In 2020, I was diagnosed with carcinoma in situ of right lung. Although it was caught at a very early stage, I still had to undergo thoracic surgery and woke up knowing that around 20% of my right lung had been removed.
Cancer has a strange way of making you search for explanations. Why did this happen? Was it genetic? Was it environmental? Was it stress? Was it simply bad luck? As I recovered, I found myself looking at my experience through different lenses. Western medicine. Traditional Chinese Medicine. Lifestyle. Years later, even astrology and BaZi. Over time, I realised I wasn’t looking for a single answer anymore. I was trying to understand what each perspective could teach me, while also recognising where each one reached its limits. None of them gave me the complete picture, and perhaps no system ever can.
The first thing I want to say is this: Western medicine saved my life, it found the abnormality, confirmed the diagnosis, removed the tumour and continues to monitor me through regular follow-up scans. Without modern medicine, I would almost certainly have had a very different outcome. This is something I feel strongly about because, especially in spiritual spaces, I sometimes see people trying to explain illness through karma, energy, emotions or metaphysics alone.
While I understand why people search for meaning during difficult times, I don’t think it’s fair, or accurate, to reduce something as complex as cancer to a single explanation.
A diagnosis isn’t a punishment, and it isn’t proof that someone wasn’t “healed enough”. It certainly isn’t something that can be replaced by positive thinking or spiritual practices alone. Western medicine treated my cancer, and that deserves to be acknowledged.
Once the surgery was over, another question quietly emerged. How do I stay well? That question eventually led me towards Traditional Chinese Medicine. One idea from TCM has stayed with me ever since: the relationship between our emotions and our organ systems. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, the lungs are associated with grief, sadness and the ability to let go. The kidneys are linked to fear, insecurity and our deeper reserves of vitality. The liver relates to frustration and stagnation, the spleen to worry and overthinking, while the heart is associated with emotional balance and joy.
I think this is where TCM is often misunderstood. It doesn’t teach that grief causes lung cancer, or that fear inevitably leads to kidney disease. Human health is far too complex for conclusions like that. Instead, it describes a two-way relationship. Prolonged, unresolved grief may affect Lung Qi in some people, while someone with weakened Lung Qi may find themselves more susceptible to sadness or have greater difficulty processing loss. The same principle applies to the other organ systems. It’s less about cause and effect, and more about recognising that our emotional lives and our physical health are constantly influencing one another.
Whether we describe it through the language of Traditional Chinese Medicine or modern psychology, I think many of us intuitively understand this. Our bodies and minds are constantly in conversation with each other.
When I look back at the years before my diagnosis, I had already spent a long time surviving. There was depression, family estrangement, years of chronic stress and an environment that rarely felt emotionally safe. I don’t believe those experiences caused my cancer, and I would never make a claim like that. But they did change the way I think about health. Health isn’t simply the absence of disease. It’s also how well we recover, how we sleep, how we eat, how much stress we carry, whether we allow ourselves to rest and whether we continue pushing long after our body has quietly asked us to stop. Cancer made me realise that surviving and thriving aren’t the same thing.
I only began studying BaZi seriously years after my surgery, and some people have asked whether my chart predicted my illness. My answer is no, at least not in the way many people imagine. BaZi cannot diagnose cancer. It cannot replace a CT scan, a biopsy or medical advice. What it did give me was another framework for reflecting on the way I move through life. It highlighted patterns I had already experienced: a tendency to carry too much, to internalise pressure, to push through difficult seasons instead of slowing down and to spend years surviving before learning how to truly recover. Whether those patterns came from my chart or simply from my lived experience almost became a secondary question. The important part was recognising them, because once we recognise a pattern, we have a chance to change it.
Today, I no longer feel the need to choose one system over another. Western medicine treated my cancer. Traditional Chinese Medicine encouraged me to pay closer attention to my body before something goes wrong. BaZi and astrology have helped me reflect on recurring patterns in my personality, my habits and the way I navigate life. None of them explain everything; each simply offers a different lens. The mistake, I think, is expecting any one system to answer every question cos life is rarely that simple.
People often ask whether cancer changed me. Of course it did, but it isn’t because I suddenly became fearless or because I now have all the answers. If anything, it made me more comfortable admitting that I don’t.
What it did give me was a deeper appreciation for health; not just physical health, but emotional health, mental health, the relationships we keep, the environments we choose to stay in, the way we nourish our bodies and the courage to make difficult decisions before life makes them for us.
These days, I still go for my medical follow-ups. I still exercise. I pay attention to nutrition. I continue studying astrology, BaZi and Traditional Chinese Medicine. I’m not searching for certainty in them, it’s just that each one helps me understand a different part of what it means to be human.
No single lens can explain an entire life, but if we’re willing to look through more than one, we might just understand ourselves, and the choices we make, a little better than we did before.