Women who Inspire: Darshana Magan

Darshana Magan felt nauseous before leaping off the cliff. She was strapped into a tandem paraglider with an instructor who’d been supportive and soothing, but her fear of heights sparked a roiling anxiety she has spent her entire life wrangling.  

On this sunny day in San Diego, she wavered briefly, then stared, wide-eyed and bold, at the view before her of grassy, golden sand cliff, of sky and sun, and of the Pacific Ocean, stretched in endless blue before her.  

She told herself: “I survived cancer; I can do anything. I don’t live my life in fear.” 

And she leapt. 

In the 30 years since Darshana survived her childhood cancer, the Midwestern accountant has snorkeled in the Atlantic off the coast of Trinidad, despite her fear of the ocean. She has skydived in Montauk, New York, and bungee jumped off bridges in New Zealand, some 130 feet high. She has faced her fears with courage and fortitude because it’s how she learned to survive cancer when she was 10 years old. 

Darshana grew up on the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, with her parents, brothers and a crew of Indian-American kids whose parents worked long days in the motel industry. They were an energetic group, biking and rollerblading until dark, and imagining they were pirates playing in the wreckage of old ramshackle piers. It was a dreamy, unencumbered childhood until a sudden fatigue kept her on the couch, listless. She was too tired to play, and her belly was swollen.  

Her mother took her to the pediatrician thinking it was a simple stomach bug, but a check of her abdomen revealed a swollen spleen. Then, bloodwork showed Darshana had chronic myeloid leukemia, a form of cancer in the bone marrow more common in adults than children. She was immediately referred to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital®. 

“My parents were crying, and I was crying because they were crying. That was the first time I’d ever seen my dad cry,” Darshana said. “I had no idea what was going on, what leukemia was.”  

By the time they got home from the hospital, all the families in the tightknit immigrant Indian community had gathered at her parents’ motel to process the news together. 

Darshana watched them approach with questions and worry, and found herself in the same position, confused and uncertain. What was leukemia like? Would she die?  

When her friend Angel approached her, Darshana told her she had cancer, without fully understanding what it was, and that she was going to Memphis for treatment. 

“Will you be back?” Angel asked.  

“I don’t know,” Darshana told her.  

Now, more than 30 years later, something about standing on that cliff in San Diego, or on the edge of a bridge harnessed only by her ankles, taps into the same kind of feeling she remembers in the early moments of her diagnosis. Fear and worry of the unknown. But the need to face it anyway. 

It was 1993 when Darshana was at St. Jude, and the treatment for her type of leukemia didn’t have a set protocol because it was so rare in children. She underwent two months of chemotherapy, and one week of high-dose, full-body radiation treatment. She listened to cassette tapes of Kenny G and Aaron Neville to ease her anxiety.  Doctors at St. Jude said she was a candidate for bone marrow transplant. Her younger brother, the donor.  

“Bone marrow transplant to me was like a rebirth,” Darshana said. “Every year I acknowledge the day I got my transplant more than I do my own birthday because without that day I would not be here.” 

It took a few months for her immune system to adjust and strengthen after the transplant. She lost her sense of taste and had to re-learn how to enjoy the texture and flavor of food. By the time she returned to her hometown that fall, doctors told her she had no evidence of cancer.   

“Cancer doesn’t define me, but it has changed my life in a huge way,” Darshana, now 42, said.  

Surviving cancer has helped her be grateful for simple moments, she said. 

“I stop to look for butterflies, rainbows. I’m a sucker for sunsets. These little things are happiness,” Darshana said. “Surviving cancer taught me to stop, sit back, listen, observe what’s around me, remind myself to live every moment like it’s special because it is.”