"So Where Do You See Yourself in 5 Years?"

A couple of weeks ago I was asked in a job interview, “So, where do you see yourself in five years?” I rubbed the sweat from my palms on my pants. My eyes quickly darted down to my desk as I let out a nervous laugh. For the past two and a half years, my life has been filled with hospital rooms, CVS pharmacy runs and obsessively making sure my systolic blood pressure remains over 80; I haven’t had any time to believe in a future. My hopes and dreams seemed to come crashing down the second I was diagnosed with cancer again. What did I even want anymore? 

The thing no one tells you about being a cancer survivor is there is no guide to it — and little support. You are kind of thrust out into the wild like a stray dog, forced to fend for yourself. My situation was even more complicated since I technically didn’t finish all of my chemo after going into heart failure. After getting three second opinions, every doctor agreed that there was too great of a risk for me to get more chemo than to stop treatment. Thankfully, my scans prior to my cardiac episode were clean of any active cancer cells so that gave them some reassurance. 

The fear haunts me every day, as it does for most cancer patients: what am I supposed to do if it comes back? It took me several months — and another clean scan — before I had the courage to ask to ring the bell for finishing treatment. “But I didn’t even finish chemo. What if I jinx it?” I told my dad. Although I felt hesitant, my doctors, family and friends were all in full support of me ringing the bell. “Everything is looking really good,” my doctor encouraged.

So, I rang the bell for the second time in my life. However, in the back of my mind, I was the most terrified I’d ever been. I didn’t want to mark the end of something if I’d just be back in a hospital room in a few months. Plus, I was dealing with all the fun repercussions of having heart failure and being on a life support machine for two weeks. But something my dad shared with me stuck during one of our hospital walks. “You just have to keep living your life between the scans. You can be scared right before, but don’t let that stop you from living,” he said. 

Somehow, it has now been one year since my dad said that — and I try to keep living by it. I go to my PET-CT scans every four months, which I’ll have to do for at least two years before I can space them out more. Going in for a scan kind of feels like walking in front of the Volturi from Twilight, but life keeps moving on. My illness forces me to live day by day. Some days I still wake up with no energy to even roll to the other side of my bed to grab my phone. Sometimes I wish I could escape so badly and just run away — but I’ve come to realize that the worst part about illness is there’s nowhere to run when your body is the very thing destroying you. 

Life after treatment is a lot of grief processing and coming to terms with the fact that you have to start from square one. One day you look in the mirror and your hair is all patchy from it growing in unevenly. Bruises and wounds paint over every inch of you, along with your port in your chest, which you still have to get flushed every month. Everything is uncomfortable and different. It’s like you’re suddenly pushed back into the real world of going to work every day and keeping up with social obligations when you can’t even remember anything from all the different medications you were on. It’s depressing and heavy, often making it feel like everyone can immediately see your fragility just by looking at you. It means accepting that you might never be able to physically go to a hot yoga class again in your life. You have no other choice but to give yourself the gift of grace and patience.

I won’t lie and say that I’ve accepted my new reality willingly. In fact, sometimes I still try to push myself to the extreme out of frustration and anger. But it’s also allowed me to reconnect to things I once loved like books, writing and even going to the movies. I’ve pushed myself to do things that I wouldn’t even have thought of before, such as creating my own book club and joining a writing group. I even planned a long-awaited trip to Europe with my friends.

The chilling question still remains, “Where do I see myself in five years?” I think I told the interviewer some cheeky answer about being an editor at a publication or nonprofit and eventually writing a book. However, the only thing I really wanted to say was, “I just want to be healthy.” That’s all.