Survival

 Survival      			         October 2025		                             Claudia Guerin
                                                                               
Survival Clinic, Survivorship Program, Survival this, Survival that. I don’t see myself as a survivor, and I never did. I do believe that people can survive geological cataclysms, ebola and missile strikes. However, I seriously doubt that acute leukemia qualifies as a disaster. My own body mistakenly created beautiful purple blood blasts that almost killed me. It was my defective DNA that made me ill, nor a virus or a voracious monster. With this, I’m not saying that I didn’t suffer to get better. And the semantic difference doesn’t make my journey less difficult than the incredible stories of people rescued after months of being lost in the jungle; the difference is in the attitude to fight the battle. 
I remember that right after receiving my diagnosis, I was very reluctant to tell my niece Julieta about it. She was my first niece, and we love each other very much. Also, a few years before, she had lost an aunt to cancer, so I didn’t want her to be afraid. When I told her, she was devastated and said “I’m so sorry. What're you going to do?” She always reminds me of my immediate answer: “When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade.” She says that she found peace in my words. 
Maybe the citric allusion may sound a bit stale, but it has some truth.  My bone marrow made a mistake, so I needed to fix it. Just like when I’m cooking something and suddenly I realize that I poured too much salt or too little vinegar, and I have to make a correction. Only this time, the fixing needed to be huge and hurtful. And it was.  
Life flows. 
Cancer was part of my life; it came and went. 
The transplant came, and it’s still here. 
Every day, 
	flowing in my veins,
     	flowing in my life, 
	getting into something else. 
It’s just life.