Being A Cancer Survivor – What Does It Really Mean To Be One?

Neethu Sheri Kurian

Content Specialist
4baseCare

When I first started writing about Cancer the two words that popped up everywhere were ‘Survivor’ and ‘Warrior’.

I thought of these two words defining the people living with the disease and the people caring for those suffering from it to be extremely positive. As if, you were part of a club that you never wanted to be a part of but here you are almost celebrating being a part of it. I found it to be a paradox.

The more I delved into the stories of people who’ve survived the various cruel faces of this disease, the more I understood the deeper meaning of the word ‘Survivor” / “Warrior”

Today is National Cancer Survivors Day and I want to talk about the ‘Survivors’. The ones who lived with the disease, fought it, came out victorious with a fresh perspective on life beyond it and the caregivers who fought alongside them like the unsung heroes of this battle.

In my endeavour to understand more about people who’ve encountered this disease I found two groups:

1. One group that embraced being survivors, the ones that were full of positivity and refused to go down with this ship. They saw this as a life changing event that exalted them to the glory of being part of a greater truth about life, realisations they never had before they were diagnosed, they found themselves on the road to self discovery and came out the other end of the tunnel happier and stronger.

2. The other group chose the title ‘Survivor’ reluctantly. To them, it was a little more raw, a little more real, a little uncomfortable even when people treated them as special and put them on a throne of a kingdom they never wanted to be a part of. They fought because they had to, they fought because they had children to take care of, families that depended on them, jobs they needed for survival, they fought the pain of the treatment for the everyday mundane responsibilities they had and not for some bigger life altering purpose.

If you fall in the second group, don’t succumb to the pressure of being heroic, because on the worst days of this disease you wouldn’t feel like a hero, you’ll be fighting to keep yourself sane while trying to fight the instincts of giving up and embracing death from the physical and emotional pain of the treatment. It’s okay to have such thoughts and feelings like these makes you only Human. You are still are and will always be a “Hero”.

Survival is all about fight. The fight against the fear of recurrence, the fight against the fear of losing it all, the fight to retain individuality, the fight to retain some semblance of normalcy in a life that seems no longer under your control. The fight of the caregivers going through stress and burnout from not being able to manage it all while watching their loved ones suffer in front of their eyes. The fight to remain the person who you were before this disease changed the course of the lives it touched.

The fact remains that no matter how you describe it, no matter which words you want to identify with, it all boils down to the realisation that life is short. We often take life for granted until we are jolted into shock by life altering events that bring us back down to earth. Right where we started once, as if reborn as children learning to walk, laugh and live again looking at life through a fresh set of eyes seeing things for the first time for what they truly are.

Written by Ms. Mallika Guha
Blogger @4baseCare