Adam: Fire Against Fear

They cut me open twice  before the year turned.

The first time, they left a bag stitched to my skin.

The second, they said it didn’t sit right.

I watched my body become something else — a map of mistakes and repairs. . The stoma burned. The wound wouldn’t close. I smelled rot under the gauze and thought, so this is what dying smells like.

I was diabetic . The blood was slow to heal.

Days blurred under white light. Machines clicked. I could hear the bag gurgle at night — my body learning to speak in a new language. I hated it. Hated the sound, the smell, the reminder that I was no longer whole.

When they told me I might live with it forever, I didn’t answer.

You don’t argue with death when it’s listening.

You just breathe. You wait.

But somewhere inside, something small kept burning — an ember of refusal.

Chemo came after. Nine rounds in rooms that smelled of plastic and salt.

They called it treatment. I called it dismantling. Skin thinned. Sleep broke apart. Limbs lost their memory of strength. I became an object of routine: needles, fluids, waiting.

In January, I began the Shuang Hor regimen. YKB. YKK. YKC.

They said it was about restoration, not just endurance.

To me, it was ritual — control reclaimed from the machinery.

Morning: YKB.

The powder meets warm water, brown and sharp, bitter as old rain. . Blood and marrow awaken. Circulation stirs. The taste claws the tongue, travels down like a hot thread pulling the body awake. I drink it slow, imagining the fibres knitting back together.

Evening: YKK.

Timed to the kidneys. Cleansing, steadying. I let the heat roll through me, quieting the tremors in my hands. The day settles. The war quiets, but it never ends.

Before sleep: YKC.

The hardest one. The chemo companion. I take it when the house is still, the hum of the fridge low and constant. The bitterness is sharper, almost metallic. My stomach protests, my head aches, but I hold the glass steady. I tell myself it’s fire disguised as medicine — a line of defence no one else can see. It steadies me before sleep, keeps the poison from taking root too deep. I chew it when nausea wakes me later, grounding myself in the raw, acrid taste. Every swallow says: you are still here.

Between these rituals, there’s hunger.

The old craving for salt, sugar, grease — the food that comforted once, now turned against me. My wife watches without words. Her silence is a mirror sharper than any reprimand. I break sometimes. The guilt is immediate, chemical. Healing, I’ve learned, is a battle between want and will.

Radiotherapy followed— five rounds of light that burned instead of healed. The doctors said, It’s working.

It felt like punishment.

Still, I drank. Chewed. Swallowed. The bitterness became proof of life.

By May, the mucus stopped. I lifted the washing machine across the room — reckless, stupid — but I needed to feel like a man again. She cried. I laughed. It was the closest thing to victory I’d tasted in months.

By July, the tumour marker dropped to 3.1.

By August, 2.4.

They offered one last round. I refused. My hands were numb, my mind thin as smoke. They said, You’ve earned the rest. But rest, I knew, was when fear crept in. So I stayed with the ritual— the three anchors, bitter and unyielding.

October. Another cut.

They said they might reconnect what was severed.

I didn’t hope. Hope costs too much.

When I woke, the bag was gone. Flesh sutured to flesh. Seven centimetres closer to what they once called impossible.

And something else happened, quietly, almost unnoticed. The diabetes — the pills I had taken for years, the constant balancing of sugar, the meds for blood pressure, gastric protection, the inhalers, statins — they were no longer needed. Reversing one disease had quietly unraveled another. The body, fed with Lingzhi, Shuang Hor’s regimen, had begun to repair itself at a fundamental level. I measured glucose markers and they read lower than before. My reliance on decades of medications dissolved. I breathed differently. My body remembered how to heal.

Now, the house hums in the quiet. The fridge clicks.

I sit at the table, mix the powder. Brown. Bitter. Familiar.

The air smells of antiseptic and rice.

The scar pulls when I breathe. The glass warms in my palm.

I think of all that’s been taken — and what still burns.

Sometimes the absence is louder than pain.

But beneath it, the ember glows — stubborn, red, alive.

This is the fire I have left.

And it is enough.

Because somewhere beneath the scars, the coal still burns — steady, defiant —

kept alive by the hands that made it, the faith that named it, the Shuang Hor that feeds it, the body learning, piece by piece, to live again.