Fired You During Chemo
More unexpected and unwelcome curveballs
Bestselling novelist Cara Lockwood was sitting in the chemo chair, poison dripping into her veins every Friday, when she got the call. Her 35th novel had just hit the USA Today bestseller list. She'd done the book tour — wig on, mask on, fighting nausea while smiling for photos.
The reward for all that effort? Her publisher dropped her.
"The numbers just weren't what we'd hoped," they said. "We're moving in a different direction."
Mid-treatment. No warning. No job.
Here's what Cara told me: "Well, that's not gonna kill me."
And she meant it.
Not bravado, but rather clarity — the kind you get when you're already fighting for your life. When I asked how she found that strength, she took me back to the moment everything shifted.
"My counselor had cancer herself," Cara explained. "She told me something that changed my entire perspective: 'Cancer doesn't get to decide — you do.'"
Before that conversation, Cara felt like cancer was driving the bus. Making all the decisions. Controlling her schedule, her body, her future. But those seven words flipped the script.
"I realized I get to decide my treatment. I get to decide how I feel about it. Cancer doesn't decide any of those things."
Read Cara’s new funny and powerful book about her journey.
Two things you can use right now:
1. The decision is always yours. Not your doctor's, not your family's, not cancer's. When Cara's oncologist said "just postpone the book tour," she said no. That book was her baby. Publishing schedules are set a year in advance. Cancer wasn't stealing her book’s life.
2. "Not killing me" is a legitimate metric. When you're facing actual mortality, everything else gets properly sized. Lost job? Not killing me. Postponed vacation? Not killing me. This isn't minimizing real losses — it's recognizing what actually threatens your survival.
Cara went from that devastating call to signing with a new publisher. She's working on her next book right now. But first, she had to survive something harder than cancer: the belief that cancer was in charge.
"I spent so much of my life in negative self-talk," she told me. "Always the passive-aggressive inner critic. But after my double mastectomy, for maybe the first time in my adult life, I gave myself a genuine compliment. No backhanded BS. Just: You did a good job."
Sometimes the real cancer is the story we tell ourselves about who's in control.
Next week in Part 2: What Cara's husband said when she worried he wouldn't find her attractive after surgery — and why she burned herself on her birthday because she couldn't feel her chest.
What decision have you been letting cancer make for you?