Invincibility. It doesn’t exist among humans, but I love invincibility as masquerade, as defensive strategy in cancer and trauma...

Rule #1 and #1000: Never try to cheer up a cancer patient. Is it really so hard? Letting others be themselves?

A survivor of cancer and childhood abuse explains how empathy and defense have become her superpowers, sprung from scarcity.

A survivor of multiple cancers reflects on her relationship with panic, how PTSD has shaped her life and her character.

Medicine as transaction. I suppose I am not suited for it. But I ask myself, what are these startling realities calling me to do?

A Canadian cancer patient shares observations from the front lines of an overtaxed and underfunded system

Looking back, it seems obvious that what happened to me that summer was traumatic. I was a fifteen-year-old receiving chemo for Hodgkin’s...

Besides the fact that I have never abused anyone (besides myself) in my lifetime, here is my most significant triumph over trauma: I...

Dread and terror are best dispersed by mundane reality. At the age of 15, as I made the final steps into my isolation room for a bone...

Trauma prepares one for trauma. I have a deep and developed knowledge of suffering. I know what it is and how I want to handle it. I know...

Every journey is easier once begun. So I think to myself and say to myself as I cross another threshold in the architecture of oncology....

Before, during, and after my bone marrow transplant as a teenager, the experts at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center did not disguise...