The Valor

When I first saw her outside the breast ward, I mistook her for a man. Her bold facial features instantly gave her masculine look. Her hair had fallen out once from chemotherapy, and baby hairs were growing on her smooth scalp. The effects of treatment had darkened the skin on her knuckles. She was dressed simply, sitting casually on her hospital bed with her phone in hand. There was no family member beside her and no one else in the room. Then she looked up and started talking. Within a few minutes, the impression disappeared completely. What remained in the air was her hearty laugh.

She poured out her story as if chatting with a close friend. She told me that she was from Jiujiang and in her fifties. She had already undergone surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer and was now in the hospital for radiotherapy. She had been there for about two weeks. Unlike the quietness of the room, she was remarkably lively. Her husband, she told me, had been the one who first helped her through the diagnosis. "When I first found out, I was scared." It was difficult not to be. Cancer was not something she had expected to happen to her, but her husband kept encouraging her to undergo treatment. "Don't think about it too much. Treat it properly." Slowly, she said, she began to believe him. Her fear did not disappear because the cancer became less serious. It disappeared because she decided she had something better to do with her energy–to move forward.

By the time we spoke, she seemed genuinely optimistic. She even believed that people had become much better at facing cancer than they once were. She told me about another woman on the same floor, someone from the 1980s generation whose breast cancer had already spread to her bone marrow. "She's still very optimistic." Then she told me about a neighbor who had been diagnosed with breast cancer more than ten years ago. "I once saw the scars left from the surgery. The technique was not mature then, but she's still alive." The stories seemed to matter to her. Cancer was no longer an automatic sentence in her mind. There were people who had lived with it for years. There were people whose disease had progressed and who were still living their lives. She trusted modern medicine. Perhaps that trust was what allowed her to remain so relaxed.

Her own circumstances also gave her room to breathe. Her daughter had already graduated. She herself was retired. The family had a stable income, and she was living at her parents' home while receiving treatment. There was no immediate financial crisis waiting outside the hospital. That did not make cancer easy, but it meant that when she lay awake thinking about the future, she did not also have to calculate whether her family could afford another round of treatment. The difference was enormous. She could concentrate on getting better.

Although she was alone at the moment, she had people around her. She spoke warmly about the other women on her floor. They had become friends and even had an online friend group. They talked about treatment, complained about side effects, and joked with one another. More importantly, they had started making plans for after the hospital. "When we're all better, we'll go traveling together." She said it as though there was no question that the trip would happen. The cancer ward was not only a place where they talked about illness. It was also where they talked about what they would do after illness.

Then, almost without warning, she lifted her shirt slightly to show us the marks on her body. Black X's had been drawn on her skin to indicate the areas receiving radiotherapy. She pointed them out casually, as though she were showing us a map. The black marks looked stark against her skin. She had already been through much more than that. Chemotherapy had changed her body in other ways too. Her hair had disappeared. Her hands had darkened. And during chemotherapy, there were everyday things she could no longer do freely. She could not exercise the way she wanted. She could not simply take a shower whenever she felt like it. Treatment had invaded the ordinary routines of her life. Still, she spoke about these limitations almost as practical inconveniences rather than tragedies. She had a treatment to finish. So she would finish it.

That confidence was perhaps the most striking thing about her. She did not deny that cancer was frightening. She did not pretend that chemotherapy was easy either. However, she refused to let the disease determine the emotional meaning of her life. Her neighbors had survived. Her fellow patients had become friends. And modern medicine, she believed, had become much better at treating cancer than people sometimes imagined. So she had chosen to believe in the future. Not because she had a guarantee. Because believing in it gave her somewhere to go.

For now, there was still radiotherapy to complete. Perhaps she knew that after treatment she would leave the hospital with a group of women who had promised to travel together. And beyond that, if everything went according to plan, there would be a trip.