(First published June 18, 2025)

JUNE 18 — Being a cancer patient feels like a full-time job sometimes, what with even my leisure time being used for “beating cancer activities”.

This week I met the surgeon who excised my tumour and he confirmed the results of my pathology report: no cancer found in my tumour nor was any detected in my lymph nodes.

While some people would like the security of being absolutely sure there was no cancer left by taking scans, my doctors don’t think further tests would be helpful.

My oncologist isn’t recommending a CT scan anytime soon and my surgeon thinks I don’t need a mammogram until at least the end of the year.

Besides my body being stiffer than Rick Astley’s dancing, I feel OK enough to just go with their recommendations and focus instead on finishing my 11 remaining immunotherapy cycles and my 23 days of radiotherapy.

Trying to assemble a small IKEA cabinet over the weekend showed me I was still far from being fully recovered.

It took me most of the morning to put the LIXHULT cabinet together, when it’s little more than a simple metal box.

Instead I found myself staring at the diagrams for a long time, as though they were written in some undiscovered language.

By the time I was done, I had had to take multiple breaks and going back up the stairs required me to haul my uncooperative, aching form by clinging onto the banisters.

Everything hurt — from my hands to my shoulders to my back and legs and I did let myself indulge in a brief moment of despair.

Just two months ago I hauled flatpack furniture weighing at least 20kg up the stairs and put together a small table with attached shelves.

That seems like forever ago.

Now I’m a feeble middle-aged woman taking sharp breaths when I have to get in and get out of a rideshare.

Perhaps this is my own hubris coming back to bite me.

Whenever I saw really old people walking slowly, their backs hunched over, I told myself I would exercise to avoid that.

Now I have to resist the pull to let my torso hunch forward as I painfully shuffle along at the speed of Malaysian reforms.

At the hospital I saw this old man yell at a taxi that rudely sped past instead of pausing to let him cross to the hospital entrance.

A security guard awkwardly took his hand and tried to calm him down but the old man, who was walking slowly with a cane, kept grumbling that the car should have given him the right of way.

The taxi driver was young and brash, probably not thinking about how some day in the future it would be him hobbling along, hoping for patient drivers to let him cross the road.

Even after everything, I still find being at the hospital a blessing.

You see people at their most vulnerable at the hospital.

While some people say going to medical appointments alone feels lonely, I think if you let yourself, you can find solidarity with the other souls in pain.

No one wants to be sick or suffering, but being in a public hospital you become acutely aware of the people around you who, like you, are still trying to stay alive.

I want a Star Trek future where you can lie in a comfortable chair and have your illnesses be diagnosed with fancy scanners that won’t raise your cancer risk.

Where doctors get enough sleep without being overworked, where you don’t need to be stabbed multiple times for a blood sample or worry about your local pharmacy running out of your medication.

Here and now though, we’re fragile humans who get sick because that’s just how our bodies are, and far too vulnerable to things beyond our control such as the economy and global unrest.

I think of the woman who went without treatment for a year because the cost of immunotherapy scared her.

She is in treatment now but her cancer is now at stage 4 and is no longer responding to Herceptin, the drug that helped me.

How different are our circumstances and I wish someone had comforted her, advocated for her and helped her get her treatment sooner.

To quote from Ecclesiastes 9:11 “Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favour to the men of skill; but time and chance happen to them all.”

That passage is often quoted but what sits with me now is the one after it: “For man does not know his time. Like fish which are taken in an evil net, and like birds which are caught in a snare, so the sons of men are snared at an evil time, when it suddenly falls upon them.”

Thinking of the recent Air India tragedy, I was reminded again that we are not promised even a half-second more of life.

So I will continue my rehab exercises, even if my body is taking its time to heal.

Everything in its own time, every person finding their own place in this world.

I will sit and write, and stretch, and sing and shuffle along tending my gardenias and yelling at the stupid people who keep blocking my gate with their cars.

Now I understand why they say life is beautiful, but it is also awful and strange, and so very unpredictable.

Here and now I am alive, and so are you, so let us take a moment to marvel at it then step away from this screen to go drink some water already.

Stay hydrated, stay well (or as well as you can be).