Why Wouldn’t Cancer Radicalize You?

Walkers, wheelchairs, canes.

Tattoos, skin grafts, port scars.

Those just-growing-in chemo bobs and badass wigs.

Jackets, handheld fans, water bottles.

Bodies in every shape, color, and state of being.

Queer, straight. Cis, trans, nonbinary.

A snack in every bag and a lot of stickers.

This is what greets you when you walk into Young Adult Cancer Camp. In other words: what greets you is something beautiful.

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My nervousness melted away as I sat at a table with other cancer-camp newbies, fresh off of long drives or crammed flights from West Virginia, Texas, New Jersey. Survivors wear yellow name tags. Caregivers—spouses and partners, mostly—wear blue. We get to talking about our travel days, where we’re from, what we all do for work or school. We don’t talk about cancer.

We all get dessert.

As the weekend progresses, as I sit with more strangers at more meals, as I walk in the woods, swim in the pool, try my hand at archery and tie-dye the hell out of my camp t-shirt, I start to notice something.

Buttons, pins, t-shirts. A casual mention here, a side joke there. Not about cancer, although we do end up talking about that, too. About, well, *gestures vaguely* all of this. The state of things. The United States’ slippery descent into fascism taking place right before our eyes.

I remember ruling out packing any of my abortion rights t-shirts, but keeping my concert tees from Chappell Roan and Maggie Rogers. Subtle, easily passed off in the event that my roommate pulled out a MAGA hat or started talking about vaccines causing autism. You have to do some measure of that, these days, walking into a situation with strangers. Well, you don’t have to, and maybe you shouldn’t, but I do. (I’ve had enough “fight,” lately, anyway.)

Those worries turned out to be unfounded. Every time I talked to my new friends, I was pleasantly surprised. I didn’t have to defend or explain anything. Not only did they implicitly understand what I meant when I said, “I took the semester off” or “my port,” but also: “because Medicaid is at risk,” “because who knows how accessible birth control will be by then,” and “because clinical trials may not even have funding.”

We came from all over North America. We have all sorts of jobs, although there is a notable contingent of folks in helping professions like OT/PT/Speech therapy, social work, teaching, and nursing. There was a markedly higher number of women and femmes than there were men—maybe due to some toxic masculinity things, maybe due to some cancer-presentation-demographics things, maybe both. Almost everyone has at least one pet (including one person with a very cute rabbit). The only two concrete things all of us had in common are a cancer diagnosis at a young adult age (between 19-39) and a willingness to come to a grown-up summer camp for a few days.

And yes, willingness to come to camp means being comfortable with a certain degree of uncertainty, like potentially traveling out of state, eating foods you didn’t choose or prepare, and meeting (and sleeping in the same room as) strangers. It involves being able to pay a $150 registration fee, travel expenses, and potentially unpaid days off and/or child and pet care. It involves the inherent risk of traveling with a potentially-immunocompromised body and/or a body in pain. But still.

Why are our politics so aligned, here, even though the only thing we have in common is a cancer diagnosis at a young age?

Well, why wouldn’t they be? Why wouldn’t cancer radicalize you?

During the developmental age where we are continuing to define our identities and beginning to define our adult relationships, suddenly, the story changed for each one of us. There was a plot twist. A life-changing, terrifying one. It impacts whatever our plans were for the future: education, career, romantic relationships, friendships, family—both our families of origin, and the families we may be building.

Not only do the effects of a cancer diagnosis take us out of time in a strange, and strangely traumatic, way, but they also set us on a new timeline. This new life is frequently defined by things we didn’t choose, like treatment, and things we wish were different, like lost time, lost friendships, lost opportunities, and shorter life expectancies.

The wedding you wanted to go to, but you missed. The pregnancy you’ll never have. The home you can no longer afford. The move you can no longer make. The career goal that is now fully out-of-reach. The uncertainty that keeps you up at night. The image of yourself dying young, of your friends and family left alone, and broken. The people you thought would be there for you who left.

On the bus to the airport, in fact, we spontaneously began listing out all of the “cures” that have been suggested to us by various unhelpful onlookers. (Ivermectin, colloidal silver, salt caves, echinacea, “adaptogenic” mushrooms, going vegan, going paleo, going gluten free, soy free, seed oil free, consuming a veritable shitload of salmon, I could go on…)

But we aren’t some wholly cynical, hyper-scientific, down-in-the-dumps bunch either. There are crystal necklaces and crucifixes, good luck charms and mantras tattooed across forearms. There is optimism, and faith, and hope.

We laugh. A lot. Sometimes, about death. You can do that, at cancer camp. Even with people who used to be strangers.

That’s the thing. In this new life, this post-cancer reality, forming intimacy with strangers becomes a vital, if forced, skill. The majority of us have spent at least some time in the hospital or in other inpatient settings (some, especially those receiving transplants, have been hospitalized for months on end). Even those of us with relatively “mild” treatment plans have spent more time than most people our age receiving often-uncomfortable care from near-strangers. You don’t get to choose who your night nurse is any more than you get to choose whether or not to have cancer—so it’s in your best interest to learn that your night nurse likes dogs and has three kids, isn’t it?

And it is decidedly not in your best interest to hate your night nurse because of the color of their skin, their country of origin, their gender identity or, well, anything else.

In fact, even if you come into treatment feeling some type of way about people groups (people of color, immigrants, trans people, etc.) you will quickly find yourself both relying on your needs being met—and actually having those needs being met—by the very people you have been taught to despise. You will soon have to ask someone you were taught to despise for more pain medicine and learn to trust that they will listen to you. You will soon have someone you were taught to despise notice you shivering and offer you a warm blanket, or hold your hand while you cry about how shitty this all is.

And this does go both ways! I’m more than positive that I had healthcare providers I disagree with politically, in suburban South Carolina. (I tried finding data on this but, surprise, surprise, what’s available is mostly about physicians’ politics. Anyone who has ever been hospitalized can tell you how infrequently you interact with physicians compared to everyone else who works with patients, but I digress.)

Meanwhile, even outside the hospital, we have no choice but to be shaped by the experience of being sick in our culture.

All of us have had bills that shocked us pile up in our MyChart accounts, so why wouldn’t we want a world where all of us can access the healthcare we need without going broke?

All of us have had our lives saved by scientific innovation and information sharing, so why wouldn’t we want a world where more people have what they need to find more ways of saving lives?

All of us have had well-meaning people in our lives overstep, give us head colds our immune systems can’t fight, make our diagnoses harder, or ghost us entirely, so why wouldn’t we look for community among people like us, even if cancer is one of the only things we have in common?

All of us have also had loved ones and strangers alike take care of us in ways we couldn’t have previously imagined, so why wouldn’t we want to extend that kind of care and assumption of goodwill to all of those around us?

All of us have bodies that look, feel, and operate differently than they used to, so why wouldn’t we want every body, no matter how they look or function, to be treated with loving kindness, justice, and empathy?

All of us know that planning for the future is at best a shot in the dark, so why wouldn’t we want that future to look better than the present for not just our individual lives, but our collective?

And all of us know that our lives could change on a dime, that the scan could be bad, the treatment could not work, the cancer could come back for even those of us who are cancer-free. So why wouldn’t we treasure every moment we get to be alive, here, together?

We have all had to pick the pieces of our lives up and reconstruct them, brick by brick. Maybe some of us are still rebuilding.

Maybe we all are, really, and those of us who get cancer young just understand that reality better. Maybe those of us who get cancer young have much to teach our culture about how we belong to each other, how very intertwined our lives are.

Maybe we’re teaching those around us those lessons just by living. Still.

Maybe we’ll never stop.

Read more of Liddy’s work at her substack: ourbodiesourselves.substack.com.