ShareKUWAIT: For six months, she walked into her chemotherapy sessions with confidence, spreading laughter and positivity all over the place, which left her care team wondering every time: “Aren’t you feeling upset?” And her response was: “Why should I be? My body aches, but I must accept that all of this is just a temporary phase, and it shall pass very soon.”
This is the power of acceptance that made the cancer and chemotherapy journey much more bearable for Kholoud Al-Rashedi, a 47-year-old assistant professor at the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Kuwait. Rashedi reminisced the moment she received her diagnosis for the first time. “You have one of the most aggressive breast cancer types...” her doctor coldly said. She couldn’t remember hearing anything after. Instead, waves of shock, numbness and disbelief washed over her right away.
The first question that crossed her mind was: “Does this mean I can never get married and have kids?” It took a while for her shock to wear off, until she rushed out of the hospital, called her mother, and immediately ran out of tears. She didn’t remember crying again after that day, because from that moment she realized that focusing on her fears would just hold her back. Rashedi had no idea what was waiting for her on the other side, but her faith in God’s plan kept her moving forward. “I didn’t really understand what I was passing through. All what I knew is that I had to move on and go through it all,” she said.
Her first chemotherapy infusion wasn’t easy at all. After a few hours of the session, she started feeling immense pain radiating all over her body. “My stomach ached as it bloated with trapped gas, and it felt like hammers hitting all over my bones, almost breaking them into pieces. For 10 days, I couldn’t eat, drink or even cry, as if something was stuck into my throat but not turning into tears.” Strange thoughts roamed in her head: “Why is this happening to me?” “Will this pain eventually kill me?”
While chemotherapy is a very effective treatment for curing cancer, its negative side effects are inevitable, and everybody reacts differently to it. After the second and third dose, Rashedi paid more attention to her body signs, which made her more familiar with the repeated pattern that her body went through after every treatment. She learned the importance of strengthening her immune system ahead of each session by getting enough food and rest to be able to handle the pain. “I also realized that resisting the pain makes things worse. I learned that whenever I find myself feeling exhausted, I must surrender to the fatigue and get some rest.”
On the contrary, whenever she had the energy, she gave her all. “I refused to get someone to help me with cleaning the house. I used to clean, cook and bake all by myself. I wanted to immerse myself in any task that would take the feeling of pain away from me.” Not only did Rashedi handle her household chores alone, but also, at that time she was the head of the set design department at the institute. She was responsible for teaching and supervising 150 students and 27 doctors, and none of them ever had any inkling about what she was going through.
Chemo kept gradually going after her body cells, where she gained more weight, lost all her hair and started sporting dark pigmentation under her eyes and on her nails. Yet, she embraced these changes as part of her recovery journey. “I accepted myself when I was bald, without eyelashes or eyebrows, and I didn’t want to hide it from people. My appearance ceased to become one of my priorities anymore, because all what mattered the most for me was to feel genuinely happy from the inside.”
Rashedi’s family and friends were one of the main reasons behind her surviving this phase. “They treated me as if I was completely normal because they knew how much I hated being pitied. They gave me the space that I needed, and at the same time were always there for me. One genuine message from anyone of them was enough to help me to keep fighting,” she said.
After months of chemotherapy, radiation therapy and surgical intervention to remove the tumor, Rashedi almost reached full recovery. She noted feeling grateful for the disease after all, because it taught her patience and helped her understand herself on the psychological and physical levels. It taught her to walk away from people and situations that didn’t make her feel happy and alive. Finally, cancer brought Rashedi to the realization that life is too short to waste it in vain. “It simply made me want to focus on finding a moment of joy every day of my life,” she said.
