In October 2025, Emily Koh was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer.
Though she could feel herself growing physically weaker, she didn’t let it dampen her love for travel.
In a Facebook post on Monday (April 27), the 62-year-old shared a series of photos from her recent trip to Chiang Rai, where she posed with monuments such as Wat Rong Khun.
“Can a cancer patient travel? Should a cancer patient look a certain way? Bald? Haggard? Confined to a sterile hospital bed? No. They can be vibrant; they can laugh until their sides ache; they can hike, and they can see the world,” she wrote.
Emily shared that before the illness, travel was her “soul’s language” and something she enjoyed greatly.
However, chemotherapy left her physically debilitated.
Even the simple act of breathing became a luxury I couldn’t always afford,” Emily shared. “Rowing, hiking, skating — the things that once made me feel alive — slipped into the realm of the impossible.”
She added during that period, she was “swallowed by a tide of” grief, confusion and anxiety.
But Emily didn’t want to let the illness win.
“Then came the day I simply refused to stay down. I wanted out,” she said.
Bit by bit, she pushed herself to move and walk more, beginning within her neighbourhood.
“One lap, then another. I just kept walking — walking past the ‘death countdown’ of those first few months, walking through the agonising wall of chemotherapy resistance, walking all the way to this very moment,” she said.
https://www.facebook.com/emily.koh.188/posts/3464973693659574
Finally, she mustered up enough strength to go on a trip to Chiang Rai.
“I never thought I’d travel again. I never thought I’d truly make it.
“But as I sat in a garden recently, huffing and puffing with every strained breath, I made a silent vow to the Reaper: ‘Don’t you dare give me an opening. As long as there is a single breath left in my lungs, I will wait for you to blink — and then I will strike back. I will show you exactly what the power of life looks like’,” she wrote.
