Five hours is a long time, inside a chemo room. For 61-year-old actor and politician Nafisa Ali Sodhi, who finds stillness discomfiting, it's like an albatross around her neck. "You can't be a mareez [patient] and sit quietly," she says. Sodhi prefers indulging herself, instead. Lying on the hospital bed with tubes jutting out of her body, she wields her phone to take pictures of friends and family, sitting by her side. The photograph later makes its way to her Instagram handle.'

"My chemo watchers," she captions it. Sodhi has always been active on social media. "I really enjoy it. I like sharing my life journey there, because it is fun and it makes people happy," she says over telephone, just a day before she goes in for her next chemotherapy session. When she was diagnosed with Stage 3 peritoneal — a two-layered membrane that lines the organs of the abdominal and pelvic cavity — and ovarian cancer in November last year, Sodhi didn't steer away from doing what she knows best. She still wanted to bring a smile on people's faces. But, not by keeping her followers ignorant. "My life has been an open book," she says. That her first diagnosis had not pointed to cancer, and that, "a simple CA125 blood test" could have spared her the anxiety and uncertainty, she is now experiencing, meant Sodhi had to share her story with the world. "Knowledge is power. Why go downhill, when you can only go up from here?" she asks.