Patient’s Voices
The Cost of Silence Has Been Death
After surviving cervical cancer at 25, Tamika Felder transformed personal tragedy into a global movement. In this CancerWorld interview, she reflects on fear, stigma, infertility, survivorship, advocacy, and why the world already has everything it needs to eliminate one of…
Sixteen Years Clear, Then it Came Back: A Husband’s Reckoning with Cancer, Faith, and the Ordinary Courage of Carrying On
For sixteen years, cancer became something we spoke about in the past tense. My wife, Lynn, had survived a rare smooth-muscle cancer (leiomyosarcoma) after two operations in 2009. Year after year the scans came back clear. Gradually, we stopped living…
I Am Alive: Letter to Oncologists
I am alive. A stage four cancer survivor—alive, in part, because of you, dear oncologists. And in part, because of the divine. I begin this letter this way, as it is intertwined on a road that is part medicine and…
From the New Yorker: What Cancer Takes Away
When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death. Before I got sick, I’d been making plans for a place for public weeping, hoping to install in major cities a temple where…