When I was diagnosed with cancer, I thought I knew what the hardest part would be. It was not the treatment. It was not the side effects, though those were brutal.
It was the isolation of feeling like no one around me understood what I was going through, even the people who loved me most. The scale of this experience is larger than most people realize. National Cancer Institute projections estimate 2,114,850 new cancer cases in the United States in 2026.
And the population living with cancer is growing. The NCI estimates 18.6 million cancer survivors in 2025, projected to reach 26 million by 2040. Every one of those people is navigating something the medical system treats primarily as a physical problem.
I want to name what that something is. Cancer does not just affect the body. It affects your sense of self, your relationships, your ability to parent, your capacity to work, your willingness to plan for a future you are no longer sure exists.
It produces fear, anger, grief, and exhaustion, and those emotions do not resolve on the schedule of a treatment plan. They sit with you, sometimes for years. What made it worse, in my case, was that the people closest to me could not fully understand.
But they had not woken up every day with cancer. They did not know what it was like to feel your body betray you, the effect it has on your mental health, to wonder whether this would be the scan that changed everything. And I did not want to burden them with the full weight of what I was carrying.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
