NORRATOR – NORRA + narrator
Stories shaped by experience
The Remission Illusion
12 mins read
It wasn’t always smiles and matching glasses on our faces.
In November of that year, I genuinely didn’t think I would get to see my daughter turn 21.
It began on a stark Monday morning. We were scheduled to leave our house at 8:00 AM for a massive two-day corporate training session. My daughter was my lovely assistant when I conducted these corporate programs.
But at 4:30 AM, I woke up to a startling phone call.
I answered, and the small, strained voice on the other end was hers. She simply asked me “to come out.” Confused and wondering why she wanted me to walk out of my room at that hour, I opened the door.
In my mind, I was desperately hoping it was nothing serious. We just needed to get a tiny bit more sleep and leave by 8:00 AM. Just a few hours earlier, we had gone through our training decks and rehearsed the modules. All the workshop materials and props were neatly prepared, packed, and stacked by the front door.
Now, with every passing minute, it was becoming blindingly clear that the training session was not going to happen.
At that exact moment, I felt a flash of mild annoyance. It felt like an unwelcome, disruptive inconvenience.
Looking back today, I recognize it as a life-altering, character-shattering crucible. But in that raw room at 4:30 AM, I was just angry. I was sad. It felt deeply unfair that I had to endure yet another grueling situation in my life.
It seemed as though there had always been one crisis or another since my youth. From losing my father at sixteen, to my mother’s passing at twenty-eight, to finding the raw courage to flee a toxic marriage with two young children, to being declared bankrupt, to fighting my own cancer, and then living with the permanent physical side effects of that radical surgery – I truly believed the onslaught of hardship was finally over. I thought I was finally sailing into calmer weather.
But the universe had other plans.
I reached out and held my daughter’s hand to soothe her, but her skin was shockingly cool to the touch. I flipped on the main living room lights and saw that her lips were completely pale.
Panic hit me full force. I ran to my son’s bedroom, knocked aggressively on his door, and told him we needed to get to the emergency ward immediately.
My son lifted her up and carried her down to the car. Thank goodness for his physical strength; otherwise, I would have been reduced to placing her in a comforter and dragging her across the floor just to reach the driveway. There was absolutely no way I could have lifted her on my own.
We rushed to the nearest hospital, arriving within minutes, and were attended to immediately in the emergency trauma ward.
As the morning light broke, it became obvious the corporate training was completely dead. Yet, I still clung to a desperate sliver of hope that a miracle might salvage it. Doctors and nurses swarmed her bed. At one point, my daughter completely passed out. When she regained consciousness half an hour later, she whispered that she had simply blacked out from the sheer intensity of the agony.
Within the hour, three separate specialists came to evaluate her. I watched the perplexed expressions settle onto their faces, reading the dark shifts in their body language. Finally, the lead doctor called me aside. He informed me that they had discovered a large mass in her abdomen. They needed to admit her immediately for emergency scans.
At some point, I finally pulled out my phone and texted my client to cancel the training session.
Even in that traumatic moment, a tiny, ugly bit of frustration rippled through me for having to forego the work. I despised canceling last minute; I dreaded appearing unprofessional, and frankly, I desperately needed the revenue. Running your own business is vastly different from being salaried. A guaranteed monthly paycheck is not one of the perks.
Yet, ironically, having my own business was the very reason I possessed the absolute freedom to halt my life and give my daughter my undivided presence. We just had no idea what was waiting for us down the road.
The next day, she underwent a CT scan. The results were completely inconclusive; the mass was too elusive to pinpoint. Next came a grueling MRI. Still, they couldn’t define its exact borders. All they knew was that an enormous growth – somewhere between the size of a grapefruit and a pomelo – was sitting inside her. Due to its sheer largeness, it needed to be cut out sooner rather than later. But to remove it, they first had to find where it lived.
They performed a colonoscopy, suspecting it was in her digestive tract. It wasn’t there. This mysterious growth was hiding in the dark space between her lungs, her heart, and her stomach. Finally, an endoscopy revealed the truth: the mass was attached to her liver, growing directly out of the tissue.
To this day, we don’t know what caused it, or how many silent months it had been developing inside her body. They took a tissue sample for a biopsy, but at that stage, the lab results were a mere formality. It had to come out.
She was scheduled for a complex liver resection. The surgical team estimated the operation would take four and a half hours.
Before she went under the knife, my daughter and I quietly discussed the terrifying possibility of the mass being malignant. God bless the immense kindness and professionalism of those doctors; they stubbornly stuck to the gentle word “growth,” even when we both knew the truth.
The day of the operation arrived. She was wheeled out from the ward at 8:00 AM. I was told she would be out by 2:00 PM.
2:00 PM came and went. 2:30 PM passed in agonizing silence.
Still, there was no word from the theater.
I didn’t receive the call until 5:00 PM.
The operation had taken two extra hours because once the surgeons opened her up, they discovered two separate tumors. The massive, pomelo-sized growth was fused to her liver on one end and wrapped around her colon on the other. A second, lemon-sized tumour was nestled deep in the liver bed near her gallbladder.
To save her, they had to perform a radical restructuring: her gallbladder was removed, nearly half of her liver was cut away, and parts of her colon were severed and reattached.
Words will never possess the capacity to describe the absolute terror, anxiety, and suffocating worry that held me hostage during those long hours. I wondered if she’d hit 21. I sat there thinking: I cannot be a parentless, cancer-survivor, single mother whose daughter just died on an operating table. It was a deep, pitch-black thought. I had to fiercely remind myself that no matter what terror was drowning me, my daughter was the one enduring the physical trauma. I had to be the anchor for us both.
Her recovery was a battlefield of pain. She bore a massive, jagged L-shaped scar running from just beneath her chest straight down past her belly button. After eight days, she was finally discharged. The extra hours in the operating room meant the financial bill skyrocketed, but we were just profoundly relieved to have her home. We truly believed the worst was behind us, and she could finally heal in her own bed.
We were completely, utterly wrong.
During her one-month follow-up checkup, she underwent routine MRI and CT scans. We were focused entirely on wound care and nutrition. We were entirely blindsided by the verdict.
The cancer had returned.
The nightmare was running on an endless loop. I remember telling myself: You are the only parent this girl has. Pull yourself together.
But darker days were coming. It felt sick. It felt fundamentally evil. Disbelief turned into a heavy, cold numbness.
Because she only had half a liver left, specialized radiotherapy was physically impossible. The oncology team delivered a chilling medical fact: cancer cells tend to be far more aggressive and violent in younger people. Our only remaining option was heavy chemotherapy.
Her chemo cycles began the following month, each session followed by an agonizing wait for scans to see if the poison had killed the monster.
First chemo – the scans showed it was still there. Damn. But, she did make it to 21.
Second chemo – still there. Damn.
Second chemo – still there. Damn.
By this point, my daughter had withered away. She lost an immense amount of weight, possessed zero appetite, and looked devastatingly pale. Her hair began falling out in clumps. It was a brutal, heartbreaking sight. Furthermore, the treatments were draining my financial reserves, requiring constant hospital admissions, discharges, and logistical marathons.
Through it all, I repeated my mantra: Be stronger than her. See this through.
By the third chemo session, the spirit of my brave girl began to falter. She wept, look at me, and whispered that she would rather just be sick than endure the poison of chemo ever again. I saw the absolute despair in her eyes and heard the raw desperation in her voice. For the first time, I felt myself begin to break. I didn’t know if I had the capacity to keep this up.
One month after that third grueling session, we walked back into the clinic for the follow-up scans. We were completely numb, yet somehow forged into iron by the trauma of the last nine months. I had stopped exercising, stopped eating healthily, and lived in a state of constant, vibrating stress.
But my daughter – she was sassy and funny. On the good days between treatments, when the nausea faded, she would look at me, smile, and joke: “Cancer? No, mom. Pisces.” because she was a March baby. She wore that massive L-shaped surgical scar on her abdomen like a proud battle trophy.
I survived entirely on her humour and Allah’s grace. Her larger-than-life positivity dragged me out of the pitch-black pit I was drowning in.
And then, the doctor delivered the news. The scans were clear. They couldn’t see any active cells.
We were ecstatic, feeling victorious with the battle that had went on for more than a year. All the cliches about “everything being alright” danced through my mind. We felt more resilient, more triumphant, and deeply changed by the fire.
We were told the cancer was officially in remission. We were handed a protocol of scans every three months to guard the border. The smiles returned to our faces. We put on our matching spectacles, took a photograph, and celebrated her turning twenty-one.
I looked forward to her turning 22. I told the world that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I believed the bad weather had finally broken.
The Quiet Reflection
I look at that photograph today – the one of us laughing with our matching glasses. We thought we had stolen back from the jaws of death – and the silence it leaves behind is deafening.
That photograph was a beautiful, cruel illusion.
What I know now, standing in the absolute aftermath of my life’s greatest devastation, is that the word “remission” was not a victory lap. It was merely a brief, six-month ceasefire.
About half a year after those clean scans, the monster woke up, aggressive and unchecked, slamming her straight into Stage 4 terminal reality. And exactly one year after I posted the photograph, my beautiful and resilient daughter closed her eyes and passed away.
Looking back at that era through the lens of a mother who had to endure the ultimate milestone of human grief by burying her child, the lessons I wrote down in my old LinkedIn drafts look vastly different to me now.
I wrote about how to manage finances, how to exercise, how to stay positive, and how to keep a business afloat during a crisis. I treated the experience like a corporate self-improvement module on “resilience.”
What a naive perspective that was.
When you lose a child, you realize that none of the practical advice matters. Wealth, business revenue, and professional titles are completely hollow tokens. The only metric that carries any real weight on this earth is the time you spend holding the hands of the people you love while they are still here to feel your touch.
I am thankful for running my own practice because the months of uninterrupted presence I gave my daughter was everything. It was the first time I became a primary caregiver, and I hope it was the last.
If you are reading this today and you are currently stressing over your business targets, worrying about looking unprofessional to a client, or trading your precious family time for an extra pay cheque, I urge you to re-evaluate your priorities. Maybe most people have other halves or parents to turn to, I didn’t. My kids were my world.
Do not take a single sunny day for granted. Do not assume that clean scans or moments of relief mean the battle is permanently won. Bad weather doesn’t last forever, but neither does the good. Protect your time fiercely. Hold your loved ones close, listen to their laughter, and memory-capture every single smile, because tomorrow, those ordinary moments might be the only anchors you have left to survive the quiet.
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