Alexei Bagirov is 36 years old. He had barely turned 18 when a small lump appeared on his side. At first, no one paid it any attention, but the “lump” began to grow rapidly, and very soon the young man could barely walk. Alexei shared the story of his illness and recovery in the Project “I Will Live!”
“It felt like I had strained a muscle, and then the swelling started,” Alexei recalls. "That's when it became clear that I had some kind of complicated blood condition. There was no precise diagnosis yet, but they told me I needed chemotherapy, and that there was a high probability that I wouldn’t live. That's exactly what they said. I was 18, and I had never even been hospitalized before. This all happened in my second year of university. I was in shock. It was the New Year holidays, and they weren't admitting anyone to the hospital. I don't know how it is now, but I'm 36 now. Back then I was 18. It turned out to be — anaplastic large-cell lymphoma.”
You can't be prepared for this...
At that moment, I wasn't thinking about any parties or gatherings. I was thinking, how could this be? Even a 1 percent chance that you won't exist seems huge, and this was far from 1 percent. I couldn't believe my own story. When the doctor told me, and I heard the word “chemotherapy”... For me, it was pure horror. Before that, I'd only seen photos of those bald, emaciated children. The first thing I did was go to the university to see my friends. Everything was like a blur. I could still walk then. And I already had this feeling that everything could end. I went as if to say goodbye to everyone. So that tomorrow, if something happened, I would have had the chance. That's the feeling I had. It was very strange and wild. I was in shock, honestly. I just wasn't prepared for it.
Why am I here?
First, I was admitted to the oncology center in Kashirka Hospital. It was strange, very strange. They took me there after the holidays, and before the holidays... I don't remember what was going on with my stomach. Some kind of attacks once a day; I couldn't think about anything at all. My temperature would spike suddenly. I dreamed of being admitted somewhere and at least getting some relief. By then, they were already assisting me under my arms, in a wheelchair. I was placed in a ward. There, as usual, there were a million stories like mine. My parents were told: “Why did you bring him here? We'd rather treat those we can save.” I didn't hear this, but I understood it from my parents’ faces. I had only one thought: “I just wish it would get easier.” After the IV drips, I did feel better. I started getting to know my wardmates, asking what was wrong with them. One said: “I have pancreatic cancer,” another said: “I have stomach cancer,” the third — “I have thyroid cancer.” Four people, all adults, and there was one elderly man. May he rest in peace; I found out he passed away some time later. Then I thought: “This is bad, very bad, that all this happened to you.” And then — what am I even doing here?! It's terrifying when you can wake up and one of the beds is made up. It’s better not to think about it.
There were also surprising moments. I had many complications, one of them being fluid in the lungs, which makes you choke and unable to breathe. It was incredible — people with cancer would open the window and leave the room so I could breathe. I've never seen anything like that before or since. It's amazing that people who probably have nothing left still have this innate kindness in them. It was an incredible story.
Why me?
I was 18, I was like a dandelion that wouldn't say anything bad to anyone. Living in such a cloudless world. And then this story. I started honestly whining, saying: “Why me? What did I do wrong?”
I thought and found people I might have wronged. But were these “wrongs” really so bad that I ended up here? Not to say I was an angel. I think I lived the same life as everyone else. More or less. I was never involved in any hooliganism or anything like that. I was a good B-student. I don't remember ever hurting anyone.
It was all very hard: being stuffed with medications, not being allowed to eat because I couldn't. Without being used to it, you could go crazy. I whined and threw tantrums. Then one doctor came to see me— honestly, I don't even remember what he looks like now — and said this: “Look. You have two options. Either you whine and do what we tell you poorly or not at all, and then it's just a matter of time before you're finished here. Or you do everything we tell you, and then you have a chance to get out of here.”
In the movies, the hero gets up, starts taking his medicine. Inspiring music plays. And everything becomes fine. For me, it wasn't like that at all. I listened to this whole story and went back to whining. But when you're backed against the wall, there's not much choice. I thought that if I want to live, and I have at least a chance, I need to do all of this, I need to get treated.
What to do when there's nothing good?
After that, this story isn't about the hero pulling himself together, gritting his teeth, and enduring. Having a steely character and all that. For me, it was completely different. I pulled myself together for a certain period when they started my chemotherapy. This story is about how you're, like, slowly dying. I can't describe it. I couldn't walk, because I had no strength in my legs. It felt like there was no reason to live. There were many times I didn't want to keep going. I wanted to give up many, many times. It's not like you pull yourself together once and go. It's as if life stopped at the worst possible moment. Someone hit pause, and it will never get better. You live like that, and every second stretches into an hour. It becomes just this ward. The IV stand nearby. Utterly hopeless. Plus, they also tell you that if you get out of here, you'll be disabled. And that's the worst thing of all. They told me I wouldn't be able to go to the gym. I didn't go before that either, but when they tell you that... Restrictions that mean you won't be able to move... It's strange to hear; it's not certain it will happen, but they were preparing me for it. And that's very hard. When they tell you “pull yourself together, endure it, and tomorrow you'll have health from here to the moon” – that's one thing. But when they tell you that even if you recover, there's a very high chance you'll be disabled. You have to find new motivation to fight that. It was hard, very hard. I don't know why they did that. If it's 100% certain – then okay, you have to say it, you have to prepare people, but if it's not necessarily going to be that way, I wouldn't tell people they might end up with something wrong. Now I'm 36. I go to the gym, I can do pull-ups with extra weight, and so on. I don't look like Superman, but I feel very good. So that was strange, and it was hard. It's very difficult to find any motivation to move forward if you're told that what lies ahead isn't all that great.
“I didn't do it alone. That would be a lie.”
When a person achieves something in life, say a racer wins a championship, he's certainly great. But behind him are mechanics, strategists, doctors, a whole bunch of people. I was lucky; I have close people who gave me incentive. That is, if you're sinking, there are people who help you. You can't pull everything on your own. At least, I didn't have that kind of character. I'm an ordinary person. I was 18, but it's not even about age. If I had gone through a lot in those 18 years – no questions. But I hadn't been through anything at all. I had no life experience. My family always wanted to make sure everything in my life was easy. And if they could help with something, they helped. I was taught. My father – I wouldn't say he's the softest person. But everything that happened was justified, everything was explained to me. If something needed to be taught, and I did something wrong, they'd sit me down and explain what I was doing wrong, and so on. But I had never gone through anything like, I don't know, trauma. I'd never been cut open before. And here they operated on me, cutting things out from both sides. So, I wouldn't say I did all this on my own. That would be a lie. When you can't find strength in yourself, you're very lucky if there are people nearby you can lean on. Honestly.
Empathy
There were times when someone did something very unpleasant to me, and I wished they would trip over something. And when they tripped, fell, and I saw they were in pain, I felt uneasy. It's not that I felt sorry for them, but I felt pain alongside them. I don't know how to explain it. Apparently, with age, I've become more sentimental. What's surprising is that you can't maintain this in everyday life. If someone cuts you off on the road, you won't be sentimental; very different emotions take over. As psychologists explained to me, you can't control your first reaction; it's very difficult. Maybe some monks in Tibet can. If someone shines a light in your eyes, you squint. That's a fact. But what you do after, that's something you can work on.
Hospital stress and simple things
My parents, sister, friends, and family friends helped me. I couldn't have walked this path alone. I lacked motivation, strength, and some kind of story. What helps you isn't some grand things, like when they tell you you'll recover and have a house by the ocean. No. Sometimes simple things give you strength. When someone just asks you what to bring you. Someone always stayed with me in the ward. My aunt would come – and my God, a person with a ton of her own problems – dropped everything, came, and stayed with me. And when someone went to the store nearby, they would ask me: “What should I bring you?” I had a whole list of things I wasn't allowed to have, and I constantly asked the doctor: “Can I have this? Can I have that?” And when there was that anticipation that something good, something great was coming – it was super wonderful. Then they'd bring something; it wasn't expensive, but the very moment of waiting and receiving – it was incredible. You can compare it to when they let you go home after chemo. They told me that after the third round of chemo, they might let me go home. It was unusual, very unusual. I'm very grateful to the hematology center; I recovered here, but it's constant stress. They can wake you up at any moment and go, for example, drill into your tailbone to extract something. It feels like you're completely unprotected. And when they let you go home, you know for sure that a nurse won't wake you up to poke you with needles, that you won’t receive some unpleasant news. At home, that doesn't happen. You don't become the person you were before, but at least you feel safe, you feel calm. At home, it was very calm. And the very moment they told me they'd come to get me. Friday evening. My God, how I waited, you have no idea. I kept asking: “Well, where are they?” And they, my parents, said: “We’re already here, on the third ring road.” When they picked me up, my God, it was so incredible. You leave the ward, wearing a mask, of course. You get in. I even rode home in a mask. I only took it off inside the house. It was incredible. You wait for them to take you home. It's just an incredible story.
The first positive trend
When I had my first chemotherapy, afterward I weighed 40 kilograms, and I was very thin. No eyebrows, no eyelashes – like all those stories on the internet. And I overheard my parents talking to the doctor, saying there was positive progress. That's where my recovery began. Maybe the doctors wanted to give me hope. But after the second chemo, it was already noticeable that the lymph nodes had shrunk a little. The light at the end of the tunnel began to show, or rather flicker, when the phrase “positive trend” was uttered. I was, in the good sense of the word, dying to hear that. When they took me for an ultrasound or somewhere else and said that some nodes, the iliac ones – I don't even know where they are – had shrunk a little somewhere in there, I was like: “Good. It's working, so it's good.” That's when you get the feeling that maybe things will be okay.
First days at home
Honestly, I just sat on the sofa in my room and got used to it. To being safe, to nothing threatening you. I mean, not that nothing threatens you, but no one will bother you, no one will do anything. That's the kind of story it was. And you sit at home. I even forgot the door code because I hadn't been home in so long.
Stand up and walk
When I started walking, it was an incredible story. The doctor tells me: “You can start now. It's time for you to get back on your feet.” I'm like, “Yes, yes, yes. Right away, right away, I feel it. I just need to gather a little strength.” I kept putting it off. Not because I needed to gather strength, but because, honestly, I was afraid that I would try and fail. That's why I kept putting it off. This moment of my supposed disability, which they had warned me about earlier, it was just killing me inside.
I started trying to stand up. My father and mother took turns watching over me. At that time, my father and I were together for three days. And I said, like: “Alright, let's try.” He said: “Let's.” By the hospital bed, there's a metal support, maybe so you don't fall out, I don't know. So, he helped me, I stood up and held onto it. My father asked: “Standing?” I said: “Standing.” It was incredible. At that moment, you feel like you can do more than you think. An incredible feeling, just incredible. And I remember taking a couple of steps around the room. I had this incredible feeling that I had some inner strength, that I could do a lot.
I had this IV pole, with saline solution constantly dripping between chemos. And my mother came to see me. I was already in the hallway. And there I stood. Well, how did I get out? I shuffled very slowly. But I got out of that room. My father assisted me. I leaned on that thing you roll, with the saline solution (the infusion pump stand). It was a long corridor, and I was standing with my back to it. My room was somewhere far away. And I head voices from behind. My mother asked:
— How are things?
My father answered:
— All good.
— Why are you here and not with your son?
— Well, there he is! — and he pointed at me.
My mother didn't even expect to see me there, because I hadn't walked before. And then I heard my mother crying behind me. It's just incredible. That's when you start to understand that you can get out of here. Well, understand... You gain more faith in your own strength. That's very important. It's precisely faith in your own strength. Besides incentive and motivation, you must have faith in your own strength, because if you don't believe in yourself, doing the same things, you'll get worse results. When you don't believe, your chances of recovery are much lower. Significantly lower. This faith helped. I remember saying this phrase: “Why don't you walk? It's so great.” It was incredible, but I got tired very quickly. I took three steps, and it felt like I had run 100 kilometers.
Anyone can be broken
Faith in myself didn't come immediately or completely. It came and went. Everyone has a limit to what they can endure. I noticed many times when I came to the surgeon, I was like: “Alright, now they won't be able to touch me or get to me so easily.” When the surgeon went in with the knife where it was numbed, everything was fine. But then, when he went a bit further because he needed to get another lymph node, it felt like I was being cut open raw. I almost blacked out from the pain. Why am I saying this? To say that we are not infinite. Absolutely anyone can be broken.
The fact is is that some people have a little more fuel, and some have less. One can stand longer, while another falls immediately. But there’s a different point as well. Your strength isn't just about how hard it is to knock you down; or how hard it is to upset you because there's no improvement after chemo, because you can't have something. No. It's about whether you can find strength from somewhere when you have no strength left, when you lose motivation, when you don't want to do anything. That's the real indicator. Not when you have a surge of strength after some success and you move forward. No. As someone great said, “Success is the ability to move from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”
I would bet that the one who has a better chance of getting out is not always the one who stubbornly pushes through to the end. You do need to push through, because if you fall after every gust of wind, give up after every piece of news and yell that you won't take your pills, of course, the road will end very quickly. Resilience is needed. But the greatest resilience is shown when you have no strength left, and you just want to unscrew that IV drip so they can take you away from here, because you can't fight anymore, you just shut down and rest a little. And you tell yourself: “Now I'll rest a bit, and then I'll continue.” That's it.
I had a different story. I didn't always stand up and walk. Rather, I crawled. What helped me was that at that very moment I realized I wasn't all-powerful. That I could be broken too. I was just lucky it turned out that way. I'm not a superhero, I'm an ordinary person. They told me: “You can lie down if you want. No one will judge you. But if you don't move yourself, that's it.” And then, little by little, I found some strength within myself.
No one can walk this road for you
When it's very hard and there's no way to move forward, it's absolutely normal if you don't even want to live. You're very lucky if there are people around. You can lean on them if you want to go, if you want to crawl, or, as they say, at least lie in the right direction. They can help you move forward, not lose faith. But the most important thing at that moment is not to deceive yourself. They cannot walk this road for you.
You can give up everything, throw in the towel, or you can keep going, and then you have a chance to recover. I have two options: either I can get what I want, what I strive for, in this life, or I will cease to exist along the way. If you don't move anywhere, just sit and say everything is bad and will never be good, you'll never get anywhere. That doesn't mean you have to endure. “Endure” is not the right word; it's precisely about sitting and doing nothing, just enduring. But to “stand firm”– that means enduring in some places, and pushing harder in others regarding treatment.
Learning the right lesson
When I recovered, I had this feeling that the whole world now owed me for what I went through, for this hell. It didn't last long, about a year and a half. And then I had a relapse. They sent me back. I don't know what higher powers look like, but they definitely exist. And they sent me back because I hadn't learned the lesson. They gave me four more chemotherapies, and then through the “Gift of Life” foundation, they looked for a bone marrow donor for me. And somehow they found this lady from Dresden. The bone marrow arrived and miraculously took. My blood type changed. After that, I thought I had learned my lesson. Since then, I've been living differently.
In your own eyes, you are special. It's very hard to accept that after everything you've been through, some passerby might step on your foot, not apologize, and even yell at you for standing wrong. Or someone in the metro might push you. But it grounds you very well. It was difficult at first, but I'd like to believe the lesson was learned. This moment – that no one owes you anything – is sobering, and it's very hard to accept. It took me more than a year to understand that. I'm just like everyone else, and what happened to me was so that I could learn something, so that I could do something, absorb something, and somehow correct my life.
Happiness is the road
And then this happened. I suddenly woke up with the thought that I had this intense urge to live. If the illness didn't break me, it's unlikely anything else can. That's a completely stupid thought, very childish, to be honest – there's little common sense in it. And then I decided that I would look really cool on a motorcycle. I had never ridden a two-wheeled vehicle except a bicycle, and I'm not even a bike fan. Anyway, I got a motorcycle. I started riding because I thought I looked insanely cool on it. And I rode that motorcycle all summer. Then I wanted more. I bought a more powerful motorcycle, even though it was completely stupid, having no professional skills whatsoever. I really liked the Italian MV Agusta F3 in photos. Insanely beautiful, just an incredible motorcycle. I didn't have enough money for it. So, I bought a Honda. It was in a racing paint scheme. Everything was great, awesome, truly incredible. I flooded my entire Instagram with this story. Everywhere, on all social networks, there was me riding this Honda. Then I calmed down a bit, and I developed a principle: if it's not a necessity, it should be what you want, not what you can afford. So, I sold the motorcycle.
I started saving money, somehow managed to save up, and waited 64 days for the new motorcycle to be delivered from Italy. It was just incredible. There were three reviews: in Chinese, English, and Russian. I watched all of them several times. Over those 64 days, I almost went crazy. Finally, it arrived. Later, when something didn't work out in my life, I knew: “It's okay, because I have a motorcycle like that in my garage.”
It seemed to me that I really needed to ride like the pros, with my knee down in the corners. I went to a racing track, practiced, rode. They shot video from a drone. It was great. The doctor then told me: “This is probably better than people shutting themselves in at home after illness and never going out.” Happiness? No. Happiness is when you're moving toward something. And the road itself.
The art of living is...?
The art of living is being honest with yourself. If you didn't do something today, don't try to placate yourself and make a deal with yourself, like “oh, I'm just going through a phase right now, but tomorrow I'll get up and definitely do something.” You know why you didn't do it, and you have to admit to yourself: “Yes, okay. I didn't do it.” You can enjoy things that give you pleasure. As long as you don't deceive yourself. If you get pleasure from doing something good for someone – do it. It's like an album where you stick stickers. The stickers are emotions you can experience. I'm so lucky that I feel emotions very strongly. If something upsets me, it upsets me deeply. If something makes me happy, it makes me deeply happy. I'm collecting an album of moments from my life. Whatever they may be. You don't have to skydive for that. You can just sit with someone close and look into the distance. You will be happy in that moment. I wouldn't necessarily call it an art, but I collect stickers for my album.
