It was a small hospital, swarming with doctors going from patient to patient all day long. It was like a second home to me, as I had lived most of my life there since I was 20 years old.
My hospital room, number 13, looked like a copy of my room at home. It was an organised mess, covered in posters and drawings that had been added on through the years, to keep me from getting bored. It had become a habit to pin something new to the walls each time I came to the hospital.
As I lay on my bed that night, I remembered the many challenges I’d had to face throughout the years fighting my illness every hour of every day, living in constant pain.
I often had flashes of the past, but these ones seemed so real they made me relive my traumatising experience all over again. It started with me, at 18 years old, dancing with my friends in the Nutcracker ballet. Then at 20 years old, performing a solo onstage, about to face my greatest fear.
I remembered it clearly; first, my head had started hurting and I’d felt nauseous and dizzy. Then my whole body had begun to feel weak and strange and finally I had fallen, landing with a thud.
After that, I had woken up in a hospital, surrounded by nurses and by my parents, all of whom had been looking at me with concerned faces.
Soon after, they had told me that I’d been diagnosed with leukaemia, and that it would be too dangerous for me to continue dancing. I had fallen into a depressive state, refusing to eat, sleep or talk. It had taken countless psychiatrist appointments to get back to normal, but the trauma had never really faded.
Back then, after having recovered from my period of depression, I thought I had the solution: I thought my cancer would only last for a year or so, and then I would be able to get back to dancing, but it wasn’t as simple as that.
As my thoughts slowly returned to the present moment, I realised that I had found the solution to get rid of the pain. I prepared myself, wrote a note to my friends and family, and just let go.