My journey to becoming a lawyer amid a cancer diagnosis
French philosopher Gabriel Marcel once wrote: "Hope and despair are born of the same womb." He also wrote: "Hope transcends a specific form of deliverance."
I was barely two weeks into my third year in law school when I found out I had a rare form of lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. It was at the height of the pandemic in 2020. I withdrew from my classes, underwent treatment, and eventually returned to school.
When the cancer relapsed in 2021 and I had to take a leave of absence for the second time, hope felt impossible. It seemed, at that time, that law school simply wasn’t for me. So instead, out of despair, I bargained with God. I told Him, "I don’t have to become a lawyer, as long as I make it out of this ordeal alive."
They say only 20% of patients experience a relapse. But they also say only 2% of the population is at risk of developing lymphoma in the first place. And of that number, only 0.075% get the rare subtype that I had. That’s 0.0003% of the world’s population. If my misfortune was that precise, how could Marcel tell me not to hope for something specific?
I spent my 26th birthday in a bone marrow transplant unit, fully isolated from the world like Jake Gyllenhaal in Bubble Boy, except unlike Jake, I was inside the bubble with my mom. I passed the time reading Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air and Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal, memoirs by surgeons confronting cancer, to try and make sense of my own. Mom and I filled the hours by watching travel vlogs on YouTube. Other countries felt like some distant worlds from a different universe. Even the Jollibee across the road that I could see from my window felt like Antarctica.
Of the 0.0003% chance for someone like me to have cancer, I was still told I was lucky. I had the “good” kind of cancer. It was treatable with multiple lines of treatment options for a chance at a cure. When one option fails, as my first line of treatment did, there is CAR-T. There is transplant. There is immunotherapy. Medicine is fast evolving.
Not everyone has those resources. The cost of survival in this country is absurd, and our public healthcare system is a broken labyrinth. A treatable disease like mine, delayed by diagnosis and treatment, can easily become a death sentence. My friend Jeryl, who had the same kind of lymphoma as I had, passed away in 2023. He was not able to receive treatment on schedule owing to financial constraints. That, in large part, complicated his case. He put up for sale the laptop he used for his studies at the UP Open University. His post became viral, and many people came together to donate. Jeryl was able to keep his laptop, but the money he gathered eventually ran out. His tumor was growing faster than the funds he needed to access treatment.
Jeryl and I faced the same disease, but not the same chances. After a total of two years in treatment, I was given the all-clear by my doctors. I went back to school, got my law degree, and took the Bar exam.
In When Breath Becomes Air, Dr. Kalanithi wrote, “I would have to learn to live in a different way, seeing death as an imposing itinerant visitor but knowing that even if I’m dying, until I actually die, I am still living.” In my 20s, I had already come to terms with the possibility of death. There are no discharge instructions for life—all I had to do was keep living it.
There was no “normal” for me to return to. The compounded effects of treatment made studying difficult. I struggled to retain concepts and couldn’t function on less than nine hours of sleep. Sometimes, I would be too nauseous to attend class. Hanging over my head was this constant fear that my illness would return, as it had before.
My law school transcript is the imprint of my struggle and survival. It tells a story: underload, incomplete, residency, leave of absence—the full gamut of permutations one can tinker with as an Iskolar ng Bayan. I thank the UP College of Law and my classmates for helping me navigate it all. I thank my professors for understanding when I had to prioritize my health.
Year after year, Bar results would come out, and my friends added “Atty.” to their names. I celebrated with them. Year after year, my dad would also tell me: Your time will also come, anak. He said it like it was certain.
On Jan. 7, I told my mom, dad, and younger sister that our time has come. I thanked them for their faith that I could see this dream through, even when I lacked enough faith in myself.
In the end, Marcel was right, and I concede. Hope doesn’t promise deliverance. That part is desire and optimism. We desire specific things: recovery, reunion, success. But hope is different. It is an existential, often painful act of endurance. And all love, as I have learned, is a form of hope. To love is to brave both joy and loss—to begin again despite grief and brokenness.
I don’t doubt the existence of a benevolent force, and I accept that it is beyond my own human understanding. That I insist on reducing my fate to a mathematical probability is proof of my frail humanity. But this I know for sure: That 0.0003% chance of going through what I did meant a 100% chance of being loved beyond all measure. Because what my simple mind can comprehend is love, in the form of kindness and compassion that I received from the people who stood by me. I promise to spend a lifetime paying it forward.
It takes a village to raise a lawyer. In the hours leading up to the release of the results, so many people sent me a prayer or a kind word. I am once again reminded how a community surrounded me from the beginning of my ordeal up to this moment.
I thank God for not holding me to my end of the bargain. He did not take what I tried to give up. Everything that followed was grace.
