Monthly Archives: January 2011

It’s Not over When the Radiation Burns Heal

Last week’s installment of This American Life focused on people who take a long time. There was the guy who took 17 years to marry the love of his life.  There was the writer who waited since childhood to publish a certain story. And there was the author Katherine Russell Rich who has been living with stage IV breast cancer for 18 years.

I can’t pretend to know what it is like to have metastatic breast cancer, never mind what’s like to live 16 years longer than the oncologists expected. But I do know what it’s like to take a long time with something.

It has taken me a long time to recover from cancer.

I am not talking about healing from radiation or having my incision scar stop hurting (it never has). I am talking about coping with the emotional and existential fallout that comes from having a cancer bomb go off in your life.

That part takes a long time, but I didn’t know that when I got diagnosed with breast cancer at 32. My doctors warned me that chemotherapy and radiation would be miserable. But no one told me that adjusting to life after cancer would be just as hard.

In the first year after of treatment, cancer continued to infiltrate my life. I remained in chemo-induced menopause for months. I sat in my office wondering why I left my baby at home when I might not live to see him enter kindergarten. I watched friends plan second pregnancies and career moves, and I felt adrift. I couldn’t plan past my next cancer screening.

I tried to share some of my fears with friends, but even the most well-meaning were perplexed by the persistence of my worries. They would have known how to counsel me through divorce or infertility, but cancer wasn’t on their radar yet. I felt kind but gentle pressure to move on. It was as if there were a shelf life on my cancer experience, and it was fast approaching expiration.

So I did what every young survivor yearns to do: I found other people who get it. I sought out lectures and workshops designed for people my age, and it was a revelation.

I heard Page Tolbert, a social worker at the Post Treatment Resource Program at Memorial Sloan Kettering, explain: “People think of getting a cancer diagnosis as a crisis. Sometimes the treatment itself is a crisis. But people don’t often acknowledge that the end of treatment can be a crisis as well.”

This is especially true for young survivors. Oncology social workers who treat us have identified a common theme: young people tend to summon all our strength to sprint through treatment. We are in such a hurry to regain our “normal” lives as soon as the radiation burns heal that we are caught off guard by the intensity of emotions that hit us as soon as we slow down.

One of the young survivors I spoke to said that even though he went through a brutal regime of chemo and radiation for nasopharyngeal cancer at the age of 28, he still thought the first year out was worse than treatment itself.

“When I got my scan and I was clean, it was the happiest day of my life, but it was horrible, devastating. People don’t understand that. It was a huge letdown. Everybody didn’t want to deal with it. The moment I was clean was an excuse not to talk about it. My soul still had cancer, and I wasn’t getting treatment for it.”

Young people’s skin and bones heal quickly, but it takes awhile for our souls to mend. It can take even longer if our loved ones don’t understand why we aren’t moving along faster.

That’s why I decided to write a book about life after cancer for young people. And that is what I will be blogging about a lot here: how cancer continues to shape our lives long after the port comes out, our hair grows back, and our friends think we are better.

There is no way to avoid the pain and confusion that descends at the end of treatment. Yet knowing you are not alone can help you cope. Almost all the survivors I have spoken to said the best remedy they found was connecting with other young survivors.

Because we understand that taking a few years to rebound from getting a life threatening illness in the midst of your youth isn’t so long after all.

Emily Cousins

Emily Cousins is a writer and editor who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 32 and nine-months pregnant with her first child. She is currently writing a book about what it’s like for young survivors once cancer treatment is over-when the radiation burns have healed and the hair has started to come back, but everything else is completely out of whack. After almost a decade living in New York City, Cousins now resides in Northern Arizona with her husband, son, and the daughter she was lucky to have post chemo.

Cancer as Romantic Comedy: The New Kate Hudson Movie

Last week the Weinstein Company released a trailer for the new Kate Hudson romantic comedy called A Little Bit of Heaven. According to IMBD, “It’s a comedy about a guarded woman who finds out she’s dying of cancer, but when she meets her match, the threat of falling in love is scarier than death.”

The film seems to have all the trappings of the genre: a successful career gal (who is probably also a klutz like so many of her celluloid sisters), a stylish wardrobe, a cluster of dedicated sidekicks, and a handsome love interest.

Into this sleek, Cosmo-sipping world stalks cancer. Only it’s not the cancer that most of us young survivors would recognize—the harrowing, painful, and heartbreaking kind. It’s cancer as plot device: the troublesome obstacle separating our plucky heroine from true love.

And did I mention her true love is also her oncologist? Talk about meeting cute.


Not everything about this movie puts me off. Considering that most people still believe cancer only happens to grandparents, I am always glad to see young survivors represented in movies and on TV.

I also admit to having a soft spot for romantic comedies. They provided a welcome distraction during my eight months of treatment for breast cancer. The complete works of Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, and Sandra Bullock could be as mind-numbing as Ativan.

And I have no ethical problems with Kate Hudson’s character falling in love with her oncologist. Most survivors I know harbor very intense feelings about their doctors. I certainly loved my first oncologist. He was young and handsome and smart—and gay, which along with my being married, kept the boundaries very clear—and he happened to save my life. What I felt wasn’t romantic love, more like in-the-trenches love, but when he left the cancer center to return to school, it did feel like a break up.

It’s not the oncology love or even the lack of baldness that I object to in this film. It’s the breezy nature of everything. Hudson’s character casually tells her friends she has cancer in the middle of dinner. She has glib conversations with god, played by Whoopi Goldberg. She is a storehouse of one-liners.

All survivors turn cancer into a punch-line sometimes. We need gallows humor to help us deal with the shitty nature of the disease. But judging from the trailer, A Little Bit of Heaven doesn’t have the biting, clear-eyed wit that rings true. It’s has the Hollywood softball variety.

I fear the film will deal with mortality in the same cavalier, cancer-lite manner. It’s unclear from the trailer whether Hudson’s character dies or is given the clichéd “second change.” But it seems to treat facing death as a good way to deal with commitment issues.

I have interviewed scores of young survivors, and their experiences with mortality are far more profound than that. They talk about being unable to plan past the next scan, grieving lost opportunities, and feeling the dread of living an abbreviated life. “It is dying YOUNG that bothers most of us,” one sarcoma survivor told me. “At 24, I don’t even have a boyfriend. My job is sorting mail. I have accomplished nothing in life of any importance yet.”

This kind of unvarnished truth simply doesn’t fit within the confines of a romantic comedy. Still, I am not giving up hope that Hollywood can capture what it’s like to have cancer as a young person. Nor am I assuming that the Tears of Endearment versions are the only ones that get it right.

I am holding out faith that another upcoming comedy will strike the right note. Live with It, previously titled, I’m With Cancer, was written by Will Reiser of Da Ali G. Show and stars Seth Rogen, Joseph Gorden Leavitt, and Anna Kendrick. It’s about a 27-year-old guy who gets spinal cancer. The blurb says, “With the help of his best friend, his mother, and a young therapist at the cancer center, Adam learns what and who the most important things in his life are.”

Sounds like it promises sharper humor and a lot more soul than A Little Bit of Heaven can deliver. But let me know what you think. Do you think Hollywood can ever get cancer right?

Emily Cousins

Emily Cousins is a writer and editor who was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 32 and nine-months pregnant with her first child. She is currently writing a book about what it’s like for young survivors once cancer treatment is over-when the radiation burns have healed and the hair has started to come back, but everything else is completely out of whack. After almost a decade living in New York City, Cousins now resides in Northern Arizona with her husband, son, and the daughter she was lucky to have post chemo.

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