I’m four years old, standing on a little blue stool in the bathroom so that I can reach the sink to brush my teeth and see in the mirror. I’m 8 years old, at the deep end of the swimming pool wondering what I would be doing when I was 15 years old like my swimming instructor.

I’m 12 years old, bored during the COVID pandemic and discovering that biology is quite interesting. I’m 14, 15 helping my parents at our family restaurant, excelling in school, thinking I had so much time in life.

Suddenly 15 has passed and I’m 16, lying in the emergency room bed and hearing the words “You have a tumor in your brain.” Suddenly I don’t need a stool to see myself in the mirror anymore, and in the mirror I see baldness where my long hair used to be, a scar on my head from brain surgery, a scar on my chest from the central line used for chemotherapy, and a teenage girl forever changed.

After cancer, I was introduced to a family member as “the one who was sick,” which was odd, because, against my older sister’s frequent hospitalizations, I’d always been “the one who is healthy.” It was odd, because I still remembered the memories of all the times I ran outside in the middle of winter without so much as a jacket, the summer evenings playing badminton in the street with my little cousins, the days of feeling unstoppable, invincible, like they had just happened. Suddenly life didn’t seem practically eternal but so tragically ephemeral. I always wanted to grow up, but suddenly I wished I needed a stool to see in the mirror again, wished I was outside building a snowman without a jacket again, wished I was playing badminton with my cousins in the summer evenings again. I mourned the ephemerality of the period of my life I call before cancer, how short-lived living freely, without worrying about survival or relapse, was. I only got 16 years before cancer.

Yet, ultimately, I’ve been fortunate. Sitting in the waiting room of the radiation center one day, I saw another family with a small toddler, head as bald as mine. During my cancer treatment I read The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, in which I learned about Dr. Sidney Farber’s founding of modern chemotherapy by treating acute lymphoblastic leukemia in children. Farber’s patients endured miserable nausea and dehydration, often only to relapse after a couple months of remission. Cancer had reached the toddler I’d seen in the waiting room not at 16, and even way before six. For the children who don’t survive, how ephemeral is not their life before cancer, but their life as a whole? In having cancer, I recognized that while life is ephemeral, impact lives on. Sidney Farber’s pioneering of chemotherapy and several decades’ worth of research by scientists translated themselves into the treatments that saved my life. The amiability of the doctors and nurses who brought the light in my darkest days lives on in my memory and inspires me to one day transmit such kindness and warmth. Cancer has inspired me to make an impact, and I want to do so by studying cellular and molecular biology in college, and then pursuing a graduate degree in cancer research, aiming to advance science’s understanding of cancer and bring medicine closer to a cure. I want to become a pediatric oncologist and be guided by my passion and my story to bring the light to young patients’ darkest days.