The first thing you notice in the ‘day-care oncology unit’ at IGMC is that it looks more like a modest dental clinic that has accidentally wandered into oncology. There are reclining dental chairs instead of luxe chemo recliners, IV poles that sway like deodars in a storm, and visitors who treat masks as optional accessories rather than mandatory gear. Between the antiseptic scent and the rustle of shawls, strangers become family, and this modest Himachal ward feels like a place where hope quietly drips into your veins with the chemo.The women in this ward could each carry a novel. There is Neetu, the policewoman with cropped hair who takes her drip in uniform and worries more about pending files than white blood cell counts. And there is the daughter-in-law who quietly hides her mother-in-law’s stage-4 diagnosis because she wants to gift her a few more months of unafraid days. Around them, attendants pass steel tiffins, IV poles creak theatrically, and the beeping machines perform a hesitant background score.My own journey as a stage-3 cancer patient began far from Shimla in the City of Angels, Los Angeles, where cancer centres resemble boutique hotels with attached coffee bars. I could have gone to Chandigarh or Delhi, of course, with their glossier reputations, but I wanted my oncology care in IGMC — close to the mountains that have held every other crisis of my life. In LA, chemo arrives on a platter; numbing sprays are offered before injections; there are latte menus and soft, coordinated blankets. Coming from that to IGMC feels like checking into a busy rural guesthouse. The linens may not match, but someone will always find you a pillow.One day, my very serious sounding injection appeared in the chemo ward without its usual ice accompaniment. It was the kind of injection that looks as if it was designed for cooperative cattle rather than anxious humans. The young doctor on duty studied the syringe and then looked up at me and asked, “Do you know how to put this?” As a wrong kind of doctor, I could honestly say I knew where it went, but not how it should go in. So, we did what modern medicine and patients sometimes do together: watched a quick YouTube video, nodded gravely at the instructions, and shared a laugh that was half humor, more than half prayer.She loaded the formidable syringe. “It’ll pain a little,” she warned gently, in the same calm tone someone might use before saying, “Now, let’s teach you how to cross the formidable Himalayas.”Not all pain here comes in syringes and drips. Getting treatment at a government hospital in the hills is an endurance sport. First, the token counter is up; the regular OPD is further up; the doctor’s office is down; the chemo ward is in another building, also down; and the photocopy shop, naturally, is back up again. By lunchtime, you’ve done a yatra: administrative mountaineering with chemo side-effects.Amrit Pharmacy — amrit meaning elixir — adds its own modest healing touch. In a world where bills can feel more dangerous than biopsies, it is oddly soothing to have a chemist who suggests the generic.The ward is also a place of unexpected, intimate encounters. One afternoon, an old man in his chemo session became fascinated by my broad Burberry spectacles. He gazed at them, finally asking me if he could try them on. I handed them over; he turned his head and searched for a reflection in the shiny surfaces around us. So, I flipped my phone to the camera and held it up. He peered at his reflection, and smiled at himself. For those few seconds, the chemo ward blurred out; we were just two people at an optician’s shop, trying out frames. “Bohot badhiya lag raha hoon,” he said. “Kahan se liye?” he asked. In that moment, the spectacles stopped being designer; they were simply borrowed vision, a tiny holiday from being a patient.Threaded through all of this is the quiet efficiency of women like Ritu, who takes blood work with the concentration of a calligrapher. She gets it right in a single, gentle attempt. “Bas ek baar mein ho jayega, tension mat lo,” she says. In a place where bruised arms and multiple pricks are routine, her careful hands feel like a daily miracle. If veins could choose favourites, mine would have adopted Ritu long ago.At the centre of this improvisational orchestra stands Dr Manish Gupta, an oncologist whose quiet brilliance is matched by an unfussy empathy that makes hope strangely easy to hold. He explains options as if they are entirely manageable, and for a few minutes, they are. It is not hard to imagine Cancer looking at his calm face and saying, “I’ve picked the wrong doctor — let me just disappear before he files my paperwork properly.”The Himalayas have always asked their people to live with broken roads and sudden landslides; the chemo ward at IGMC is that landscape turned inward, with saline drips instead of mountain springs, dental chairs instead of terraced fields, and women who keep showing up despite everything.There is no numbness medication here except your own power to face injections that look suspiciously cattle grade, but there are shawls pulled over shivering shoulders, an honest chemist, an old man admiring himself in borrowed specs, and a slow, steady drip that proves courage is not the absence of fear but the decision to keep turning up.Perhaps my dream is simple: that this ward will one day trade its dental chairs for real recliners and its rusting IV stands for bright, sturdy pillars of hope; until then, we make do with what we have — mountains at the window, humour in the corridors, and hope on a drip beside women who keep turning up, redefining what it means to be strong.— The writer is a lawyer and anthropological archaeologist. She is also the founding-director and founding president of the Himalayan Institute of Cultural & Heritage Studies (HICHS), and Himalayan Conservation & Preservation Society (US). Follow her on: Instagram @thehichs and www.hichs.org/www.hcpsusa.org