This paper analyzes the centering of the diseased body in Radwa Ashour’s Midan Tahrir memoir, Heavier than Radhwa. Ashour, an activist, academic, and writer, was diagnosed with Schwannoma shortly before the Egyptian revolution of 2011. Her memoir weaves together the illness narrative and the narrative of the revolution, without reducing her body to a nationalist allegory for a sick nation. The memoir, while fully engaged in preserving the counter-memory of the Egyptian revolution, is essentially a reclaiming of the diseased body from the margins of hegemonic socio-cultural discourses about the female body. Using insights from Abir Hamdar’s the Suffering Female Body: Illness and Disability in Modern Arabic literature, I argue that the diseased body here, “ceases to be merely a signifier for some apparently more urgent socio-political trauma and becomes a physical, affective, and phenomenological state of being in its own right (97).” The medical precision with which Ashour details the stages and symptoms of her illness positions the cancerous body as a site of knowledge and power capable of reconstructing the activist’s personal memory as well as national memory.