Cancer, Delivered by Email

On how we found out about my husband's cancer from the portal.

Some moments quietly divide your life into before and after.

For us, it came in the form of a late-night email — a new document had been uploaded to my husband’s health portal. No call, no context. Just a notification.

The report was dense with unfamiliar medical language. He stepped into another room to Google terms, trying to translate it into something human. That’s how he figured it out. That’s how we learned it was cancer.

While he was doing that, I was in bed watching How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days (a movie I may never be able to watch again), trying to distract myself from whatever news might be coming. He came in quietly, touched my shoulder, and said calmly, “It’s cancer.”

We didn’t sleep. I cried all night. We spent those first hours of his diagnosis alone with a PDF and a thousand unanswered questions. It wasn’t until noon the next day that we spoke to a doctor — and only because we reached out first.

This isn’t about any one person or one provider. But the fact that this is even possible — that people are finding out about life-changing diagnoses through an automated email and a portal login — should be a wake-up call. Patients — people — deserve more humanity than that.

Don’t get me wrong. The portal is useful, it can be a powerful tool. But it cannot replace presence. It cannot replace humanity. It should never be the first to break news like this.

There has to be a better way.

Because the moment you find out you or a loved one has cancer is not just a lab result. It’s a collapse. A disorientation. A before and after. That moment deserves care. It deserves someone on the other end who can say, I’m here. Let’s walk through this together.

Not an email at 10 p.m.