Lessons from a cancer survivor – Part 1: The power of your mind

 If you are new here - Hi, I am Vidushi – a girl who could go through hell and return to snatch her life back but struggles with algebra and cries over carbs. I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma at Stage 3B when I was 18 and documented my journey through this blog. It’s been 7 years since that day, but I still carry on the same fundamentals, which helped me overcome that catastrophe. A lot of people are shocked when they first get to know about my cancer, many say it’s hard to believe looking at me and most commend on my strength and sheer tenacity, but today I am here to tell you why the most dreaded event in my life was also somewhat a boon, that changed me forever. I am here to tell you, why we regard a cancer survivor as someone who is courageous and brave and the lessons you can use in your everyday life, encompassing the will of a survivor. You don’t need to die, to start living and in a similar way, you don’t need to go through such enormous pain to know how to thrive. If the lessons I have learnt, can change my life – the same can do so for you too. Today, I will divulge into the biggest weapon, the sharpest axe, and my Excalibur – the mind.

That’s right, you read it right – its your mind, that single walnut shaped organ that spends most of its time in front of Netflix that will save your life. Odd now, isn’t it? The same organ that is addicted to reacting to memes and reels and keenly awaits your next season of the new Netflix original, is going to suddenly give me the strength to leave all those habits and become the next Elon Musk? Absolutely yes. Why do I say that? Because we are the only magicians to have ever walked this planet and the magic we see around us, has been done by us itself.

On December 17, 1903 - Wilbur and Orville Wright invented the first successful airplane and flew it for a total 12 seconds at first, at a height of 120 ft. This historic 12 seconds then set foot for the next attempt at 59 seconds and the rest we know is history. On July 16, 1969, the first lunar landing took place, man kind went above and beyond their reach to land on the moon and make a mark there. The mission duration was 8 days, 3 hours, 18 minutes, and 35 seconds. So, what happened in 63 years that made mankind fly from 120 ft to all the way to moon, from 12 seconds to 8 days, from a simple backyard experiment to making one of the biggest marks in aeronautics for the rest of the years to come? It is simple – it was the chutzpah of man to keep trying and trying till every layer of the sky has been touched (in literal sense). The damned audacity to not settle, the perseverance, the determination, the doggedness to achieve the best, regardless of the resources available at that time. This is what makes us magicians. This is what makes magic real.

If that one organ can move mountains and create its own miracles, its unnerving to know the true potential of it. For a girl like me who was deathly afraid of needles to now not flinch at it, what changed? I am the same and the needle is the same. It was just how I saw it and reacted to it. Its how, some people see a tough math problem and say ‘damn I cant do math’ and the some say ‘damn, I can learn math’. To learn something is to be bad at something, else a fully cooked meal cannot be cooked further. The way the mind perceives things is just extraordinary. The same mind wasting its potential in front of social media created the vaccine for covid, is trying to cure cancer, has made rockets, and is changing the world. To have dreams is human, but to achieve them is funnily not. The reason I say this is because to achieve it, its necessary to do acts which you wouldn’t consider what ordinarily humans would do. Posing a paradox to this, excellence isn’t doing extraordinary acts, it’s doing ordinary acts consistently and differently. The last two words, being the most important and being almost impossible for most of the mankind these days. For me, it was just showing up for my chemo and training up my mind to take the pain for the greater good – looking at it as something that is making me better instead of making me sick, learning to be okay with my situation and not drown in self-pity, making the most of the journey and picking up cues from anywhere and everywhere.

I remember the two exact moments I learnt, the importance of my mind in this journey. The first time when I was in the cab, coming back from the airport, and I knew the next day was my bone marrow aspiration and chemo beginning. I remember, this stark silence in the cab, my mom napping near me, city lights approaching and fading quickly and my mind saying – ‘We got this. One day at a time only, just one day. Tomorrow is chemo, what needs to be done – needs to be done, and this is for your greater good. Why do you feel you cannot do it? What is stopping you? Yes it will hurt, but it will get over too right? We got this, we are going to get through this because that’s the only way out’. That gave me the roadmap for my first and the most painful chemo. The Second time when I had issues in getting a port in near my chest – which was the place from where they wanted to administer chemo but my cancer cells was mostly located in that area. They could not do this procedure on me, under a general anesthesia as I have had massive complications from that before, and the worst outcome of it could be that I don’t wake up from it. I remember my surgeon telling me when I was in a bereaved state – ‘You cannot let the fear of something small come in the way of achieving something big. Being strong isn’t having no fear, it is realizing that you need to act in spite of it’. This gave me a huge push to go about with my procedures, and till date I keep this motto in me alive. Whenever I get scared of something, I realise I cannot skip doing it because of my fear. That just doesn’t happen. You got to do it, and that’s what makes you brave. Dauntless. To not let something scary stop you from getting to something great.

One of the key moments of strength comes from acceptance. Acceptance of your situation, of your fate, of whatever has been given to you. You might be in the worst of the worst circumstances and acceptance is just the toughest but half the battle there. That yes, it is shit, and it happened to me and now what can I do about it? I remember being in denial about getting diagnosed and crying and screaming helplessly on WHY? Why me? I didn’t smoke or drink or do shit. I don’t even have a cancer gene in my family, so why me? How? What went wrong for me to have gotten this? I felt this was one of the hardest parts of my journey. To accept that yes, I have cancer. To see my hair falling in massive clumps and then getting it shaved, to realise that my only visits outside will be limited to hospitals and that I will be getting chemos and that I will be poked and prodded around. One day I asked my doctor – ‘You have seen thousands of cases, you have researched and read and been in this for above 30 years and you are super brainy, so tell me how did I get it? What caused it?’ to which he replied in just 2 words – ‘Bad luck’.

Well isn’t that the truth, with a lot of shit we have been dealt with. Post pandemic I am sure you will all agree to this whole heartedly. Some massive shit we go through have no cause and effect relationship, no whys and hows and whens and whats. They are just there. Sitting and looking you in the eye and laughing when you are figuring out ???? in your head. You feel the worst thinking ‘what have I done to deserve this shit’ and honestly you haven’t done anything – but its life – shit happens.

After 2 minutes of silence post him saying the most momentous words, my doctor then proceeded to tell me ‘See its happened, we can’t do anything about it but we can fight it. You crying on why and how its happened might not solve anything, but at the same time if you can work on getting out, then we can get out right?’ In hindi – ‘Ho gaya so ho gaya – ab kya’. That brought be to a solution mindset. How many times have we just thought about the problem only and never the solution. Cried about it, prodded it, done everything to it except solved it. Getting to a solution is taking the power away from the problem, and even though that’s hard, we must do it. So when you get handed over a bag of trash, and you are just screaming and crying over whys and hows? You can just clean the trash or dump it, and end it there. Solution mindset over problem mindset. Your mind can literally flip from one issue to the solution of the issue if you train it to.

Telling yourself that you are bad at something is easy. Asking yourself how will you get better is hard. Telling yourself you are fat and cant do this, is easy. Asking yourself how will I get to the Gym and become healthy is hard. We are what we tell ourselves. We are how we think, we are what we say, we are what we do. Greatness doesn’t come from big acts of extraordinaire, rather it comes from consistent small ordinary acts from a place of discomfort. I have fought cancer and obesity till now, and in all honesty – its my mind that fought it. If you have dreamt it, you can. But dreaming isn’t enough – a solution-oriented goal mindset it. Looking at your dream, charting out a plan and religiously doing it instead of just ‘hoping’. Doing all 5 things that takes you there, instead of just the 3 and leaving the 2 because they are hard/uncomfortable. The best thing that can happen to you is things being hard, or being uncomfortable, or you hating something. Because that’s when you will do everything to fix it, make it better, get out of it, and that process, not the destination will make you great. It is not the flag post at the end of an uphill mountain that determines success, it’s the climb. So when you push the rock to the top, remember to push it back down and do it again, for every time you are put in a place you hate – you grow.