The Battle We Didn’t Choose
The extraordinary power of ordinary people
for Shabnam Virani
This is a story of struggle, faith, hope and perseverance. It’s the story of my mother who got diagnosed with a very rare and aggressive kind of soft-tissue Cancer (Leiomyosarcoma) almost 7 months ago. On May 28th, 2014, it was my parents 25th anniversary and they celebrated it on a plane to Mumbai, India where she was due for a major surgery. Somehow I managed to travel across the world and made it in time before her surgery, but that’s another story.
That day our lives changed, and maybe it did for the better. I still remember the day of the surgery, when my dad and I were sitting outside the surgical room patiently waiting. It was a surgery that was supposed to last 2 hours, but it ended up being 8 hours long. It felt like life was being so unjust with us, and I kept asking myself:
Why do bad things happen to good people?
It’s been 7 months since that day, and my mother just completed her treatment which involved 8 Chemotherapy cycles. The CT Scan reports just came in and there’s good news, as of today she is Cancer free! While it’s been quite a difficult journey for my mother, I wanted to share how she coped through her illness and the life lessons I learnt that may be useful for anyone reading this.
1. Be Realistically Positive
“Optimism sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.” — a quote I found outside the surgical room.
It is said that people who are optimistic tend to be happier, healthier and cope better when times are tough. So there are a lot of advantages to looking at the world through a positive lens and focusing on the good things in life. However, when we’re unrealistically optimistic we tend to put a positive spin on everything or pretend that things are fine when they clearly aren’t.
Whether we are naturally an optimist or more of a pessimist, it’s impossible to know what the future holds. So perhaps the best of both worlds is to be a realistic optimist — someone who tends to maintain a positive outlook, but within the constraints of what they know about the world. This is a mindset that my mom developed earlier in her life and it’s something that helps us get through the struggles.
2. Appreciate the Simplicity In Life
You don’t really realize what you have, until you start losing it.
This can be the case with relationships, a career, wealth, or in my case my mothers health. I started to realize how fragile life really is and how we forget to be grateful and take things for granted. And sometimes life gives us a reality check to remind us to stay grounded and humble.
As my mothers treatment progressed, her enjoyment doing the simplest little activities heightened. I started to appreciate her for everything she achieved in her lifetime and for the unconditional love she gave us. This is when I started to study Pareto’s Principle or the law of the vital few, which states that 80% of your relationships don’t matter, only 20% do. So keep your family and key friends close because it’s those few people that will be there for you through the thick and thin.
One of the main side effects of Chemotherapy is that you lose your hair, and I vividly remember the day my mom and I went in for a haircut. I’ll be honest, I was more scared of her losing her hair than she was. But for her, her physical attributes have always been a lot less important than her spiritual attributes.
“True beauty is not about what’s outside, but rather what’s inside. It’s about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass.”
And she truly believed in those words. It’s the main reason why she refused to ever wear a wig to hide her illness, and we all know how difficult of a choice that can be for a woman. But the courage and confidence she showed during the toughest times of her life taught me the greatest lessons that will inspire me for the rest of my life.
3. Become Antifragile
In the last 7 months I have spent more time at hospitals then I ever imagined I would in a lifetime. During this time, I started reading Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Now I’m not an avid reader, but I definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a new book to read.
In the book Talib talks about how we’re so familiar with the concept of fragility. It applies to things that break when you strike or stretch them with a relatively small amount of force. However, more complex systems like the human body or living organisms tend to benefit from stressors (to a point). Take weight-lifting for example, if you try to lift something too heavy, you’ll tear a muscle; but lifting more appropriate weights will strengthen your muscles over time. This property can be applied to living things generally, as in the famous aphorism ‘what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger’. Strangely, we don’t really have a word for this property, this opposite of fragility. But in order to gain from such events, these stressors have to be distributed irregularly, or randomly and the only way we can benefit from it is through acceptance.
You might have noticed that in the title for this post I used the word “Battle”. Us humans are programmed to see challenges and conflicts as a battle that we must fight and triumph over. From an outsiders perspective, I always imagined my mom was fighting a battle against Cancer and eventually with the grace of God she would conquer it. But she never took it as a battle. People often asked us about my mothers health and would say “She’s fighting well with the Cancer”, and in response she would say:
“I’m not fighting with the disease, I’m at peace with it.”
At first I found that really strange, but I think that’s really what Taleb was talking about in his book, the concept of becoming Antifragile. And I think the only way you can achieve it is through acceptance and being at peace with your struggles.
4. Awareness Is Everything
Did you know that in 2014, there were an estimated 1,665,540 new cancer cases diagnosed and 585,720 cancer deaths in the US alone? Cancer remains the second most common cause of death in most developed countries. In the US and Canada it accounts for nearly 1 of every 4 deaths, in the UK it’s 1 in 3 deaths and it’s growing at an alarming rate across developing countries.
We’re scared of Ebola killing us but maybe we should take Cancer more seriously. I may be a hypocrite when I say this, but we need to start being aware of what we consume. We are lucky to be born in a time where technology is making it so much easier for us to track our health & fitness, and it’s true when they say you are what you eat.
However, there is still hope and diseases like cancer can be prevented if detected early. People like Jorge Soto (video below) have figured out a way to detect cancer in it’s earliest stages by monitoring the appropriate responses at the molecular level in an easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible way than ever before.
Early detection can save lives:
5. Faith and Perseverance
I think the words Perseverance & Faith are intertwined. You won’t persevere in achieving something if you don’t have faith that in the end you will eventually succeed. Spirituality is generally described as an awareness of something greater than the individual self. It is often expressed through self reflection, meditation, religion and/or prayer. There can be many paths to spirituality and expression but meditation & prayer has been the main reason for my mother to get through all the struggles in her life. Now don’t get me wrong, research has not supported claims that spirituality or prayer can cure cancer or any other disease. However, it is scientifically proven that spiritual well-being is linked to a better quality of life in people with cancer. Ever since I’ve been a child I’ve often seen my mother meditating, and maybe that’s where she gets her strength and perseverance from.
So it doesn’t matter what religion you follow, I think having a sense of faith helps you achieve internal peace. And if you are peaceful internally, you will build perseverance to get through any difficulties, you will become Antifragile, you will start appreciating the simplicity in life and you will become a realistically positive person. I know I’m still working on all of those.
I hope the experiences of my family will somehow inspire you for the next year. And if you are going through an illness like cancer or are a caretaker and need someone to talk to, I want you to know that you can message me anytime. Life is unpredictable, but sometimes we just have to take it day by day and make the most out of what we have. ☺
Wishing you a happy new year and a healthy & happy life!
