The joy of living

Cancer survivor details his successful fight in a book written during those dark times

When the doctors told Anup Kumar, 51, he had lung cancer and barely four months to live, he thought the usual things people think when faced with death. He thought 'why me' and 'why now'. So many events had overtaken him in the past few months.

It was the year 2000 and in the midst of the festivities that ushered the new millennium, he had lost his job with an international advertising agency. His eldest daughter's marriage had left him bankrupt.

The advertising industry was reeling under recession and there were no jobs. And even if there were any, no one wanted anyone on the wrong side of 50. To add to this his previous company has not paid him in months.

However, the following April Anup got a breather in the form of an interview call from the largest telecommunication company in the Gulf.

Eventually Anup got the appointment letter to what he called his "dream job". April is the cruellest month, T.S. Eliot had warned us and it proved uncannily true for Anup. When he had to undergo the mandatory medical test before joining the new job, the doctors diagnosed him with a patch on his lungs.

Further investigations revealed that Anup had not only cancer in its fourth stage but that it had reached his bones.

"If you do not respond to the chemotherapy treatment you have only four months to live," the doctors told him. Anup wondered 'why me and why now?' But fortunately for him it was just a spontaneous reaction which lasted momentarily.

"I just had to get out of that syndrome immediately and take it in my stride," he says. And take it in his stride, he did and did so wonderfully that he responded amazingly well to the chemotherapy treatment. The result – two years on Anup is today a recovering cancer patient.

The patch on his lung has been reduced to a small scar. What's more, he has landed himself a job in New Delhi with one of India's leading industrial organisation as a corporate communication department head.

Ask him the secret of his recovery, and he has this to say, "Positive approach helped me. Everything has its good and bad side. I decided to focus on the good. To win the battle with cancer the mind and the body have to come together and the patient has to participate in it absolutely."

This is exactly what his extraordinary book, Joy Of Cancer, is all about. Released this year, the book is extraordinary in more ways than one. The major part of it was written during the crucial six months of Anup's treatment, all between bouts of nausea and other horrific side effects of chemotherapy.

The book documents the entire gamut of Anup's emotions, reactions, fears and hopes from the moment he was given the bad news to the time when the patch on his lung regressed.

"Until now two types of books have been written on cancer. One by experts and the second by patients who were cured of cancer. Joy of Cancer is perhaps the only book by a cancer patient written when death stared him in the face", says Anup.

The book describes a seven-fold strategy against cancer. It enumerates the anxieties, the pressures, the fears of a cancer patient and the wherewithal to deal with them. One of Anup's advise to every patient is "learn everything about your aliment and about the various treatments for it."

This was one factor which rid him of fear, says Anup. In Anup's own words, "the book aims at demystifying cancer".

Despite the somewhat morbid title which is also oddly an oxymoron, the book is not only a inspiration for cancer patients or patients down with life-threatening diseases, but it is also an eye-opener for just about anyone nettled with the usual everyday worries.

Anup knows his cancer has cut his life-span considerably, but he does not seem to mind that too much. He is so full of life that it is difficult to imagine he was battling it only a while ago.

Cancer has transformed him into a new individual. To mention a few instances: Anup has given up smoking, he is not a workaholic anymore, spends more time with his family, takes each day as it comes and lives it to the hilt. He says: "It was ironical that in the face of death, I began for the first time, to really live."