Why should you care about Ifor Thomas if you don’t have prostate cancer? Because in this space we are a cancer support community. We care about each other’s journey with different kinds of cancer, and we seek to be supportive. To listen to what the others in our group are going though strengthens our bonds with each other and increases our understand of what cancer takes away from us and what it brings.
cancer humor
Cafés are therapeutic. Good coffee, often fresh bakery items, and a place away where you can imagine a life beyond cancer. Instead of feeling cooped up at home, you’re among people, so you feel connected to the flow of everyday life. You can be reflective and creative. No one has to know you have cancer, unless you want to share this, and the staff in independent coffee places can be a great support.
Cartoonist Miriam Engelberg had two favorite San Francisco cafés where she went every day to create cartoons about her breast cancer, searching for the humor that existed along its edges to keep her anxiety under control. There are two cafés I go to in town, depending on the weather – one is indoors and the other has a patio under oak trees.
Sarah, melanoma, also a mother, writer, actor, digital creator
Sarah is not her cancer. Cancer is not the warp and weft of her being. Cancer is woven into only part of her life. She wrote about this last week (9/8) in an insightful post on her Substack account Pause for Cancer.
Cancer is something that happens to you. It’s not something you are, and it’s not the work you choose to do to explore your passions in life, like being a writer, an engineer, a teacher, or a nurse. Her recent rumination started when she ran into a friend of a friend who said, “you’re the one with the cancer, right?” So her identity with this other person began with her being cancer. I imagine, and hope, that as they talked, probably about everything but cancer, that Sarah the Person replaced the initial label.
Sandra Steingraber, environmental cancer
We know that some cancers are inherited. We know that if you use tobacco, you are likely to get lung cancer (John Updike). We know there are industrial carcinogens in the environment around us, although we may not be able to name one.
What Sandra Steingraber does in her 1997 book, Living Downstream, is document the cancer-causing chemicals in the air, water, and land. The World Health Organization estimates that 80-90% of cancers are instigated by environmental carcinogens, occupational risk factors, and lifestyle choices. In other words, these cancers are preventable. Only 5 to 10 % are hereditary.
