Natalia, Australia

Six years ago, I was lying on a beach in Australia, watching the waves roll in, completely unaware that my body was already fighting for its life.

For months, I had been drowning in exhaustion, pushing through relentless chest pain, night sweats, and the kind of fatigue that made my limbs feel like lead. I was dismissed at every turn—told I was too young, too anxious, too dramatic. My concerns were brushed off as stress, burnout, and "nothing to worry about."

But on January 4th, 2019, I was rushed to the ER, barely able to breathe. I watched the doctors’ faces shift as they looked at my scans.

I heard the words “Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.” I heard “17 cm tumor.” I heard “If you had waited any longer…”

I didn’t hear much after that.

I’d spend the next year undergoing chemo, radiation and more hospital visits than I can count.

This World Cancer Day, it’s important to note that cancer is more than a medical diagnosis. It’s an unravelling.

A stripping away of everything familiar, everything safe.

It turns your body into a battlefield, your identity into a question mark. It’s hospital rooms that sting with the scent of life and death, scans that make time stand still, and the feeling of your life being split into before and after.

It’s isolation—not just because of treatment, but because the people around you don’t always know how to stay. Because you become a reflection of everything they fear. And no one teaches us how to hold space for the messy, in-between parts of survival.

For me, cancer wasn’t just chemo and hair loss and hospital visits—it was facing my own mortality at 28 years old, wondering if I had wasted my life chasing the wrong things.

It was learning, the hard way, that the healthcare system often treats the disease, not the human. That once treatment ends, you’re expected to pick up the pieces alone. That survivorship care is almost nonexistent—no roadmap, no emotional support, no guidance for how to live in a body you no longer recognize.

I became an advocate because I know firsthand how the gaps in cancer care leave fighters and survivors lost, overwhelmed, and questioning their worth outside of the fight.

We need care that extends beyond treatment.

We need doctors who listen the first time.

We need mental health and survivorship support that isn’t an afterthought.

Healing hasn’t been linear. It’s been slow, frustrating, and a necessary wake-up call.

Survivorship, for me, has been about reclaiming my body—learning how to exist in it again without fear. Learning that healing requires more than just survival. It requires whole-person care. It requires community, validation, and spaces where the full truth of your experience is allowed to exist.

Cancer turned my world upside down. It took parts of me I’ll never get back. But it also forced me to slow down, listen, and finally ask: What does it mean to be alive?

I share my story today because I believe our stories save lives. I’m currently six years in remission, and while I don’t have all the answers, cancer taught me at least one thing: we deserve better. We deserve to be taken seriously from the start. We deserve a care team that has our back at every turn. And I won’t stop advocating for it.