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

I didn’t have a PTSD episode while awaiting my colonoscopy to annoy my gastroenterologist, but annoyed he was. He is a busy, important...

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

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 survivor of cancer and childhood abuse learns she is not entirely free of her troubled past

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...

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...

Not allowed to speak my thoughts or show my feelings, I was driven by my family of origin into art. More like, taken, tied, threatened,...

Whenever I doubt myself, the continuity of my mind and my body, all I need to do is dance, turning and winding and bending and...

Hold off, Death, I say, Not for me today, Not for the immediate future. I walk away healthy from the cancer clinic. I walk away healthy...

Even before I confronted death at age 15, I had tastes, desires, and a temperament that did not fit. I danced, and sang, and immersed...

I went to college unsure of myself. I had been driven underground by my own family, told again and again I was wrong, ugly, and stupid,...