Cancer Awareness: Life after

Cancer Awareness

CANCER AWARENESS : CANCER IS CURABLE

Tuesday, November 11, 2008

Life after

Harmala is a cancer survivor and started CanSupport, a cancer support group in Delhi
It’s a few days to Deepavali. At the bright and airy day care centre run by CanSupport in Delhi, the energy is palpable. As the crowd of children, parents and volunteers watch, a magician in a cheerful green cape transports us all into a land where wonder and magic still exist. A mundane Monday morning, the diagnosis of cancer, hospital visits and medicines are forgotten for a magical half hour. Sharing in the joy is Harmala Gupta, president, CanSupport.

In 1986, while she had enrolled at McGill University, Montreal, for a PhD, Harmala was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. Her son was just three. Apart from the numbing thought that cancer can kill, Harmala knew little about the disease. She knew even less about Hodgkin’s and still remembers wondering if it was something similar to Parkinson’s since they both sound “distinguished.” It was only later that she found out that it is a lymphoma that gets its name from Thomas Hodgkin, who first described it in 1832. It is also one of the first cancers known to have been cured by radiation and later, by chemotherapy.

Harmala has been there, facing the numbing reality of diagnosis, going through the various phases on an emotional roller coaster. That is why today, she can advise others diagnosed with cancer not to take it personally. Most often, after the shock wears off, is the ‘why me’? phase and then, guilt and blame and even a stage of bargaining. “That’s wrong,” she stresses of the self-reproach and blame, “It leads nowhere and adds to the existing trauma. Come to immediate acceptance, pick up as much information on the problem as you can and help yourself. This is where we often fail.”

She even went through denial and wondering if her problem was tuberculosis. That’s when her practical doctor helped her snap out of the delusion. “Stop clutching at straws. I need your help in this fight,” the doctor said. That transformed Harmala from feeling victimised to knowing she was empowered.

Her doctor also helped her focus on the fight with a diet to follow and with advice but in spite of it all, Harmala recalls one chilling panic attack she suffered that began with a pain in her chest. “I thought I was dying, and was rushed to emergency.” There, another doctor identified the problem as a panic attack, reminded her to breathe easy and saw her through. “My doctors assured me that nothing is too small to discuss,” she recalls with gratitude.

When she was better, Harmala returned to India. The reality here hit her hard. This, when she went to some of the best doctors in the country. One doctor dismissed the Canadian doctor’s diagnosis. Another did not bother to see her earlier liver function records and pronounced the cancer had spread to her liver. “It just added to my trauma,” she remembers.

Harmala knew she had to bring to cancer patients in India the support structure that had seen her through in Canada. In 1991, she began Cancer Sahyog, a voluntary organisation of cancer survivors and caregivers offering emotional and other help to people living with cancer.

From that experience was born CanSupport, a home care project that got an impetus from Ruth Wooldridge, a nurse from the UK who had started a hospice in Kenya. The day care programme, where the magician left the children agape, began later, on August 1, 2003. The message the team carries is essentially: don’t let the flame die out. It may be flickering today, but we are all there to fight the wind that threatens to blow it out.

Benita Sen

Send your doing's to aware.cancer@gmail.com

posted by Bhavya @ 10:00 AM

1 Comments:

At November 18, 2008 at 7:35 PM, Neerz said…

congrates for get selected in blog contest
hope u get gud position

Regards

~Neer~
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