Chocolate, Cigarettes, and Survival

What a Candy Bar Taught Me About Survival

The neighborhood corner store in Jordan was small, with an uneven floor and neon lights, but to me, it felt vast. Its shelves were lined with colorful wrappers, plastic toys, and rows of canned goods that my family could barely afford. I was nine, and my mother and I were standing at the checkout counter with the essentials—rice, lentils, and a few vegetables.

My eyes wandered to the chocolate bars near the cashier. I reached for that small, gleaming object of desire, too precious to belong in my hands, knowing we could not afford it but hoping, for once, that I might be wrong.

“No,” my mother said softly, her voice thick with an apology. She turned to the cashier, with one hand clutching the few bills we had, and the other carrying the plastic bags. The stranger behind us spoke up, his voice cutting through the sound of items scanning. “Let me take care of that,” he said, immediately inserting his credit card into the machine, paying for not only the chocolate but our groceries too. His kindness was immediate and overwhelming. I took the candy from the counter, feeling its weight in my small hands—heavy with more than just sugar. It was a symbol of everything we could not have, but for that moment, we had it.

I caught a glimpse of my mother’s face as she thanked the stranger, expressing a delicate mixture of gratitude and embarrassment, asking to pay him back. It was not the chocolate that had embarrassed her; it was the fact that she needed someone else to buy it for me. That piece of candy, small and simple, was out of reach, a fleeting comfort and an ache that stretched beyond the candy itself in a world defined by scarcity.?

That moment in the corner store felt frozen in time. The uneven floor wavered beneath my feet, and suddenly everything began to shift. The flickering neon lights faltered. The colorful wrappers crumpled, and the shelves disappeared into shadows. The sound of scanned items and the stranger’s voice softened, overwhelmed by the monotonous mechanical beeping of the vital signs monitor. I was no longer standing in the corner store.

The chocolate disappeared, and the plastic bags became worn-out blankets strewn across the floor of a dark cold room. Years later, in 2019, I stood in the doorway of a patient's home, then working as an EMT. The space was dimly lit, not by design but by necessity. There was no furniture, no electricity, and no heating, just a few worn blankets on the floor with the smell of cigarettes in the air. My patient, a 20-year-old female with asthma, was sitting on one of the blankets struggling to breathe with a few cigarette butts next to her on the floor. One of my team members muttered under his breath, “Imagine living like this. She’s making it worse for herself.”

I looked around the room, taking in a similar emptiness that once marked our lives in Jordan. Just like the chocolate had been out of reach for me, so too were healthier choices for her. Her smoking was not just a reckless decision; it was a brief escape, a grasp for something familiar, something small and comforting in a life plagued by struggle. I could see it as clearly as I had seen that chocolate bar—her actions were not born from ignorance or apathy but from the sheer exhaustion of survival. This could have been me. This could have been us.

Growing up, we paid for medical care in cash, since refugees like us could not access health insurance. Every visit to the doctor was a calculated decision—do we go now and spend what little we have, or wait and hope that it was “just the flu?” The patient sitting before me likely faced the same impossible choices, caught between the cost of survival and the price of relief. Like my childhood chocolate, her cigarettes offered a moment of solace in a world that did not offer many.

At that moment, I did not see someone who needed to make better decisions. I saw someone trying to survive in the only way they knew how. We usually judge people by their choices, but my experiences taught me that survival often leaves us grasping for any small comfort we can find.

The stranger’s gift in that corner store had been a lifeline, not just because he bought us food, but because he recognized our shared humanity in a way that was often overlooked. That same recognition is what drives me now, as I work with patients whose lives are shaped by these same cycles of deprivation. The lifeline is not always material; sometimes, it is understanding that the struggles are more than just poor choices—they are the result of a system that keeps us reaching for hope, but puts a hefty price tag on it.

When I think about that chocolate bar now, it reminds me of how survival shaped me. Even the small things we reach for—whether it is candy or cigarettes—are often the only moments of control we have in lives where control is a luxury. I want to give my patients more than just medical care: a lifeline so that they will not have to choose between survival and hope, even if comes in the form of a candy bar.