We Are More Than Our Diagnoses

Come and hear Briana read her letter to cancer out loud at our upcoming Perkatory event! October 9th, 7:00pm ET

Dear Cancer,

You might think you’re strong.

You’ve shown up like a thief in the night, uninvited and unapologetic. You’ve attacked bodies indiscriminately, disrupted lives without remorse, and left scars both visible and unseen. It starts with a phone call, a biopsy result, a routine scan that turns into something far more sinister. You steal time. You steal peace. You steal futures that were still being written.

You take loved ones away from one another. You walk into lives and detonate certainty, unraveling what once felt secure and replacing it with fear, confusion, and grief. You leave behind hospital rooms filled with beeping machines and whispered prayers. You fill calendars with endless appointments, treatment plans, and scans that seem to blur together. And worst of all, you leave questions, so many questions, that no one knows how to answer.

But what you underestimate is the power of the human spirit.

It shows up in the quiet resilience of someone sitting in a sterile waiting room, alone but unbroken, waiting for news that might change their life. It’s in the strength of a mother who holds her child’s hand as the IV drips steadily into her veins. It’s in the laugh of a teenager who wears their bald head with pride, refusing to be defined by what you’ve taken from them. It’s in the breath of someone who, despite everything, still chooses to get up each day and keep living. Keep loving. Keep fighting.

Our strength doesn’t come from being untouched by you. It comes from enduring you. From surviving you. From learning to live fully and deeply in spite of you. We gather courage in the little moments, like making it through treatment without any major side effects, walking to the mailbox unassisted after surgery, or simply eating a meal without nausea. We measure triumphs differently now, and every one of them matters.

You tried to silence love and laughter. You thought fear would drown out joy, that pain would overpower celebration. You assumed that the sound of crying would be the loudest thing in the room. But you were wrong. We are louder. Louder in our love, louder in our laughter, louder in our relentless insistence on living, on truly living, even with you in the room. Even when you hover, when you lurk, when you try to darken every corner of our lives.

You’ve caused so much loss. You’ve brought people to their knees. But in your wake, something remarkable has risen.

You’ve united strangers in grief, yes, but also in strength. People who never knew each other now sit side by side in treatment centers, sharing stories and encouragement. A nod across a chemo suite becomes a lifeline. A shared laugh between IV drips becomes a moment of humanity amidst the clinical. You’ve built communities we never expected to need but now can’t imagine living without.

In trying to break us, you brought us together.

You forced us to see each other more clearly, to recognize what truly matters. We slow down. We hold hands longer. We say “I love you” more often. We no longer wait for the “right time” to take the trip, to make the call, to forgive, to say the things we used to keep inside. You didn’t teach us these things intentionally, but we learned them anyway. You taught us urgency, and we turned it into presence. Into meaning.

And here’s something else you need to know: you may change bodies, but you will never define them.

We are more than our diagnoses. We are not reduced to the sum of our scans, our surgeries, our scars, or our symptoms. Our bodies carry your mark, yes, but they also carry love, resilience, creativity, and joy. We are parenting, painting, writing, singing, dancing, and hiking, often while carrying the weight of you. And that makes our joy even more powerful.

Some of us live with the knowledge that you might return. Some of us carry the burden of permanent side effects, of daily medication, of bodies that don’t feel like they once did. Even then, we persist. We find new ways to adapt. We learn to love the parts of ourselves we once resented. We see beauty in resilience; in the bravery it takes just to wake up and try again.

You don’t get the final word. We do.

And when I say “we,” I mean the cancer warriors, the survivors, the caregivers, the researchers, the doctors, the nurses, the loved ones who wait and pray and advocate and endure. We speak with resilience. With knowledge. With love. With the fierce determination to carry the names of those we’ve lost and protect those still fighting.

We are amplifying voices, sharing stories, funding research, and pushing forward with every ounce of energy we have. Every clinical trial, every treatment breakthrough, every survivor story, we continue to celebrate. We are so much stronger together.

So, Cancer, know this: you may be feared, but you are also outmatched, not just by medicine, but by the people you tried to destroy and failed to silence. By the moms who still cook Sunday dinner after recovering from life-changing surgery. By the children who sing and make new friends in the hospital halls. By the men and women who show up to work every day with ports in their chests and fire in their hearts.

You have taken much. But you cannot take everything. You cannot take our will to live, to fight, to hope. You cannot take the music from our souls or the love from our lives. You cannot take the stories we tell, the memories we cherish, or the legacies we build.

We will not let you.

Sincerely and unshakably,
Briana Ghbein