My Last Toast to Leukemia

Cancer. It gives people the scare. Leukemia, not so much because it’s not a common term. It gave my father a scare because he had heard the term in the movie Akhiyon ki Jharakon Se. It gave him the scare because the 1978 movie showed that Leukemia had no cure. Thirty years later, little did he know that his much-loved daughter will be diagnosed with the same. As for my mother, I don’t know how she felt. If I ask her today, I don’t think she will answer my question. She’s probably one of those people, who can keep their emotions in check when the time demands them to act. My brother’s Class 10 board exam results were out. He says that I was the one who called him to declare his results, that he had secured the second position in his class. I do not have the memory. Although I imagine being immensely happy while shouting his results on phone. I do not remember the date when I was told the name of the disease, whose symptoms had made me slowly immovable over the course of six months. My brother says that he was told about my condition the same day as his results were out, on May 28, 2008. If I had a say, then I wouldn’t have allowed anyone to tell him, not that day, not till a few days later. His results were a huge news to all of us, but apparently, I was the only one who enjoyed its happiness. Everyone else’s joy was overshadowed by my diagnosis, PRE-B ACUTE LYMPHOBLASTIC LEUKEMIA and my brother, only 16 at that time, had to deal with his mixed emotions all alone. 

I knew I had Leukemia, a small infection in my blood or so I was explained. I am glad that smart phones and Google weren’t dominating my teenage.  I cannot imagine how terrified I might have been had I googled my condition the moment I was told about it. I am glad that I did not know I suffered from blood cancer, irrespective of the severity of the case. I might not have been the bubbly spoiled brat who got excited at the very thought of her first surgery and sulked the moment she was asked to stop eating hours before the surgery. I was overtly a different person in the three years of my treatment – people looked up to me, they called me brave. I wondered why, I still do. How can a girl with a severely low self-esteem suffering from inferiority complex be brave? People saw the girl as chirpy and stubborn, the one who was so bored in her hospital bed hooked to meds that she moved in the corridor of her ward with the saline and medicine bags. What people didn’t see is that, in the dead of the night when her mother fell asleep in the attendant’s bed on the other side of the room, in that silence the girl wondered if death was easier than the pain of chemotherapy. Every day she wondered, if her being alive matters in the long run and the answer always seemed to be no. Talk about mid-life crisis, I had my existential crisis when I was 14!

Being that girl, I never understood the bravery people, including doctors, talked about. It did seem to boost my ego so I accepted it. I had always felt invisible, cancer seemed to be giving me a lot of spotlight. For a girl who wanted adventure in her life, wanted to move out of home and do all sort of sports like bungee jumping and sky diving, leukemia was no less than an adventure. I did not see the sun or moon or the occasional heavy rain for almost two months. I did not see my hair fall once the chemotherapy began. When I finally saw my shaved head in the mirror after a long time, I wished for the mirror to not exist.

My brother had to move to Delhi with my Uncle because my parents were stuck with me. My father returned to work after a couple of months only to come back a month later to me. My mother, she didn’t move from my side. When I look back, I find that particular phase in our family the strongest one so far. The four of us were torn in our own ways, distanced from each other. And yet, sleeping on my hospital bed, I saw my family coming together so strongly for the very first time. I saw the way my parents began caring about each other, perhaps unaware of it themselves back then. I saw their helplessness for they couldn’t be with my brother. I saw grief, immense grief. And then, I saw my brother who came to visit me for a week or less. I saw the kid in him trying to be adult about the situation.

For a long time, I often said, “Cancer was the best thing that happened to me”. It was. It brought my immediate and extended family together in separation. It made me an optimist for a change. Eventually I went back to being a pessimist because it hurt less, yet never did I stop hoping and working for a better world. Cancer also gave me a mystery that I will probably never solve, the seven days I spent in ICU. The memories that I have of those seven days sum up to form less than a day. I chased this mystery for a long time, it bothered me that I have no memory of them, and eventually I sort of made peace with it. Cancer showed me the light towards life, yet I succumbed to the darkness of not deserving to live.

Later in life, I realised that my worth isn’t weighed by how people looked at me. The inferiority complex that I dealt with because I almost believed people when they told me not so subtly that I am less worthy because of my dark skin. During my teenage, before, during and after my Leukemia diaries, I chose to be someone I was not. I was not the ‘conventionally good’ girl who wanted to be everyone’s favourite. Yet, I really worked to fake that person because that seemed to be a way towards acceptance in a society where I already felt different at the age of 12. If you talk to my parents now, they will tell you that I didn’t cry till I was in a pain that I couldn’t handle. I had a really high threshold for pain. I wore it as my pride only to realise that ignoring even the tiniest bit of pain doesn’t help. Irrespective of its intensity, from 1 to 10, pain needs to be acknowledged. It came back to me as mental agony years later when I kept falling sick because of my low immunity. At times I wonder if things would have been different for me had I not focused on keeping everyone so happy in those days, despite my inability to help their grief and helplessness. Then, would I have to deal with the things that keep coming back to me out of thin air and get stuck in my head? Maybe, maybe not.

It’s been ten years since I was first diagnosed. If you ask me to tell my Leukemia diaries, then I will probably tell you a chirpy tale of how amazing it was. But, later I would be haunted with the question, “What’s the point in repeating the same story a million times over the years to different people, with a significant amount of loss with each telling?” As much as I often forget, better things have happened in my life where I have actually worked and built something. I feel proud today to have fought my body shaming to a level where no one can make me feel good or bad about my skin colour or curves or the lack there of.

Above all, I am proud to have kept one thing from my childhood – the pursuit for equality. If as a kid I prayed to suffer from end stage brain tumour every time I was sad along with my happy days and even on birthdays, then I don’t think wanting equality in society is any different. I believed as a kid that God won’t be doing me favours if I remember him in my sadness, so I prayed to suffer on my happy days too. I chose against my convenience.

Don’t ask me why I wanted end stage tumour. I saw it in serials, people suffered and didn’t die. It was pretty cool irrespective of how crazy and stupid it seems now. I don’t believe in God anymore, not as I used to. I don’t pray or wish for things to happen. I work for what I want, in whatever way I can. And, just like I chose to pray for a tumour on my birthdays, I choose to live in chaos as long as I see it as a part of a good that’s beyond my existence.

Cancer was the best thing that happened to me, but now, there’s more, and it’s time to put an end to my leukemia diaries. Even though I will live with the memory of it alive in me, I can no longer define my life by it. The moment I tell people I survived cancer, they look beyond everything else that I have achieved for myself, they look beyond the struggles of my mind and how I have risen within. I end up wondering, why does physical health win over mental health when they shouldn’t be compared? 

To them, I am the brave one. To me, I am the brave one. Our reasons do not intersect.

Lastly, to be completely honest, I don’t feel a thing about a decade old cancer. There should be nostalgia, a relief, a something. There’s truly nothing. The only reason I decided to write this post is that I used to think it would be huge, something to celebrate. Ten years is a long time, and if there would have been a tiny deviation in the chain of events then I might have been long dead. So, here’s my last toast to Leukemia that I lived and the chemotherapy that I survived.

And, still I feel nothing. Maybe, just maybe, there’s really nothing to look back at – what good are memories when you cannot feel them anymore?