Stage Ten: The Holding Year

For now, the radiation has stopped. Thirty sessions. Sixty Grays. Countless mornings of sitting still under the machine’s cold hum. And through it all, she showed up — without hesitation, without fear — only with the quiet conviction that this time, she’d beat it. That she wouldn’t have to go under the knife again.

She says she’s alright now, and in many ways, she is. But her body bears the cost of every treatment, every recovery. Her oral health has declined — teeth loosening, gums fragile, ulcers forming from the medications and the radiation. Her voice, which had been slurred after the second operation, has grown stronger again — soft, but clear, coherent, steady. She doesn’t talk as much as she used to, but when she does, every word feels deliberate.

The scarring around her neck has softened, fading into a pale crescent that no longer startles her when she looks in the mirror. But during the first weeks of radiation, it had looked like a second-degree burn — angry, raw, painful. She was terrified her hair would fall out too, but it didn’t. Small mercies count in battles like these.

By the twelfth or thirteenth session, the doctors began to notice how well she was tolerating everything. Her spirit seemed untouchable — like she had decided, quietly, that this disease could take her strength but not her dignity.

Now, there are constant check-ups. Each visit, they palpate her throat carefully, searching for any hint of swelling, any irregularity that might whisper recurrence. She sits calmly through them, watching their faces, reading their silences better than their words.

The year is drawing to a close again — another December. All she wishes for now is simple: to get through this month without a shadow on her scans, without another hospital admission, without another “we need to talk.” She doesn’t ask for years anymore, just a little more time — time to breathe, to sit in the morning light, to live without the ache of fear pressing against her heart.

Stage Eleven: The Legacy

When I look back on my grandmother’s two-year journey with leiomyosarcoma of the thyroid, what stands out is not the disease itself but the quiet dignity with which she met it. In a world where rare cancers often live in the shadows of medical literature, she became my first teacher in perseverance, patience, and the art of asking questions when answers don’t yet exist.

She had been through everything a human body could withstand — two surgeries, months of radiation, endless blood tests, the side effects of hormone replacement therapy, the weight of fear, and the ache of scars that healed slower than time. Yet what she feared most wasn’t dying — it was being forgotten between the pages of incomplete research, like the countless patients whose names never make it past the footnotes of oncology journals.

As I watched her face each recurrence, I began to see the fracture lines in the system itself — how delayed referrals, limited diagnostics, and poor coordination can shape the difference between early detection and irreversible progression. And I realized that her story wasn’t just personal; it was scientific. Every unanswered “why” she whispered after her diagnosis was a research question waiting to be asked, a pathway waiting to be mapped, a gene waiting to be understood.

She used to say, “I just want to get through one more December without it coming back.” That sentence — so simple, so human — became the core of my purpose. I don’t want the next patient to hope for survival in months. I want them to have decades.

Her rare cancer, affecting less than 0.3% of thyroid malignancies worldwide, revealed to me the magnitude of what medicine still doesn’t know — and the responsibility of those who choose to seek those answers. She transformed my understanding of science from something learned in classrooms to something lived in hospital corridors, written in discharge summaries, and felt in silences between heartbeats.

This is why I chose research. Because somewhere between the hospital bed and the pathology report, I stopped wanting to treat disease and started wanting to understand it. To study the genes, the pathways, the microenvironments that dictate why one cell chooses to heal while another mutates to destroy.

My grandmother didn’t live to see the breakthroughs that might one day explain her illness, but she gave me the reason to pursue them. Her strength became the bridge between grief and purpose. She made me see that science isn’t cold — it’s compassionate inquiry. It’s the courage to look at suffering and ask, What can be done better next time?

And that is what I intend to dedicate my career to: advancing cancer biology so that stories like hers won’t have to end in uncertainty, but in understanding.