They say that we are all fused together by that of pain. Pain brings out the rawest form of human kindness and humanity and out of suffering emerges the strongest of souls. Pain pulls individuals together, something magnetic, something holier than gravity itself. Whether you can align yourself with someone else’s pain due to your own experience, or the experience of a loved one, cancer can be the epitome of pure, human agony.

Sometimes with cancer in particular, you can only get through it five minutes at a time, with each and every breath counted to propel you onto the next five-minute time span. For the last eight months, I have lived my life in five-minute intervals. Talking myself through the course of how to make it to the next five minutes, while chasing the fugitive that is cancer.

When you are initially diagnosed with cancer, you immediately want to reset the hands of time and relive your life in a way that you believe it could have been prevented. A fresh reboot, in hopes for a different outcome. But the truth is, no matter where we hide, cancer would still have a way of finding us. I am a true believer that every cancer patient is not reduced as a human because of their fortune, but rather given the opportunity to grasp the meaning of what it means to live, in the truest of forms. Cancer patients past and current, survivors of our yesterdays and tomorrows and the deceased share an innate bond, a bond that is unbreakable and a guild that is unlike any other on this earth, for we are fused together by pain. The thing is, there are two types of pains, one that hurts you and the other that changes you.

Within the last few days, I have been sick in bed, which always provides me with a considerable amount of time to be in my own head. Undoubtedly over the last several months since my diagnosis, there have been many twists and turns but I realize that even though there have been greater moments of grief than fortune and many things have been taken from me as a result, there is one thing cancer cannot take from me; the bond I share with millions around the world, despite their religion, sexual preference or color of their skin, we are all one in the same, fighters.

That said, I felt compelled to dedicate this post to all of my brave, unwavering cancer peers, we are all survivors and fighters, no matter the outcome. God bless you all and next time you feel alone in the world of cancer and whenever you find yourself doubting how far you have yet to go, just think of how far you’ve already been.

Don’t quit.