The People Who Hate the Name of My Show Are Right
What I mean when I say "kick cancer's ass."
People who have faced cancer often hate the way we talk about cancer patients. The warrior language. Be strong. Stay positive. Fight. Kick cancer’s ass. The argument is simple: if beating cancer is a battle you win or lose, then everyone who dies of cancer died because they lost. They didn’t fight hard enough. They weren’t strong enough. As if a stage four diagnosis were a verdict on your character.
I host a show called Kicking Cancer’s Ass and this is our one year anniversary. And I think the critics are right.
The win-lose version of this is cruel. It turns the sickest people into failures. It tells a woman with metastatic breast cancer that she’s letting everyone down by not being upbeat enough on the days she can’t lift her head off the pillow. I’ve watched people apologize for being tired. For being scared. That’s wrong.
So here’s what I mean when I say kick cancer’s ass, because it’s almost the opposite of what those critics think.
It has nothing to do with winning. You can kick cancer’s ass and still die of cancer. I’ve sat across from people who are doing exactly that, living with disease that isn’t going anywhere, and to my eye they are kicking its ass every single day.
“Cancer reaches for the pen. It wants to be the only author of what happens next.”
Kicking cancer’s ass is deciding, as much as you can, what role this thing gets to play in your life, and how you’re going to respond to it. It’s refusing to be nothing but a passenger in something that’s happening to you.
That’s the whole of it. Not the outcome. The authorship. The outcome often isn’t yours to choose. The response always is.
I didn’t arrive at that in the abstract. In January 2023, the day before a surgery meant to lower my odds of ever getting cancer, my surgeon called: the scan had come back malignant. The surgery to prevent cancer was off, because I already had it. I carry a BRCA1 mutation. My mother was diagnosed at thirty-six, my sister Tracey at twenty-nine, nine others in my family before them. I’d spent twenty years getting screened every six months, trying to time that surgery around my life, and I timed it wrong by about one year.
At my first oncology appointment, I was vibrating. Not shaking. Vibrating. And in that room I decided this would be a project. I named it, my cancer obliteration project, and by the second round of chemo I had a spreadsheet.
Here’s where I have to be careful, because this is exactly where the toxic version sneaks back in. My spreadsheet did not cure my cancer. Twelve rounds of chemo and a team of doctors at the cutting edge did the medical work. Three weeks before my rescheduled surgery, my scans came back clinically complete. My oncologist said, whatever you’ve been doing, keep doing it. And I’d love to tell you I earned that with my attitude. I didn’t. Plenty of people do everything I did and don’t get that call. If your story turns out different than mine, it’s not because you wanted it less or did something wrong.
What the spreadsheet did was smaller and more important. It kept the pen in my hand. On the days I was terrified, I still got to decide what happened in the next ten minutes. That was mine. Cancer didn’t get it.
“The outcome often isn’t yours to choose. The response always is.”
I built this show because everything that helped me on day one was scattered across many people, the kind of thing that, in a family like mine, you’d call your sister to ask. Fifty-two conversations now, and I close every one with the same question: what’s your advice for someone who wants to kick cancer’s ass? Almost none of them answer with fighting. If the name meant what the critics think it means, every answer would be about being a warrior. They never are. One guest told me to make sure I was kicking in the right places, that managing a disease is sometimes wiser than trying to destroy it. Another told me the strongest move can be to become the soft person and let people take care of you. Another told me it’s very hard to be afraid while you’re laughing. None of those are war. Everyone is authorship.
This is a genuinely different moment to get cancer than the one my mother walked into at thirty-six. I’m alive in part because I knew I carried BRCA1, information her generation didn’t have. This past year, I’ve sat with scientists working on earlier detection, therapies targeted to the biology of a specific tumor, and immunotherapy that teaches your own body to do the work. Things that were science fiction when my family started losing people are now standard of care. People still die, and my family knows that better than most, but hope isn’t a poster on a hospital wall anymore. Increasingly, it’s data. Which raises the stakes on everything else: taking hold of your role, asking the questions, and finding the team at the edge of what’s possible matter more now, not less. There’s more on the other side of it to reach for than ever before.
The Shift
If you are currently navigating a diagnosis, or supporting someone who is, consider these shifts in perspective:
From Warrior to Author: You aren’t obligated to “win” a fight that relies on biology; you are simply tasked with choosing your response to the reality of the situation.
From “Positivity” to “Presence”: Don’t apologize for being scared or tired. Acknowledging your reality is not a failure—it’s an honest way of taking the pen back.
From Isolation to Connection: You don’t have to carry the burden of the “spreadsheet” alone. Look for your team, ask the questions, and remember that you get to decide the tone of your own treatment.
Kicking cancer’s ass was never about winning. It was never about being a warrior, or relentlessly positive, or strong enough to deserve a good scan.
“It’s about not disappearing inside your own diagnosis. It’s deciding who you’re going to be while this happens to you.”
On the good days and the ones where you’re vibrating in a chair.
That part is yours. Whatever the scan says. And nobody- not cancer, not your worst day- gets to take the pen out of your hand unless you hand it to them.
That’s the whole show. That’s the lesson my guests have shared, and that is why we keep doing it.
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