed its f-ing welcome.

Doctors stared at my scans like they were looking at some never-before-seen alien species.

“We think it’s fluid.”

“We’ll try to drain it first.”

“We don’t really know what this is.”

Oh, that’s cute. I love medical mysteries.

But when they actually tried to drain it? Nothing.

Because, SURPRISE B*TCH, it wasn’t fluid.

It was a tumor. A big, aggressive, rare-as-hell tumor.

And suddenly, I wasn’t just a patient, I was a medical anomaly.

The kind of case that makes doctors go, “We should write a paper about this.”

Love that for me.

OPEN-HEART SURGERY, BUT MAKE IT FASHION

At this point, they had two choices:

1) Hope and pray it didn’t kill me

2) Crack my chest open and remove it

Guess which one they picked?

On June 27, 2018, I had my second open-heart surgery.

EIGHT HOURS. EIGHT. WHOLE. HOURS.

And here’s where it gets even crazier:

The tumor was both inside and outside my heart. It was entangled in my organs. It was massive. And yet it never touched a single major vein.

A literal miracle.

They removed the whole thing with negative margins. Didn’t need a valve replacement. Didn’t need additional reconstructive surgery. Didn’t need anything except to survive the next chapter.

Which, as it turns out, was a f*cking nightmare.

CHEMO: OR AS I LIKE TO CALL IT, "HELL IN A DRIP BAG"

My doctors gave me the option: Do chemo or don’t.

They couldn’t give me a clear recurrence risk. Couldn’t tell me if it would 100% help.

But you know what? I wasn’t about to let cancer have a rematch.

So I said pump me full of that poison, b*tch.

From August to December, I got chemo’d into oblivion.

The nausea? Hellish.

The exhaustion? Unreal.

The feeling of your body rotting from the inside out? Oh yeah, it’s a vibe.

And just when I thought I was done, my oncologist was like, “Hey, wanna do radiation too?”

And I was like, "Wanna eff off?"

But again I wasn’t leaving anything to chance.

So from January to February, I got radiated like a goddamn science experiment. By the time it was over, I was barely human. But I was alive.

And that? That was the whole f*cking point.

THE IMPACT: SURVIVING SURVIVAL (AND LOSING EVERYTHING I WORKED FOR)

You’d think the worst part of cancer is, you know…having cancer.

You’d be wrong.

No one warns you about the aftermath.

The moment you survive, everyone claps, throws you a “Yay, you did it!” party, and then…they move on.

But you? You’re left picking up the pieces of the body and mind you barely recognize.

MY BRAIN WAS STRAIGHT-UP FRIED AND IT COST ME MY FUTURE

I wasn’t just some college student going through the motions. I was studying to be a surgeon.

Not just any surgeon: a heart surgeon.

I wanted to hold life in my hands. To be the one standing over the table, cracking open rib cages, saving hearts.

And then? My own heart tried to kill me.

The irony is f*cking painful.

I fought through surgery, chemo, radiation…only to lose the one thing I’d built my entire life around.

Because chemo didn’t just take my energy. It took my memory. I lost the ability to form short-term memories. I could study for hours, wake up the next morning, and remember nothing.

It wasn’t just school either. Someone could tell me something, and five minutes later…gone.

How the eff do you become a surgeon when you can’t even remember what you studied the day before?

I had to rescind my med school acceptance.

The dream I fought for, the future I built, vanished.

And no one tells you how to survive that.

DEPRESSION: CANCER’S FINAL BOSS

Survival comes with side effects.

And one of them? The soul-crushing depression no one prepares you for.

When I was sick, I had a mission.

Fight. Survive. Get through the next treatment. Don’t die.

And then one day, it was over.

And suddenly, I wasn’t a “cancer patient” anymore.

I was just a person who had to somehow go back to life.

How?

How do you “go back” when the old version of you died on an operating table?

How do you return to a world that kept spinning while you were drowning?

How do you even study or go work a job when you know life is so fragile and you rather NOT spend your time making someone ELSE big bucks?

Survivor’s guilt hit like a truck.

The grief, the emptiness, the WTF now?

I was supposed to feel happy. I was supposed to feel relieved.

Instead? I felt lost as f*ck.

I wish I could give you more answers on this but I’m still struggling with this and it’s been 7 years.

In fairness, I’ve always had depression but this was depression on crack.

THE VACCINE DAMAGE: AS IF I NEEDED MORE BULLSHT

Just when I thought I’d survived every possible kind of medical hell…

2022. My university forced me to get the COVID vaccine.

Never mind the documented heart risks.

Never mind that I had a literal history of heart cancer.

I fought it. I even had a medical exemption.

Didn’t matter. They made me do it.

A few months later? My mitral valve started leaking.

More surgery. More damage. A pacemaker. I never fully recovered.

Now, I have SVC syndrome - which basically means my blood doesn’t circulate properly.

Use my upper body too much? I turn blue. Like a damn Smurf.

Oh, and my diaphragm is half-paralyzed.

But guess what?

I STILL sing opera.

I STILL perform live.

I STILL refuse to let any of this sh*t stop me.

Because if cancer, heart failure, and a broken medical system couldn’t take me out?

Nothing f-ing will.

THE CALL TO ACTION: TRUST YOURSELF. FIGHT LIKE HELL. NEVER BACK DOWN.

Cancer didn’t kill me. The system almost did.

And that? That’s unacceptable.

I lost two friends because their doctors didn’t take them seriously.

Two women - smart, strong, and fighting for their lives - who found my Instagram, read my story, and realized: "Holy sh*t. This is what I have."

They begged their doctors to listen. Their doctors delayed their treatment.

And now? They’re gone.

Gone, because they trusted their doctors more than they trusted themselves.

And I refuse to let that happen to anyone else.

p.s. you can still find one of their stories on instagram: @healing_my_sarcoma_heart

THE HEART CANCER FOUNDATION: BECAUSE NO ONE ELSE SHOULD DIE FROM IGNORANCE

Here’s the ugly truth: People don’t think heart cancer exists.

Doctors aren’t trained to look for it. It’s so rare that most hospitals aren’t equipped to handle it.

And you know what that means? It means people die before they even get a chance to fight.

Not on my f*cking watch.

That’s why I’m launching my Heart Cancer Foundation.

💔 To raise awareness - because too many people don’t even know this sh*t is real.

💔 To help fund diagnoses - because catching it early shouldn’t be a privilege.

💔 To make sure no one fights alone - because no one should have to Google their way to survival like I did.

This foundation is for the fighters. The ones the system tries to ignore. The ones who refuse to go quietly.

TRUST YOURSELF. FIGHT LIKE HELL. NEVER BACK DOWN.

Listen to me when I say this: Doctors are people.

They make mistakes.

You? You know your body better than anyone.

If you feel like something is wrong, don’t let anyone gaslight you into a grave.

Keep pushing. Keep demanding answers. Keep fighting.

Because the world doesn’t give a damn about powerful women until we force it to.

And if they don’t listen? Make them.

That's what this column is ALL about.