Everything Changes - The Guide to Young Adult Cancer

I just got back from a ten-day heavenly trip to Georgia with Shannon: lush palms, Spanish moss, butterflies, lazy boating on a lotus lined river, and my mystery fever (just for a day). I get mystery fevers every few weeks and have for a long time.  I down Tylenol, drink tons of water, lay low [...]

Vote Now: Should I Delete Spaz as A Friend on Facebook? I’m not trying to go 6th grade on us; I think this is a great topic up for grabs, with a friend who never minds public exposure or controversy (or at least he didn’t 20 years ago; maybe we’ve changed since high school!) Tuesday [...]

Superficial Twit There have been times throughout cancer where I have the intellectual capacity of a three-year-old and my attention span is nil.  I’ve tired of reading mind numbing glossy mags, yet could not surmount a thick biography or engaging book of history if my life depended on it.  Is there hope for a young [...]

Okay, so you are too sick to stay in school. Yeah, so you are too weak to go to work. That doesn’t mean that you have to halt your education or give up on having goals. When I was glued to the sick bed, I still wanted to make to-do lists, keep my mind active, [...]

I’m not a mail-order bride to-be living in Odessa. I don’t relish gothic rock, have roommates or HIV. I do, however, know what it is like to live with a disease that gives you a more realistic perception of life, and what it is like to butt heads with people who take life lessons from [...]

“My body feels like a defective unit on the assembly line,” said Wafa’a Badriyeh, a 24 year old lymphoma patient who I interviewed in my book Everything Changes. I concur. Oddly enough, one of my best remedies for feeling subhuman is to focus on bodies that are superhuman. Time flies when I dive into the [...]

What else sucks about young adult cancer besides puking, wrestling with death, and feeling like you may have no future? Carrying around in your purse a plastic day-of-the-week med reminder box that reeks of the nursing home life. For years I have placed on my to-do list the Martha Stewart-esque craft project of attacking my [...]

Hours upon hours in a chemo chair. Months of car trips to radiation treatment. 100 forevers racked up in waiting rooms. Too tired, too car sick, too anxious to read but deeply in need of a supreme cancer distraction? Make your time fly with This American Life, a weekly radio broadcast/podcast hosted by Ira Glass [...]