Supporting Maheen's Cancer Recovery: Medical Debt

Dear friends and loved ones,

A question I find myself asking lately is: What is a life worth? What is my life worth? How do we measure a life? For a decade now, I've measured it through my work as a refugee mental health and trauma therapist working in refugee healthcare. Aleppo. Cairo. Ankara. Kabul. Gaza. Use your two good hands to build the world you want to live in. That's what I've always kept at the center of my heart's practice when it comes to living. To want anything from this world is to believe in the world, and that's something I've been trying to do again in recovery from eighteen months of cancer treatment.

I'm lucky to have good people around me, friends who have taken a leave of absence from work to care for me, friends who have shepherded me into the stuffed animal aisle at Ikea and let me cry after a particularly rough round of chemotherapy when the nurses couldn't find a vein and poked me eight times, friends who have called and checked in from worlds away through voice notes and video calls, and who have not let silence creep into the distance as I navigate a body in treatment.

I have to remind myself it happened. 12 rounds of chemotherapy, 2 surgeries, 19 rounds of radiation, 17 rounds of immunotherapy. And then the complications last April that sent me back into urgent care and hooked up to IV's with an infection that no one could explain days before my baby brother's wedding.

I have to keep reminding myself: yes, it happened. To who? To me.

I've been walking more lately despite the snow storms that we've had to endure in Canada, and I often find myself looking at a crooked tree branch or a cloud in the shape of a fist and thinking, there could have been a life in which you missed this part. I found myself confronting the same reality last Fall on a trip to Portugal, where I drove a rental car to a lookout point over the Aegean Sea and had a panic attack because it was simply too beautiful. The fear was the same, you could have missed it.

The truth is, there's so much in my present moment that I'm missing. A writing deadline for a work-in-progress that requires my undivided attention, my aging parents who have asked for so little my whole life and now are asking for time, a demanding job as a psychotherapist that has taken every bit of energy in my body to return to as I navigate the cognitive impact of a cocktail of chemicals being pumped through my body.

For the first six months after active treatment ended, I couldn't remember anything; barely able to recount the content of a page of a book I had just read, unable to distill the information in a referral for therapy from my colleagues, the details of anyone's life despite recognizing their smile or curly hair, the verbs in French I had memorized the year before, the lyrics to my favourite songs from the past decade. I begged my surroundings to let me remember anything, to piece any parts of a life together that felt present and within reach. I kept forgetting. I was barely recognizable to myself despite people around me saying: oh, you look better. Sure, the hair came back, but what about my sanity?

I kept working. Use your two good hands. And I have been. I've been working three jobs to make ends meet and have done my best to keep up with monthly payment plans for fertility plans and the cost of whatever medicine and emergency interventions ended up saving my life.

And yet, I would love to be able to focus on something else other than the medical debt that has accrued since I was diagnosed in September 2022. Despite what folks are led to believe about the healthcare system in Canada, very few procedures and treatments are covered unless you have private health insurance, which I don't.

What is a life worth? I keep asking myself. I don't have any clear answers but I do know that as I navigate the aftermath I want to have a chance at living instead of just surviving the upheaval of not being able to work during treatment and the accrued debt of just needing to focus on my recovery and endure the absurdity of a diagnosis that required so much upkeep: daily appointments at three different hospitals; never-ending treatment schedules; nerve damage; arguments with doctors who wouldn't take me seriously; monthly injections; having to explain symptoms to nursing emergency lines in the middle of the night; CT scans; the rigged question of rating your level of pain on a scale; MRI appointments; weekly bloodwork; being put on oxygen because the meds sent a forest fire into your veins; mammograms that I have bit my tongue during but have left me breathless and crying in the changing room after.

So. Many. Appointments.

I went back to work sooner than I should have because I needed the money. The upkeep of a life requires labour.

And now after much consideration for my exhaustion and mental health, I need a chance at just existing without the debilitating stress of medical debt that I've begun to have nightmares about.

Please donate to support the alleviation of medical bills and debt so I can go back to my life and make a meaningful choice about how to use these two good hands to build a life that's mine.

I appreciate you. I see you. I am rooting for all of us.

With love,

Maheen