Cancer Survivors Day: No exam is too tough for this brave heart

For most part of his six-year pharma course, R Karthik was undergoing treatment for cancer

In a week’s time, 23-year-old R Karthik will complete a six-year course, and that would make him a doctor of pharmacy. That is no small feat for someone who spent the last four years shuttling between home and hospitals. He was undergoing intensive chemotherapy after a diagnosis of the cancer of the bone marrow.

In 2018, in his second year at college, when Karthik was going to appear for a pharmacology exam, his eyes showed abnormal colouring and itching.

He initially dismissed it after showing it to a doctor not knowing that they were early signs of cancer. Later, diagnosis showed that he had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia.

At a private hospital that Karthik was first admitted in, the doctor gave him little chance of survival. “My parents were told that I will live for only a couple of months as more than 90% of my cells were immature in this condition,” says Karthik.

Karthik says that his first reaction to this was, strangely, a laugh. “I had heard and read a lot about cancer patients and their struggles but the realisation that I was among them only hit me later,” he says.

But he was not going to let cancer rule his life.

Family and friends close to him suggested he discontinue the course but Karthik would not countenance the idea.