My Story

I am writing this not as a physician, an editor, or an academic — all of which I am — but as someone who has sat on the other side of a cancer diagnosis. I built Cancer Support India because I went looking for exactly this kind of resource when I needed it, and I couldn’t find it. I hope that by sharing my own story here, this platform feels a little less like an institution and a little more like something built by someone who understands.

In April 2024, I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. I remember the particular kind of stillness that comes over you in the moment a doctor says the word “lymphoma” — the way the rest of the conversation seems to arrive from very far away. My disease was present in lymph nodes across multiple regions of the body, which made it Stage III. But I count myself fortunate in one important respect: no other organ, no bone, and no bone marrow was involved. It had been caught reasonably early, and it was confined to a system the body can, with the right treatment, fight back through.

My oncology team advised six cycles of the R-CHOP chemotherapy regimen, followed by twenty-three sittings of radiation therapy directed at my neck, chest, and abdomen. On paper, that is a treatment plan. In practice, it was seven, eight months of a life reorganised entirely around infusion days, blood counts, and the particular exhaustion that follows each cycle. I was fortunate to have a genuinely excellent team — surgical and medical oncologists who were both skilled and, when I needed it, honest with me — and a family that simply showed up, day after day, in ways both large and quietly practical.

The radiation affected my salivary glands significantly, and for a long stretch I lost the ability to properly taste food — something I don’t think I appreciated as a genuine loss until I was living through it. Ordinary meals became difficult to enjoy or even manage; I leaned on whatever felt tolerable, some of it far from what I’d have chosen otherwise. Taste has returned gradually, though even now it isn’t entirely what it once was. It is a strange, humbling thing to have to relearn something as basic as eating.

What surprised me most, though, wasn’t the treatment itself — it was what came after. A clean PET scan is not the same thing as feeling well. I went back to my professional responsibilities — at the time, serving as Principal of an Ayurveda college, alongside my editorial and academic commitments — well before my body was actually ready, because a clear scan made it feel like I should be able to. What followed was a level of fatigue I hadn’t anticipated: draining evenings, a mind that felt foggy and blank in a way that had nothing to do with willpower, and a heat sensitivity that went well beyond my usual constitution. Alongside this, my underlying diabetes became far harder to control, my thyroid values shifted, I dealt with electrolyte imbalances, and my liver function tests reflected the toll that chemotherapy takes on the body’s own chemistry long after the last infusion. Recovery, I learned, is not a single event that follows treatment — it is its own long process, with its own setbacks, and it does not always announce itself as clearly as the disease did.

There was a period where I felt guilty for not recovering “on schedule.” I want to name that honestly here, because I suspect many people reading this have felt the same thing. Some of it came from outside — a well-meaning oncologist who, when I raised the fatigue, told me it was nothing and that NHL was entirely curable, which, whatever the intention, wasn’t the same as actually being heard. Some of it came from within my own household, where explaining an invisible exhaustion, again and again, to the people closest to me sometimes felt like its own kind of labour. None of this was anyone’s failure. It is simply what a long illness does to the people living through it and around it, and I think it deserves to be said plainly rather than glossed over.

Through all of this, I was still trying to hold together my professional obligations — running an institution through an NCISM inspection cycle, managing faculty and administrative demands, keeping an editorial calendar moving, and trying to be present for students and patients who deserved my full attention when I quite often didn’t have it to give. Eventually, I made a decision I now regard as one of the soundest I have made throughout this whole experience: I stepped back from the administrative weight of the principal’s role to protect the recovery my body still needed, and redirected my energy toward the kind of work I could do from home, at my own pace — writing, editorial work, and building resources like this one. It did not feel like giving up. It felt, finally, like listening to what the evidence of my own body was telling me.

There is one more thing I want to say plainly, because I think it matters for how this platform approaches Ayurveda. I am an Ayurvedic physician by training and by profession, and I believe deeply in what this system of medicine offers as supportive, complementary care. But I want to be honest: Ayurvedic approaches did not resolve my own metabolic complications after treatment. I say this not to diminish Ayurveda, but because I think patients deserve honesty over advocacy, even from someone who has spent a career practising and teaching this system. That honesty is exactly why this platform frames Ayurveda as support alongside conventional oncology care, never as a replacement for it — I have lived the difference between those two claims, and only one of them is true.

What carried me through — more than any single treatment or piece of advice — was my family. My wife, Dr. Anita, who stayed present through fatigue and friction alike. My daughter, Vd. Ayudha, and my son-in-law, Gowtham, who have simply always been there, in the way that steady people are. And, unexpectedly, the intellectual work itself — writing, building, creating — which gave me something to hold onto on days when my body had very little to offer but my mind still wanted to make something.

If you are reading this while going through your own diagnosis, or caring for someone who is, I want you to know a few things I wish someone had told me plainly, early on. Fatigue that outlasts treatment is real, even when scans are clear. Your recovery timeline does not have to match anyone else's, including your doctor's expectations. It is entirely reasonable to step back from professional or personal obligations to protect your healing, and doing so is not weakness — it may be the most rational decision you make. And it is possible to hold deep respect for a system of medicine, conventional or traditional, while still being honest about its limits.

Cancer Support India exists because I wanted the platform I couldn’t find when I needed one — something that would have told me the truth about all of this, without either false reassurance or unearned despair. I hope it does that for you.