After you discover you have cancer, it’s a daily dilemma about how honest to be when people ask how you’re doing. Saying “I’m fine” shares nothing of value. Being polite gets you none of the affirmation of a high five or the empathy of a long, warm hug.
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.
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Besides memoirs written by those who have cancer, there are books written by those who take care of those with cancer — the spouses, families, and friends. This is not surprising because cancer is hard on them, too. While caregivers may be more objective about the medical procedures, their accounts can also be heart-rending because they include the anguish of being unable to stop the pain their loved one is going through. Bearing witness to the suffering of others takes its own courage.
It starts with the PSA blood test. If it rises above 4, you might have prostate cancer. The next diagnostic step is a digital rectal exam. Then you move on to an MRI and probably a biopsy, where they take a dozen samples from around the prostate. Pathology looks at the tissue samples and delivers a Gleason verdict.
In her introduction to The Cancer Journals (1980), Audre Lorde, who had just gone through a mastectomy for breast cancer, sets out what she is going to talk about in her book: “the travesty of prosthesis, the pain of amputation, the function of cancer in a profit economy, my confrontation with mortality, the strength of women loving, and the power and rewards of self-conscious living.”
First, a confession. Even though I was an English major years ago, I haven’t read much fiction after the shock of my first wife’s unexpected death in her forties twenty years ago, and this includes the works of John Updike. Only the directness of nonfiction and poetry have been able to penetrate the shell of reality.
I don’t know much about Updike’s cancer. Updike didn’t, either. He knew he had cancer for only one month before he died. I found half a dozen poems in his last poetry book, Endpoint and Other Poems (2009), published after his death. That’s a small amount of material to form any conclusions. The other poems in this collection were written over a number of years.
I have a love/hate relationship with the BMI. Is “hate” too strong a word? There is no love. At every meeting with my oncologist, the notice flashes on the screen – “You’re still overweight, Bozo!”
So I do seriously dislike the BMI because I’m never in the good zone. I diet, exercise, skimp, and have said “no” to dessert so often that I feel guilty whenever I actually eat one.
This year marks the 20th anniversary of the publication of Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person: A Memoir in Comics, 2006, by Miriam Engelberg.
Suzanne Shea cued me in to this gem of a cancer memoir. It recounts the cancer journey of Miriam from symptoms to diagnosis of breast cancer to chemo to metastatic recurrence. What makes this memoir different is that the journey is told in cartoons. It’s a graphic memoir that brings humor into the presentation, and humor with cancer helps us keep our emotions from hardening.
Inspiration is a bird feeder. Every day we have to fill it up for it to be helpful.
Having cancer is a drag much of the time. We’re tired from the treatments, tired from trying to guess what is going to happen next, and we may not feel great, so we stay home in our sweltering, sweaty pot of woes so that we don’t bother anyone with our troubles.
We can all use a spark of something to liven up our day. It helps to get outside of the house for a time to remind us that the world still exists and to give us something to look forward to, even if we just walk around the block.
In her preface, Dr. Rita Charon lays out what her book, Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (2006), is about: “narrative medicine [is] defined as medicine practiced with the narrative competence to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved by the stories of illness.” She goes on to say that it provides “health care professionals with practical wisdom in comprehending what patients endure in illness and what they themselves undergo in the care of the sick.”
Some people think of themselves as survivors every day they’re alive. This is a prudent way to live. If we are never going to know for sure that all of our cancer is gone, why not focus on living as well as we can, instead of twisting ourselves into worry pretzels over everything that might go wrong?
The 25 essays in Bodies of Truth are by people who live with a chronic illness or disability. It was published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2019. Because most of the writers are patients, it’s a good companion to Where It Hurts, a collection of essays written by doctors, nurses, and other health care workers that was published by Intima Journal in 2026.
I scheduled an appointment with my urologist, the first one with him since my cancer treatments ended, the anti-hormone drug was completely out of my system, and the temporary side effects of radiation were gone. This will be a reality check about what changes in my body I may have to live with. My urologist asks – “What questions do you have?”
I think there is a better approach, and I think it’s important because my questions are limited to what I know to ask about. I’d rather be entertained by his fishing expedition even if I don’t know why he’s asking about certain things. I figure they’re diagnostic.
This is an aspect of cancer care that I’ve been waiting for — the emotions of a doctor caring for cancer patients.
I discovered the writing of Dr. Laura Vater because her essay “Goodbye Stethoscope” was also in the 2025 issue of The Examined Life Journal published by the Carver College of Medicine in Iowa. I was drawn in by its honesty and compassion.
Anne Lamott tells the story of having her tonsils taken out as an adult. After two weeks, her prescription for painkillers ran out. She called the doctor’s office to get a new prescription, and the nurse said No. The nurse told her to chew gum vigorously, which is the last thing that Lamott wanted to do with a painful throat.
George Beauregard is a doctor who writes about his bladder cancer and his son Patrick’s colon cancer in Reservations for Nine (2025). It’s a heartbreaking account that shares the harsh realities and tragedies of cancer, and he recounts his family’s struggles and courage while twice confronting the unthinkable. From his experiences with cancer as a patient, a parent, and as a doctor, he shares what he has learned.
My thanks to Cassandra Isley for telling me about this book. I knew little about colon cancer before reading it.
Going through cancer treatments is traumatic. If you have cancer, there are days when you bare-knuckle your way through with clenched teeth and a determined “Don’t get in my way” stare. What helps us cope is keeping a journal, writing down what is going on, what our doctors are saying, what we are thinking, and how we are physically and emotionally doing with all of this.
