I would like to tear certain traumatic memories out of my brain, like old garments on fire, and stamp on them until the burning and the sensation and the repetition of burning is extinguished. But trauma doesn’t work that way. The offences I can’t forgive or forget are nestled like baby reptiles in my blood, my nerves, my bones, my flesh. Recent research suggests why defeating traumatic memories is so difficult.

I keep living into the same answer. It is the same answer because it is the same question. I give people millions of chances. I don’t start from cynicism. I make allowances for mistakes, fatigue, and frailty. And still I am disappointed. I am hurt, ignored, mistreated, or misunderstood. Time after time, I reach the same conclusion of midnight desperation: No More.

For someone who suffers from relational trauma and medical trauma, having to rely on doctors, surgeons, nurses, and healthcare administrators I don’t trust is a subtle but exquisite form of torture.

Perhaps I shouldn’t have had the massage. It had been almost two years since a professional had touched me in a compassionate, and not a clinical, way. My chemotherapy for breast cancer had finished, and I was trying to reconnect with my body and find some physical relief. My cancer recovery had begun. But massage releases both the angels and the demons within.

We are still mired in disease-centred care. As to being seen as a whole human in the healthcare system, you are out of luck.

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

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...