Your Life After Cancer

Everyone else is dead, too

Liz A
Liz A
Jul 30, 2017 · 6 min read

Your stomach feels better — you imagine all the flora in your guts coming back to life, unfurling with color and with health. The palms of your hands and soles of your feet — once red with irritation and the skin so thin it tore with every grasp — indicate no legacy of the trauma save a darkened streak on your thumbnail that will grow out and disappear. This time the surgical incisions healed much more quickly, and the scars never really bothered you anyway.

You can use heated styling tools on your hair again. You are so glad you kept your hair, but you needed to cut it short when it was all over. People compliment your haircut and tell you you are glowing. You know you are no more radiant than you were before, only that now, much of the chemotherapy metabolized and flushed out of your body in your urine, you are no longer haunted with that pallor of poison.

Everyone is dead. Or you were dead and you came back to life, only it feels like it has been a thousand lifetimes, and you no longer recognize the place or the friends or the lover you used to call home. You feel like you are in a science fiction movie in which you have been accidentally fast asleep for years and you wake up and it is the future, or maybe the past, and nothing makes sense. Everyone you loved or knew or in whom you anchored parts of your identity is gone.

Ghosts who seem a lot like the people who populated your life drift around you, and though they seem wistfully familiar, you know there is something off. Or maybe there is something off about you. There is definitely something off with you. Suddenly the little things you had stopped worrying about — your next career move, the next time you will have sex or go out dancing, the vibrating promise of the future — come rushing back to you in the vacuum left by the absence of upcoming chemotherapy or surgery dates. You know they are not really “little things,” but they seem petty, and yet, they fill you with a kind of anxiety and dread you had forgotten while facing down your mortality. You wonder if you can only live in the face of dying.

You know you are changed, but you do not know if the changes took root in the profound parts of you. You are still a little tired, but you want to do so much. You want to pick up the pieces and move on, but everyone else has moved on, too, sweeping up the pieces with them. You know you are changed, and you know you are changing again, so you do not really know who you are.

You are sad — depressed even — and ashamed to admit in the most quiet part of your soul that you miss the cancer and the cancer treatment. It gave you something to pin yourself to, a banner to rally under, a good reason to cry, a convenient reason to stay in, a plan of some sort. The cancer is gone and you are still crying. Shouldn’t you be happy?

But you are not. You are restless with the energy of a year and a half of having to tend meticulously to your body, and not your heart or your soul or your head. You maybe fell in love with the cancer. The cancer was an excuse, it was also an inspiration. In its darkness, your light burned more brilliantly. What are you now on your own? Shouldn’t you be happy? Why aren’t you happy?

You know you ought to have compassion for yourself. You go through the motions of telling yourself that this is okay. This — a Sunday that seemed to fall down all around you, resting on the precipice of the night before. You want to go do something, but the only appealing thought, now, is to hide in your room and lock the door and refuse to answer when your partner comes home and knocks. You do not want to talk to him. You do not want to talk to anyone except the others who are like you. Everyone else is dead. They do not understand.

Cancer taught you love, but it also taught you loneliness. You find camaraderie in other survivors. You only want to talk to survivors. And only survivors like you. The young ones. The ones who were not expecting it. No matter who they are, you can bond over this illness, which is a deeper connection than the one you feel with everyone else right now — the non-survivors, the healthy people. They are ignorant. They complain, not knowing how good they have it. At times you can hardly stand them. Your friends, the people who held you through this journey but who could not walk with you, they will not know — until it is too late — that they are already having the best time they will ever have because, at least for now, they believe they are invincible. They do not know love is looking them in the face. They squander their health. They do not know that all the strength they will ever need is right inside of them right now. Cancer taught you that youth, indeed, is wasted on the young. It certainly was wasted on you, so karma snatched it away.

(You know this is an unfair assessment — and that’s how you know you are an adult who has undergone tremendous growth. Still, you let the thought pass in front of you, and you name it so, as god named the beasts in the creation of the heavens and the earth.)

When the bartender asks you for your ID, you almost want to spit in their face. But there is nothing about your appearance that communicates you lived through cancer, through something horrible and scary. They see you, cherub-cheeked and with a head full of thick hair (only you know it used to be much thicker) and maybe they guess your breasts are fake, and they assume everything except the truth. But maybe you are assuming too. We make a lot of assumptions. So, without any trace of the ire you actually feel, you fish your ID out of your wallet and let them inspect it. “Oh,” they say, handing it back to you, “You look so much younger.”

You had plans for today, but they are all washed away in the tears you have been crying all morning. You have tried many times to salvage what is left of your Sunday to no avail. You give into the pain you are feeling, decide you will smoke pot, take an Ativan and maybe a painkiller, and lock yourself in your bedroom, and hide in the dark until tomorrow. Tomorrow, at least, is Monday, and you can go to the office, and cling to the facade of who you are there, which is also just as lonely as the facade you wore last night, trying to listen to your friends talk, but only being able to imagine their dead bodies laid out at the foot of the shadow lands, no longer inhabited by their souls, but left to turn back into fertilizer and food for the worms. Similarly, you will lay this weekend day to rest in your bed, a cloak of drugs drawn over you, trying to press the world out.

Intermittently crying with the newfound yet primal pain of knowing that living is only the delay of death, and that we all, ultimately, die alone.


Never Tell Me the Odds is a series of short nonfiction based on and surrounding my battle with a rare and aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of thirty-one while keeping my hair on my head.

Never tell me the odds

The story of a thirty-one year old queer Hispanic woman undergoing treatment for a rare and aggressive breast cancer while keeping her hair on her head.

Liz A

Written by

Liz A

A complicated woman writing about complicated things — and not giving a single fuck. San Francisco’s FORMER resident Internet cat expert.

Never tell me the odds

The story of a thirty-one year old queer Hispanic woman undergoing treatment for a rare and aggressive breast cancer while keeping her hair on her head.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade