being alive doesn't mean being well every day

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I Am Alive

I am here, two years after the diagnosis. I am alive — after chemo, after surgery, after radiotherapy, after chemo again.

Every pain reminds me that I am alive.

At first, I didn't know how to live with this new fear, which had settled inside me like an uninvited tenant. I felt it in the mornings, when I opened my eyes and my body asked, before anything else: am I still here? Yes. Still yes.

The first chemo stripped me of everything I thought I was. It took my hair, my energy, and sometimes even my hope. I would sit and watch through the window as the world kept moving — people shopping, children going to school, dogs being walked — and I wondered if I was still part of that world. If I still had the right to plan anything beyond tomorrow.

Surgery came and took what it had to take. I cried. Not for what was lost, but for what I understood in that moment: that my body was fighting for me, even when I no longer had the strength to fight for it.

Radiotherapy — 15 days of small, quiet burns. I would go, lie down on the cold table, close my eyes and count. I counted seconds, sessions, days. Counting saved me. It gave me the illusion of control when everything was slipping out of control.

And now, two years on, I sit and look at my hands.

The same hands. A little more tired, perhaps. With a memory that my eyes don't have — they know what happened, they held the glass of water after chemo, they felt the new scar for the first time, they counted the morning pills.

Every pain reminds me that I am alive. I don't say it as a slogan. I say it as a truth I paid dearly for. When something hurts now, the first thought is no longer fear — it is recognition. You are here. You feel. You are.

I have learned that being alive doesn't mean being well every day. It means being present even on the days when you are not well. Drinking your morning coffee and actually tasting it. Getting annoyed in traffic and realising, afterwards, that being annoyed is a luxury of those who are going somewhere. Loving with a little less fear and a great deal more presence.

Two years. I didn't know that two years could be so hard and so beautiful at the same time.

I am alive.

And today, that is enough.