Clichés about cancer are plentiful. Patients are supposed to be brave and strong. That’s what popular culture expects from them.

Anne thinks the familiar slogan “Fuck cancer” misses the mark. Rather than condemning cancer, maybe we should condemn the world that gives it to us, bankrupts us for a cure, and leaves us alone to die.

As a sick person, she realized her friends, her doctors, and society in general treated her in very different ways. Her new knowledge about the profiteering, patriarchal, institutionally racist corporations involved in cancer care and treatment is something that will continue to affect her day after day after day. 

We learn what song you don’t want to hear on the radio en route to chemotherapy; why some people are sexually attracted to cancer patients; and why triple-negative cancer has no targeted treatment.

The social expectation of how someone with breast cancer should act puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on women who live with the disease. Breast cancer is neither natural nor gratifying. In fact, it plays right into the hands of health-care corporations and charity institutions. These organizations are often only in it for the money – not to help cancer sufferers. 

A recommended book of how poet and essayist Anne Boyer reckoned with – and is still reckoning with – her cancer diagnosis. The pain, trauma, vulnerability, and rage she feels as a result of her diagnosis and treatment will stay with her for the rest of her now-shorter life. Whether or not you die of cancer, it’s not something you ever get rid of...