Dubai-based actress Lisa Ray on being a 'cancer graduate'

At 52, actress Lisa Ray is fitter than she’s ever been. The cancer graduate, as she likes to call herself, says: “I think, as a cancer survivor, having been diagnosed in 2009 and given three years to live, literally, that obviously put a lot of things into context and helped me change and prioritise things in my life. And ever since then, on my healing journey, I put my health and my fitness at the top of the list.”

The former model, who moved to Dubai two-and-a-half years ago, explains that being a mum – she has six-year-old twins – has also caused her to reevaluate her goals in life and made her try to become the best version of herself. “It’s changed my experience of working out; I'm not looking at the outside, like, ‘have I dropped these many pounds?’ And because I enjoy working out, I don't feel that external pressure, and I’m not trying to live up to anyone else's standards. It’s my own standards.”

It’s these benchmarks of success that also keep her “eating clean” and working out with a trainer.

She is at the opening of the state-of-the-art Thumbay Advanced Cancer Center, located within Thumbay University Hospital in Ajman, and it’s making her reflective of her own cancer journey.

“It was an unusual period of my life,” she recalls, “because you know innately that something is wrong on a deeper level but you don’t know what it is. Once I was diagnosed, I knew I could do something about it, even though the first doctor who diagnosed me gave me two years to live and plotted me a chart and said, you know, the data is telling us this.”

She had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of blood cancer.

Her first reaction, she says, was not of fear but of resolve. “I thought, ‘I am not a data point’. I knew it was not going to be an easy journey, but I knew it was not going to be the end of the road for me. So a combination of my stubbornness, my compulsion to challenge the data and to show that as human beings, there’s a lot of different possibilities helped me process the diagnosis,” she says.

She recalls struggling with accepting her vulnerabilities, accepting the fact that sometimes, she needed help. It was also around this time that she started documenting her journey in a blog called The Yellow Diaries and talking about what was going on in her mind through the process. “I started writing my blog and announced my cancer diagnosis, and I think I was the first Indian person to do that. And it was a relief. And I think it really helped getting that outpouring, a wave of support and blessings and also conversations with either cancer survivors, people who’ve been through the journey before me, people who are newly diagnosed. It gave me an incredible emotional foundation from which I could draw a lot of energy,” she says.

Getting to acceptance

As the actress went through the nausea and learned about the what-ifs and but alsos of her condition, she was also dealing with trauma — her mother had passed away six months earlier. “My father was incredible,” she says, adding that she also found solace in the empathy offered to her by the strangers who reached out to her. “I'll share with you something interesting that has stayed with me. When I spoke to a lot of the people who were really like angels in disguise — whether they were nurses, other cancer patients, people I would speak to in the waiting room — I would always [tell] them that they’ve helped me through this journey, and also enhanced my life. They would say, ‘Down the line whenever you can, do the same for someone else’. So that's now become an integral part of my philosophy,” she says.

The Four More Shots Please! star points out that there is still no ‘cure’ for the type of cancer she had – but, she adds, “Due to a lot of the advancements in immuno oncology, our expected lifespan has really improved dramatically, and there’s actually chance of converting it into a chronic disease, something like diabetes, where you have to take constant treatment. I am expected to remain on treatment for essentially the rest of my life. I’m very diligent about it, but I've gradually reduced my dosage, because I feel intuitively it’s better for me,” she says.

She also believes in holistic living. “I'm someone who subscribes to natural therapies, like, whether it’s Ayurveda, naturopathy… And I like to say that it's an ongoing healing journey; I’m not necessarily looking at a particular goal, other than living a healthy, happy life and thriving where I am today. I’m the healthiest that I've ever been in my life today at 52 living with an incurable disease.”

Ray says cancer was a wake-up call for her in terms of parenthood. “I was on the fence about motherhood. But I think cancer was the trigger to embrace it. So even though our journey, me and my husband's journey to becoming parents was a little bit bumpy, motherhood has happened at exactly the right time for me,” she says.

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