PART 4

I thought finishing chemotherapy would feel like the greatest celebration of my life.

Instead, I felt depressed.

I didn’t understand it.

I thought:

“Shouldn’t I be screaming from the rooftops? I’m in remission!”

But my doctor had warned me about something I hadn’t understood before.

Many cancer patients become depressed after treatment.

While you’re fighting cancer, your entire focus is survival.

You don’t have time to process everything you’ve lost.

When treatment ends, all those emotions can finally catch up with you.

6

I was 26.

I was bald.

I was exhausted.

I was in pain.

And I didn’t feel like myself anymore.

People would ask:

“Aren’t you in remission?”

“Isn’t everything back to normal?”

But the truth was that nothing was back to normal.

Cancer had left permanent damage.

My eyesight had changed.

I had permanent lung damage that made breathing painful and difficult.

I had nerve problems that made ordinary activities challenging.

And I lived with pain that other people couldn’t see.

5

That was one of the hardest lessons for me.

Remission doesn’t automatically mean you’re healed from everything cancer did to you.

There is also the psychological damage.

The fear.

The anxiety.

The memories.

The trauma.

I wished more people understood that cancer can leave you with something similar to PTSD.

Just because the treatment is finished doesn’t mean the experience disappears.

I still had days when climbing stairs exhausted me.

Days when I hurt too much to go out.

Days when I simply couldn’t do what everyone expected me to do.

And I became frustrated when people treated ordinary illnesses as though they were the end of the world.

I knew that wasn’t fair.

They couldn’t possibly understand what I had experienced.

But I also couldn’t simply turn off what cancer had done to me.

7

That’s why I became determined to talk about it.

I wanted other young people with cancer to know they weren’t alone.

Being 25 and diagnosed with stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma is terrifying.

Finding support can be incredibly difficult when everyone around you is living a completely different life.

I wish I could say that remission was all rainbows and roses.

It wasn’t.

But I am blessed to be alive.

And I know that for sure.

There were moments when I genuinely thought I wasn’t going to make it.

But I survived.

7

Now I want to use my experience to help other people understand what happens after cancer.

I want people to know that survivors may still hurt.

They may still be exhausted.

They may still struggle emotionally.

And they may need patience even after the cancer is gone.

I’m determined to keep fighting.

To keep living.

To keep helping people my age who are facing the same terrifying diagnosis.

I don’t know exactly what the future holds.

But I know this:

I am here.

And after everything I’ve survived, I’m going to hold on as hard as I can and live the best life possible—with the people who stood beside me and continue to stand beside me.