I knew my life would change, but not this way. My plan consisted of taking my life that had been added to a decade in New York City and moving it to the other side of the world.

The first two months are filled with logistics – finding an apartment, finding ways to pay electricity bills, knowing which bus routes are best to get to the CNN office every day. Too tired to travel, I told myself that once I had settled in my new place I could throw myself to get to know the city in earnest.

I found the apartment. And shortly after moving on I discovered something else – a lump in my right breast. It feels like a large, flat, heavy stone had grown all night inside me.

Within a week there were many appointments – mammograms, ultrasounds, biopsies, results, referrals. But I knew what it was before someone told me. I know that in my deepest self, like knowing that I’m in love.

On CNN Hong Kong day holiday party, I got the news I was hoping for – stage 2B, requiring six months of chemotherapy, followed by surgery and radiation. I told my parents, the time difference was 13 hours, via email.

My sister, who had never set foot in Asia before, flew out of the US to be with me for the first two weeks of my treatment in early January. After arriving, the jet lagged behind the Raleigh – San Francisco – Tokyo – Hong Kong travel plan which took all day, he walked to my apartment and immediately cleaned up the vomit.

Before cancer, I am not one who likes inspirational quotes or get-’em-tiger speeches. After cancer, I still haven’t. But one thing my illness does is it forces me to give up some of my insecurities.

No more hiding choices when I feel self-conscious. The person I took a bath with as a toddler saw me throw up 20 times a day, and he didn’t judge me because of that. By the time I was diagnosed, it felt like a third of Hong Kong medical personnel had seen me without a breastplate. And soon my friends will see me in my most vulnerable country – with mouth sores, hemorrhoids, nausea, and muscle numbness – and still want to hang out with me.

When I sent my sister away on the flight home, I did not know that I was racing against an invisible clock. We all exist.

Viruses outside, internal diseases

A few weeks after my treatment, we began hearing news in the office about a new virus that spread through China. Our bureau chief sent us all to work from our small high-rise flat. All public Chinese New Year events in the city are canceled.

At that time, many Hong Kong residents – including me – thought city officials were too cautious because of the very poor handling of SARS. People don’t wear masks unless they are sick, there is no mandatory temperature check, and most businesses stay open.

Some friends planned a trip to Hong Kong to visit me and help. But when the corona virus loomed and Asia began to lock itself in, each flight was canceled one by one.

My hair began to fall out two weeks into chemo, around the Lunar New Year. I decided to just bite the bullet and shave off everything. Every salon in my neighborhood was closed – I assume because of the holidays, because everyone in town had a week off – except for one salon. The barber looks confused and surprised to see a woman enter. He doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Cantonese, so we communicate through the Google Translate app on my mobile.

“Bad luck cutting your hair during the New Year,” he typed again.

“I’ve had bad luck,” I replied. When he doesn’t shake his head again, I draw the character to “cancer.” He immediately nodded and began working.

Ten minutes later, I’m bald. Barbers don’t charge me.

“Sorry,” he typed. That will be one of the hundreds of times I’ve heard those words over the next six months. But what I haven’t explained is that I don’t feel sorry. I feel lucky. Lucky to have health care, have a supportive Hong Kong community – many of whom are CNN colleagues I just met – and have a good long-term prognosis. Of course, that feels real. But in 2020, everything felt unreal.

I wondered how I would explain my new look to everyone in the office, but coronavirus made it irrelevant. Our bureau decided to remain closed indefinitely when the virus spread.

Travel editors who don’t travel

Even when I vomit and sleep 10 or 12 hours a day, my trip feels itchy still want to be scratched. I plan to take advantage of Hong Kong’s central location and a good airport as a way to explore more places in Asia, and as the editor of the CNN Travel section, I also hope to report from a different location. In the US, it’s normal for me to fly at least once a month. Suddenly, that was no longer an option for me – or anyone.

Ironically, Covid-19 is the perfect place to get sick. My oncologist told me to wear a mask, use hand sanitizers and protect myself once my immune system was disrupted, and then overnight it felt like the whole city had cancer with me. No colleague of mine knows that I answer emails from my oncologist’s office, not from my desk or that my cheerful social media status is mostly smoke and mirrors. The expensive wig I choose for office clothes only occasionally appears on Zoom calls. Contact-free food delivery is normal as coronavirus continues. And sometimes, just sometimes, all day long when I forget I’m sick.

Even though I can’t backpack through Laos or relax on the beach in Bali, I have the gift of getting to know my new home better than I expected. One weekend, a group of us handled the famous Dragon’s Back climb in the southwestern part of Hong Kong Island. Eventually, we arrived at the beach, and even though it was March, it was warm enough to enter the water. I brought a shower cap only for this special occasion but I pulled it and jumped, bald and happy, to the sea.

This year, I learned the word joss, or luck. A colleague that I kept a secret carried some red paper printed with flowers and pineapple – to represent growth and prosperity – as a New Year gift. You should have burned it as an offering to your ancestors, but I can’t bear to do it and hang it on the wall of my apartment. It feels like I’m living in the eye of a storm. In a city of seven and a half million people, only four died from the virus. My Hong Kong bubble is full of joss.

Find joy in an unexpected place

People think that cancer makes you wise. Just look at all the thin and pale and bald and holy TV martyrs, giving life lessons before dying peacefully – Dr. Mark Greene in ER, who died gracefully on the way to the beach in his lover’s arm, was my first pop culture experience with cancer.

There is something about looking at your own mortality that should take you deeply. But the reality is that sometimes people get sick. Good people get sick and stay good. Rude people get sick and stay rude.

That is one reason I am reluctant to share my diagnosis with people, especially the corona virus looming. Internet commentators debate about whether coronavirus is real, or who “deserves” it. Even though Hong Kong is relatively safe, with everyone in the mask, I still feel a little paranoid every time I leave the apartment. It’s better to be sick in secret, I thought, rather than having to live vulnerable in public.

In April, when I underwent chemo for four months, Hong Kong recorded one week in a row of zero new corona virus cases. The restrictions imposed began to lift slowly. Restaurants can fill more capacity as long as they divide dividers between tables, and the maximum crowd size changes from four to eight.

If you ask me a year ago what I hoped was my big step to Hong Kong, I would talk about all the cool trips I would take in Asia and the crazy adventures I would take in the city. But life, like that phrase, is what happens when you are busy making other plans.

Being sick during coronavirus, and still being able to get the best medical care and live my life, reminds me that there is excitement in everyday life. Being able to shop alone is a gift. Going for a walk is something to celebrate rather than a normal task. Cancer showed me how strange, a wonderful miracle to sleep at night and find you wake up again in the morning.

Seasons change. The sun rises and sets. My tumor shrank so much that I was scheduled for lumpectomy rather than mastectomy. The children return to school. And life, as it tends to happen, continues to move.