VIDEO

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Living with Cancer—Dealing with Anger and the Question “Why Me?”

2021

When being diagnosed with cancer, it is easy to feel anger or self-pity, but I have never allowed myself to dwell on these negatives.

01:36 min

Advice on Dire Diagnoses From a Survivor

With each diagnosis, knowing her life hung in the balance, she was “stunned, then anguished” and astonished by “how much energy it takes to get from the bad news to actually starting on the return path to health.”

Article
Jane E. Brody
2007
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The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Data, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

A week after her forty-first birthday, the acclaimed poet Anne Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer.

Book
Anne Boyer
2025
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The Big Ordeal

Coping with cancer is hard. It is an emotional ordeal as well as a physical one, with known and somewhat predictable psychological responses. And yet, patients often feel isolated and alone when dealing with the stress, anxiety, depression, and existential crises so typical with a cancer diagnosis.

Book
Cynthia Hayes
2025
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Memoir of a Debulked Woman: Enduring Ovarian Cancer

Diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2008, Susan Gubar underwent radical debulking surgery, an attempt to excise the cancer by removing part or all of many organs in the lower abdomen.

Book
Susan Gubar
2013
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Reading and Writing Cancer: How Words Heal

Elaborating upon her “Living with Cancer” column in the New York Times, Susan Gubar helps patients, caregivers, and the specialists who seek to serve them. In a book both enlightening and practical, she describes how the activities of reading and writing can right some of cancer’s wrongs.

Book
Susan Gubar
2016
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What Cancer Takes Away

When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.

Article
Anne Boyer
2019
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My Own Life

A month ago, I felt that I was in good health, even robust health. At 81, I still swim a mile a day. But my luck has run out—a few weeks ago I learned that I have multiple metastases in the liver.

Article
Oliver Sacks
2015
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Why Cancer Patients Don’t Have Enough Information to Make Decisions About Their Treatments

In the past four years, Bruce Mead-e has undergone two major surgeries, multiple rounds of radiation and chemotherapy to treat his lung cancer. Yet in all that time, doctors never told him or his husband whether the cancer was curable — or likely to take Mead-e’s life.

Article
Liz Szabo
2017
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Young People Facing End-of-Life Care Decisions

It is extremely difficult for anyone, especially young people in their 20s and 30s, to be told that their treatment(s) haven’t worked. If the cancer you have continues to progress despite treatment, it may be called end-stage cancer.

Article
National Cancer Institute
2020
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Living with Mortality: Life Goes On

Understanding the patterns of reaction to a prolonged illness with perhaps years of remission and a significant chance of being cured will help you put your emotional survival in focus while your doctor concentrates on your physical survival.

Article
Malin Dollinger, Bernard Dubrow
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