The Most Common Cancer Post on Reddit Has Three Words
Standing in the gap between "I have cancer" and "I had cancer."
Three words show up over and over again on the most popular cancer subreddit. Done. Now what?
One version of the post pulled 143 upvotes and 115 comments on r/cancer. The title: “In a weird in-between. What do I say to people now?” Not a single physician answered. The thread is just survivors, trading the answers nobody ever wrote down for them.
Three years ago this month, an oncology nurse called and used the words I’d been hoping for. Pathologically complete response. No cancer in any of the tissue they removed. Done.
Except I wasn’t.
Immunotherapy ran another nine months. Revision surgery was on the books for July. They’d found something on my kidneys during the mastectomy, so I had a urologist. The prophylactic salpingo-oophorectomy I had at 38 had left its marks on my heart, so I had a cardiologist. The incidental lipomas in my abdomen meant I’d be the winner of an annual abdominal CT scan for the rest of my life.
The word done was on the chart. My calendar certainly didn’t look clear.
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And I’m one of the easier cases.
Most women with hormone-receptor-positive breast cancer are looking at five to ten years on tamoxifen or an aromatase inhibitor after the tumor is gone.
A 2025 study in The Breast Journal found that 87% of women on aromatase inhibitors experience side effects.
86% have musculoskeletal symptoms—joint pain bad enough that opening a jar feels like a workout.
About half of them stop the drug before the recommended course is up, according to the British Journal of Cancer.
These are the women being told yay, you’re done. They learn to say good at the dinner party because the real answer takes forty minutes and nobody wants to hear it. They can’t say I have cancer anymore. They can’t say I had cancer yet, either. They stand in the gap and google the new ache at 2 a.m. They write the Reddit post at 2 a.m., too, because there’s nobody in their real life who still gets it.
Everyone moved on. They didn’t get to.
Living Inside the In-Between
I recorded a solo episode about the strange in-between that medicine has known about for twenty years and still does almost nothing to prepare patients for. The well-meaning friends. The fear of recurrence that lives in every new ache. And three specific moves I made that took a year I should have spent enduring and made it feel like the opposite.
The full episode is out now. The companion piece for subscribers goes into what cancer research has actually found about the post-treatment void, why your oncologist probably hasn’t given you a survivorship care plan, and the three moves I use to live inside the in-between instead of bracing through it.
If you know someone stuck in the gap, send this their way. Sometimes the thing that helps is knowing somebody else has been standing in that exact spot.
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