Lessons from my cancer: A retrospective celebrating 15 years of remission
I remember very well the moment I was told that I had cancer. I was 18, lying in a hospital bed after having a surgical biopsy done on an enlarged lymph node on my neck. My mom was there next to me. It wasn’t a private ward, and there were maybe 5 other people in there with me. The surgeon didn’t draw the curtains for privacy when he told us — it was the first of many small signs of disrespect toward me as an 18-year-old female being. He barely even looked at me and said it so casually. I wonder sometimes how emotionally detached some medical staff are in order to cope with their jobs. It’s not a good look from the patient side, I’ll tell you that much.
What followed was 6 months of chemotherapy, given to me every 2 weeks. 3 PET scans, I don’t even know how many CT scans I had. Enough for a lifetime. Constant discomfort, gigantic pills, regular poking with needles — a phobia of mine. It was truly awful. Honestly, a living nightmare. The worst thing was probably the isolation. I wasn’t as immunocompromised as to require literal isolation, but I had just moved back to South Africa after finishing high school in Kenya. It was 6 months into my first year at university and I hadn’t really made friends yet — it’s never been easy for me to do that, especially when it seems that people perceive you as an outsider. I had a different accent and didn’t know anyone from school.
So then you get cancer on top of that, and the few friends you do have just kind of scatter because they assume you’re always busy with your cancer stuff and can’t do anything fun because, you know, who can have fun and have cancer at the same time? Eww, cancer? No thanks! I don’t know if I can blame them. How many teenagers are emotionally mature enough to handle that with grace? I wasn’t. I just took it and carried on because I didn’t see any other options. My coping mechanism was to make light of the situation. I’ll tell you now that it was anything but funny. I still cry when I think about it, like I am now. As I said, a living nightmare.
But here I am, fifteen years later. Alive and mostly well. Grateful to exist, grateful for the experience I had that helped to shape me. The trauma from that experience served as a seed for the growth I have undergone as a person, and I don’t know if that would have happened without surviving cancer. This is an attempt to honour the experience and the transformation I have undergone since overcoming Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2009. Here are some of the more obvious lessons of my experience.
#1. Never take your health for granted. Ever.
It’s often the nature of keystone events that they happen in an instant. One minute life is normal, the next it will never be the same. My story is nothing when I compare it with those of others. I came out slightly scarred but otherwise basically unscathed. A lot of people aren’t that lucky. Anything can happen to you at any moment that has the potential to change your life forever. I don’t say this out of fear, but honest gratitude for my body and relative good health. I know more than one person who became paralysed after a vehicle accident. Shit, I was nearly killed in a bus crash, along with many of my friends. Appreciate your body for what it is — a gift. Don’t take it for granted, and don’t hate it because it may not be the shape that you think it should be. Let me ask you this — what’s more important to you: looking a certain way or being able to see? That’s the kind of appreciation we’re talking about. True, deep appreciation for your vessel, without petty superficial judgment.
#2. It is possible to survive your worst nightmare.
It’s gonna be awful, but you CAN get through it. One step at a time. These moments require you to focus on the present, on the immediate action required to get to the next. You are forced to slow down and consider what truly matters. You are stronger than you think you are, I promise you. We never know until the moment arrives how we will respond, so it’s very important not to judge others for how they handle something. Often we only learn the lesson in retrospect, as a way to process what we’ve been through. If you’re living through something terrible and can’t understand how this could ever be of benefit to you… well, if you survive, you will know at the very least that you can make it through. “I survived.” That’s honestly enough.
#3. Community is everything.
Without people to love and cherish and share life with, what are you doing? Being stuck in our own heads never leads to a positive outcome. We are so self-obsessed these days, I’m no exception. Sometimes I find myself feeling so stagnant and gross and dissatisfied, and when I take a minute to reflect why, it always comes down to spending too much energy focusing on myself. Try considering those around you instead — reach out to a friend or family member and ask them about their day so far, if they need help with anything, what plans they have. Just focus on others for a while, instead of yourself. Really be there for someone, because it matters. Our presence matters to those around us. Someone can sense when you’re not really there with them — if you’ve experienced this, you know how terrible it feels.
#4. Aging is a blessing, not a source of shame.
Just ask anyone who has had a brush with death. Can we please stop judging our bodies for aging? When did it become so shameful to look like you’re older than 25? As someone who could very well have died at 18, I will tell you now that being able to survive this world is something to be celebrated, not shamed. You may as well aim for misery if you believe that wrinkled skin is something to dread. At the same time, aging naturally shouldn’t have to be a political statement, just like not wearing makeup or shaving or any other of the very many *optional* behaviours we’ve been taught are mandatory to being a woman. Few things get me as riled up as the attempt to weaponise femininity against the feminine.
#5. Don’t waste your life pleasing other people.
This follows on from the previous point. Your life is only yours. You are the one who decides how to move through it. We need to recognise our own culpability when it comes to how our lives play out. This isn’t to say that you’re to blame or responsible for everything that happens to you, but you are certainly responsible for how you handle yourself. Unless you’re an actual child with little to no agency, it is solely your responsibility to create the life that you want to live. It’s not always an easy pill to swallow — blaming circumstances is much more convenient. Accepting responsibility for yourself means freeing yourself from the permission of others to achieve what you dream of. It means deciding for yourself instead of letting things be decided for you. It means being accountable for your actions rather than making excuses for them, and it means owning that you’ve had a hand in creating the life you have now, good and bad.
Concluding…
Life is tough, deal with it. Please — this is meant as a joke, but also not completely. Learning how to handle adversity is a valuable skill for anyone, because life is guaranteed to get tough at some point. It was never meant to be easy — that is obvious from observing nature. For some, the struggle starts much earlier and is perhaps more externally observable than for others, but we all deal with it. And that’s totally OK and normal — challenge is how we grow as human beings. Feeling connection, respecting your vessel, living your own truth, and owning your choices are all paramount to a healthy, balanced life. When things get tough, these are your sources of strength and comfort.
