Journal
To Live is to Fight
When the landslide brought me down
It’s over. Finally, after almost 3 months of going back and forth to the hospital every day, it’s over. That was such an exhausting period. I had to go to the hospital in the middle of my work for radiotherapy every single day only to suffer the side effects that came up afterward. Something that I could never imagine had come into my life.
You can call me a cancer survivor, but I felt I wasn’t. I never was sick and felt bad for long-languishing lengths of time without knowing what was wrong, as so many cancer patients are. I was at my healthy peak last year, hit the gym five times a week, consumed a lot of healthy food, and had a much better sleep schedule. I was pretty sure mentally and physically good at that time. The next year, I had surgery to remove a marble-sized tumor on my parotid gland. Turned out it was cancerous and my oncologist decided I must do radiotherapy.
I didn’t know how to react and my brain was roaming for a while until I felt totally recovered after surgery. It was time to start the rounds of radiation treatment, five times a week, with breaks only on weekends. Nothing happened in the first week, I felt good enough to continue my life with this minor inconvenience.
Toward the end of the first month of radiotherapy, my mouth was utterly useless for eating, I lost my appetite, food tasted so bad and weird, and I also had days of running to the bathroom because of false alarms to throw up nothing. In the second month, I began to lose some of my hair and the skin all over my neck was burned. It’s already affecting my body so badly that I don’t have any energy to even walk in a straight line. I lost 15 kg of body weight at the end of radiation treatment and effortlessly became super skinny. This was the radiation’s direct effect, killing me more than the cancer itself. I felt I was more of a radiotherapy victim than a cancer patient.
A month after the radiotherapy finished has passed. My oncologist decided based on the result of my last CT scan, that it was negative for cancer. So I rang the bell and ended the battle. It is a win. A Cancer Survivor? No, a Radiation Survivor. I still felt lucky on the cancer scale compared to stories from fellow patients.
Somewhere in this journey, when my body was so low, I realized that I could learn something precious in life. I often take for granted the very things that most deserve our gratitude. How can a human’s simple sense of taste and appetite turn your body’s condition upside down if it doesn’t function normally? How can your favorite food taste so weird just because your salivary glands don’t work? I could never realize if I didn’t lose it.
I can’t even remember the last time I ate without being busy staring at my smartphone or laptop. I spend more time choosing something to watch than enjoying the food in front of me. I didn’t care about eating mindfully. I just eat, but forget to taste, savor, and relish. I should’ve considered every morsel that I placed inside my mouth. I should’ve been more aware of how the food we choose to eat affects our body, feelings, mind, and everything around us. I should’ve been grateful for all the food brought to my plate.
That is just one example of small seemingly minor things that actually need to be grateful and there are many more even when the universe seems to conspire against us. Being alive, your parents, close friends, fresh air, having water to drink, access to the internet, a peaceful morning, sunshine, music, etc. Look closely, they are there. It isn’t just about being grateful for the good, but for all of life. It would help us see the world in full color — in the color of gratitude.
The last thing that I learned, life is a battlefield. We will always face unexpected challenges in this life. Sickness, pain, failure, breakup, depression, job loss, accident, disaster, everything could happen to us. The landslide is always ready to bring you down every time. So to live is to fight. Today you’ll be fighting for your dreams, fighting against your fears, or fighting to be the person you want to be. You’ll be always fighting for your life. As in war, so in life.
I do really know it hurts sometimes. It turns out that healing hurts. It’s supposed to hurt. Over the last few years, I have changed from being someone who always wanna die sometimes, to become someone who falls in love with being alive. Because whatever happens, I know I’ll get over it and find another life to live.
I am waiting to crawl out of this form and become what I am meant to be.
