Without Surgery, I Was Given Three Months. How I Learned to Live Again

At eighteen, I was not searching for the meaning of life. I was searching for a way to stop waking up with headaches and vomiting. My vision warped, the shape of the back of my head changed, and my body seemed to know something my mind still refused to hear. An X-ray gave us no answer. A CT scan gave us one too clearly: there was a large tumor in the back of my brain.

A doctor told me that without surgery I might have about three months of normal life left. After that would come decline, loss of function, and death. When you are eighteen, three months usually sounds like a summer. In that room, it sounded like the rest of the calendar.

I did not become fearless. I understood that fear would have to come with me.

My mother and I wrote to clinics in Ukraine, Poland, Germany, Israel, and the United States. I searched for everything a person types when trying to bargain with death: “how to survive a brain tumor,” “brain tumor treatment,” “can a tumor be removed for free,” and “who performs brain surgery in Ukraine.” The internet answered with estimates between €50,000 and €100,000, other patients' stories, and silence between emails.

I was born in Kryvyi Rih in 1997. My mother was seventeen and studying at medical college. We lived modestly, so my first computer club at the age of four did not look like a room of monitors. It looked like a portal. I got my own computer at nine. It became my first big universe and, on difficult days, my most patient friend.

The street taught people to answer with force. I often lost that contest, so I chose a different weapon: curiosity. At twelve, I copied code from a library book into a notebook and made a tiny text adventure. Then I invented a paper “social network” at school, connecting people, drawing announcements, and even selling posters. I was far from the word “startup,” but already close to the urge to build something useful.

I dreamed about aviation, but mathematics and physics did not return my affection. I entered a telecommunications college, trained as a radio operator, and left during my third year. It looked like failure. Now I know that leaving someone else's route honestly can be the first attempt to choose your own. A few months later, route stopped being a metaphor.

A team at Mechnikov Hospital in Dnipro agreed to operate. They described the risk simply: about fifty-fifty. In films, this is where the hero gives a powerful speech. I spent the final week with friends and the person I loved, trying to live as though nothing was happening. Sometimes courage looks exactly like that: laughing while a countdown runs inside you.

The surgery happened. I was later told that my heart stopped briefly and the doctors had to bring me back. A titanium plate replaced a large part of the back of my skull. I woke up alive—a sentence that should have been a happy ending. It was only the first line of another chapter.

I could not move or speak. Pain, seizures, epilepsy, and hallucinations destroyed the simple idea that “survived” automatically means “won.” The body that had carried me through a city only days earlier became an unfamiliar machine with no manual.

After a life-threatening illness, people expect gratitude for every breath. I felt something else. I was frightened, in pain, and ashamed of my helplessness. I wanted to fall asleep and not wake up. These were not elegant philosophical thoughts. They were depression after serious illness and suicidal thoughts in a person who believed his old life had ended and the new one had failed to begin.

More than forty friends gradually disappeared. My mother stayed. I recognized her footsteps before I could turn my head. She did not promise a miracle or demand that I become inspirational. She simply came back again. On some days, hope is not a feeling. It is a person who walks into the room and stays when you have nothing to give them.

A survivor can be angry, ungrateful, and broken. That does not change the central fact: they are still here, and help still matters.

I am writing this plainly because silence makes loneliness more convincing. Thoughts of death were not proof that I truly wanted to die. They were a signal that my pain had exceeded my ability to carry it. I did not need a slogan. I needed another person nearby, medical care, and time.

First, a finger moved. Then my hand obeyed, then my elbow. One day I sat upright by myself for about thirty seconds. By the standards of my former life, it was nothing. By the standards of that hospital room, it was a personal record and proof that my body could still answer.

Translated into the language of my later projects, my first product was called “Do Not Fall for Half a Minute.” It had one user, no budget, and a very committed team made up of my mother and me. We celebrated that result more seriously than I would celebrate some later launches.

I relearned how to sit, stand, and take steps. Seizures, falls, and hallucinations did not obey a discharge date. I learned to notice warning signs of epilepsy, get somewhere safe, and ask for help. Recovery after brain surgery was not a straight line upward. It was jagged: two steps forward, one back, a pause, another attempt.

I returned to a computer for ten minutes at a time. I made small websites, posters, and text, and taught myself marketing and freelance work. The screen became a door again, but this time I was not entering it to escape. I was looking for a way to be useful, earn money, and recover the right to plan tomorrow.

The woman I loved came back into my life. She saw one of my seizures and did not run. Later, my daughter was born. Before her, “the future” was an abstraction that could be cancelled. With her, it became a person I could hold.

My disability pension was about forty dollars, while medication cost roughly three times as much. I took whatever computer work I could find: writing, websites, advertising. I made mistakes, sometimes chose desperation over patience, and started over. Fatherhood did not heal me by magic. It gave me a reason to continue on days when strength and meaning did not arrive together.

I love the photograph of my daughter and me laughing in the Netherlands. It does not prove that everything becomes good after illness. It proves something more modest and more important: after the darkest frame, the story can still change its light.

I tried to start again in Poland and found work in a factory. After a seizure, I was dismissed. In 2022, the war turned the future into a suitcase again: the Netherlands, then Belgium, attempts to get my daughter, mother, and grandmother to safety, distance, and another separation.

Belgium did not erase the past. It gave me housing, support, treatment that controlled my epilepsy better, and a chance to study again. I completed Dutch language courses. In a room full of people from different countries, I became a beginner once more. This time the word did not humiliate me. It meant I still had somewhere to grow.

The idea for MyRazom grew from loneliness: a place where Ukrainians and other people could find support without feeling unwanted. Not every project I built took off. Some had to close. After a hospital bed, a failed product no longer looks like the end of the world. It is data. I have already seen the end of the world—and it also turned out not to be the final page.

Mykyta.app was not created as a display case for a flawless person. It is where I show projects together with the doubts, decisions, failures, and growth behind them. I build products because creating returns a sense of movement to me. I write about them because one honest account can be more useful than ten polished case studies.

I still live with the consequences of surgery and epilepsy. I can still make mistakes, get angry, and lose direction. A second chance does not turn someone into a saint. It simply makes the price of time too visible to spend a lifetime pretending to be someone else.

A reboot does not delete the old files. It gives the system another start—and gives you the responsibility to choose what to open first.

If there is a philosophy here, it is simple: meaning does not always arrive before the next step. Sometimes you move one finger first, sit for thirty seconds, write one line of code, or learn one foreign word. Only later do you discover that these small actions assembled a life you could not imagine the day before.

My diagnosis in this story is a brain tumor. I deliberately do not call it cancer, and I will not turn one person's experience into medical instructions. But I know this page may be found by someone searching for cancer treatment, brain tumor symptoms, recovery after brain surgery, or hope after a cancer diagnosis. My path cannot tell you which treatment to choose. It can remind you that asking for another medical opinion, discussing symptoms and rehabilitation, and telling a doctor about persistent depression are actions, not weakness.

If you are searching for “how to live after a diagnosis,” you do not have to believe in the rest of your life today. Find the nearest step and a person who can help you take it. Call someone you trust. Tell your doctor how bad things really feel. Ask someone to come and stay. Hope sometimes begins before confidence, at the moment you stop hiding dangerous pain.

If you are thinking about suicide, fear that you may hurt yourself, or have made a plan, do not stay alone. If danger is immediate, call your local emergency service; in the EU, call 112. In Belgium, you can call 1813 in Dutch or 0800 32 123 in French, free and anonymously. In the United States, call or text 988. Elsewhere, contact your local crisis line or emergency service. This article cannot replace help from a doctor, therapist, or crisis professional.

I cannot promise you a happy ending. I can leave honest evidence: on the days when I wanted not to wake up, I had not yet seen my daughter in the Netherlands, a Dutch classroom in Belgium, my future projects, or this sentence. The hardest chapter did not know it was a chapter rather than the whole book. So I will end this story with a comma,