SEPTEMBER 2 — No one tells you about the survivor’s guilt after being declared cancer-free.

“You should be happy,” people tell me.

I am grateful, yes.

Yet each time I see or hear about someone who wasn’t as fortunate it eats at me.

The woman who I terrorised the zakat office for last year, Musliha, is in worse shape since the last time I wrote about her.

She is hospitalised, the cancer spreading to her arm, the chemotherapy and the medication she was previously taking not working.

Her tumour now leaks blood, her mouth full of sores and she has even had to have a blood transfusion.

While zakat did approve some funding for her medical costs, she cannot work and relies entirely on her husband’s meagre salary.

So if you can help ease her burden in any way, please donate to her here.

On Threads I saw her show diapers being full of blood, diapers she uses to absorb the blood from her wounds.

Perhaps some of you wonder why I keep bringing up her situation.

Aren’t there so many people out there I could also champion? 

If I could clone as many Ernas to advocate for every single person that needs it, I would.

One of the main reasons I decided to get treatment for my cancer was my knowledge of how bad it can get when not treated.

It wasn’t long ago I had declared in a column that if I was diagnosed with cancer, I wouldn’t bother getting treated.

But knowing what I do now, about the suffering untreated cancer patients endure, I decided that I had to try and brave chemo and all that comes with it.

It is only sheer luck and different circumstances that separate my cancer outcome and Musliha’s.

If there was a way for me to wave some wand to make her cancer go away, I would.

Because I am not a faith healer, just a very strident journalist, this is what I can do for her and maybe, just maybe writing this will convince some other woman to get checked.

Yes, it is unfair that money and access to aid and newer treatments make so much difference for cancer survivability.

The least any of us can do is ease, in any way, the burden for someone else.

Yeah, maybe you can’t pay for Musliha’s meds.

But you can help buy her a meal, subsidise a day’s worth of diapers and dressings and as someone who had been in her shoes, even the barest amount of help matters.

When I was still getting Ko-fi donations I would cry into my food and drink, as maudlin as it sounds.

I thought then well, someone cares enough that I stick around so I will keep trying. 

Even when everything tasted like metal and the smell of curries made me nauseous I would eat as much as I could keep down.

Now here I am begging at a keyboard again for someone who I never even spoke to in real life, who I watched from a far (like a creepy weirdo) in the daycare ward. 

I do it because of that guilt of recognising oh God that could have been me.

It could be you. It could be your loved one.

Pain and illness will come to us all unbidden, no matter how saintly a life we try to live because cancer is a dice roll our cells throw every millisecond — we just don’t realise it.

That was the most fascinating fact I learned in the past few weeks; most of us get cancer without realising but minor cancers that our bodies’ immune system deal with swiftly, while we live unaware.

What my cancer did for me (though I would rather not have had it) was remind me that each day, even when it sucks, is a gift.

Though my joint stiffness has been a right pain, I am glad I can walk without a cane... that my food doesn’t taste of metal and blood, that no one can tell I was ever sick and my hair has grown out dark, thick and stubborn.

And I ponder again Thomas Merton’s Prayer.

“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so.

But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.

I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.

And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it.

Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.”

I hope that when I finally walk through that last door on this journey of life, I can say that I did my best to live those words.

Hopefully, you will all have a few more decades left to get sick of me.

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.