To you baba, I live

When my father was diagnosed with lung cancer, I knew I would also fall sick, very soon. Six months later, I started feeling a growing lump but thought that maybe it’s some sort of hormonal change. I just had my annual sonography two months ago and it was clear, how could it be that there’s something now? I waited for a couple of weeks, but the lump kept growing and when I repeated the sonography I initiated increasingly worrying scans until my diagnosis with breast cancer.

As my father was undergoing treatment for stage 4 lung cancer, with only months to live, I was told I had “the good cancer”, especially that I caught it early and was stage 2. I was not only a caregiver, I was also a patient now. While I knew I would probably survive this, my father’s prognosis wasn’t as good as mine. Adding insult to injury, I sensed the difference in medical care we both received, at the same oncology clinic, just because he is an old man with little chance to live, while I was a young woman with many years ahead expected for me.

My father’s health started to decline as I was struggling with chemotherapy side effects, and he passed away alone, in the ICU of the same hospital where I was receiving radiotherapy. Survivor’s guilt doesn’t do justice to what I was feeling as I was witnessing him being neglected by his medical team and left to die, since it was the expected course of events, and receiving my own ‘congratulations’ on being cancer free.

For five months I came to know something that will bound us together forever, in life and in death, cancer. I am still angry at him for not checking that lump that showed up a year before on a chest x-ray, but I wondered often why he had to go while I was able to stay. I thought a lot about death ever since, especially when my own bone metastasis was discovered 3 years after his death. How unfair it is for people with stage 4 cancer not to have equal treatment options? Why are there more options for one type of cancer and less options for the other? More money into researching newer medications for one, and not the other?

My father was very lucky to not have gone through chemotherapy, and that he was eligible for immunotherapy, as he would not be able to stand chemo given how frail his body was. Nevertheless, I saw him leaving a bit of himself the last few months, and it was heartbreaking. As soon as I finished treatment, I packed my stuff and left the city where all of this happened and never came back to live there again. The sadness and shame that I now know better, that I could have supported him better if I fell ill first, the anger towards the medical institution and the discrimination he faced as an elderly person with a ‘bad’ prognosis haunts me to this day. The moment I learned of my cancer returning I knew I should find an oncologist who is invested in saving my life, and I did. Then the guilt wore another layer as I was imagining my father having a more dignified departure. Guilt never leaves my heart and it walks hand in hand with grieving my father’s loss.

To you baba, I try my best to live every day, to the fullest.