Nobody's Going to Fight for You as Hard as You Will
Episode #35: Valerie David
She’d been reporting trouble breathing for weeks — an allergic reaction to a drug that was supposed to help her white cell count during cancer treatment. She kept being told it would clear up. The referral to a specialist never materialized. So she got the name of the pulmonologist herself, called the office, and said: “What time am I coming in today? Because I’m coming in.”
She went in. They ran tests. They told her she was allergic. Get off that drug immediately.
What would have happened if she’d kept waiting?
That’s the question Valerie — actress, performer, three-time cancer survivor, and creator of the one-woman show the Pink Hulk — asks in this week’s episode. And it’s one worth sitting with, because most of us are not wired to make that call. We’re taught to trust the process, wait our turn, not be difficult.
Cancer doesn’t have time for that.
"What time am I coming in today? Because I'm coming in."
Valerie has been navigating cancer for 27 years — stage three non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, then breast cancer, then stage four metastatic breast cancer. Seven years after that stage four diagnosis, she has no evidence of disease. NED, for those who know the language. Not cured — that word doesn’t exist in the metastatic world — but no detectable disease. A 100% response to her drug. One of the few patients who gets there.
That drug? She’d worked on the ad campaign for it for eight months before she was diagnosed. She knew what it did, understood why it might work for her, and walked into her oncologist’s office to ask if she could try it. Her doctor said: Anything you want.
Two things worth taking from that before you even listen to the episode.
One: Your medical team doesn’t know what life you want to live after treatment unless you tell them. Valerie told her oncologist she was a singer before she started treatment, and made sure her vocal cords were imaged beforehand so they’d have a baseline. She was booked in four productions when her lymphoma was diagnosed. She said, “Treatment is going to have to wait.” Her doctor’s response was swift: if you don’t treat this, it’s fatal. But the instinct — to hold onto your life, not just your survival — was the right one.
Two: If you’re not being heard, find another door. Valerie eventually left the hospital she’d been with for 20 years. She made the call herself. She switched. And she’s been NED for seven years.
There’s much more in this conversation — about art as medicine, about the support group leader who told her she probably wouldn’t “find someone who’d appreciate the time she had left” (Valerie called her when she got her NED results), and about what it means to keep performing through a stage four diagnosis.
The full story — and the research behind why creative expression may actually change cancer outcomes — is in this week’s subscriber piece.
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