cancer comrade or internet impostor?

I'm taking a break from my break to warn you about this growing compendium of losers:

(image from Gawker's own article on Warrior Eli)

http://warriorelihoax.wordpress.com/

Be wary of cancer fakers, my friends! Trust your intuition & arm yourself with the knowledge that, yes, there are people out there that lie about this stuff.


From my own personal experience, here are a few "tells":

1.) People lying about cancer online often add inconsequential medical jargon to their stories to make them seem more credible. If you're a cancer survivor, you can usually sniff this out fairly easily-- do the diagnosis/treatments add up? Is their story *almost* too outlandish to be true? Does it sound like they're getting cancer treatment from Wikipedia General?

2.) Cancer Fakers almost always place extreme emphasis on exact dates-- i.e. "I was in remission for 6 years 4 months 8 days and 41 seconds exactly before I relapsed and had surgery at eleven-forty-five-pee-ehm on Tuesday December 12th 2012 and while they were taking out my malignant tumor I gave birth to a beautiful healthy eight-pound-thirty-two-ounce baby girl who's birthday is now 12-12-12 which is also my great-grandmother's birthday and therefore a sign of luck that I will beat cancer miraculously". Somehow they all think this will add credibility to their scam. You know you'd be too groggy to remember that shit. Or care to repeat it at all.

3.) They have brand-new Caringbridge, Facebook, Tumblr, Blogger, and charity pages that pop up immediately overnight. Usually this happens organically, over time, through family members as the *real* patient goes through treatment. Look at the wording, sentence structure, and misspellings of the entries and comments. Do they ALL seem to come from the same person?

4.) On the topic of family-- Cancer fakers usually make theirs up. Often with really stupid trendy-fantasy names like Gideon, Elijah, Braiden, Destinaijah, Meridian. It tends to reek of a tween girl's discarded game of MASH. There are Fakers who create sock-puppet accounts on social networking sites for an entire fictional support circle in order to boost credibility. Seriously.

5.) The pictures posted are all closely cropped, purportedly in a hospital, but you'll never see machinery or an IV pole (which, as we know, becomes inseparable to us during chemo). Look out for STUBBLE on a supposedly bald-from-chemo head, and acne/redness in the cheeks, which chemo absolutely does away with. Chemo makes your skin clear & pallid. Cara had red, craggy acne all over her chin--I shrugged off clues like this without even raising a (newly grown in) eyebrow.

6.) They readily publicize an Amazon wishlist or pry for gifts/money/sympathy. The majority of Cancer Fakers seem to be young, very bored, insecure girls with nothing else going for them & probably not much love in their lives. boo hoo. Get a hobby.


Has anyone else had an encounter with a Cancer Faker?

**Please do not take this list as definitive "proof" that someone is lying about having cancer-- it is meant only as a mildly amusing guide to help you identify predatory behaviour and avoid being duped. Use your intuition & common sense out there in the YA cancer community! 

hello old friend

I haven't posted in a few months, why?

I've been going to therapy since May & have made an important personal discovery: almost all of the problems I've had in my life, whether it be with work, friendship, relationships, mental health, everything-- all of my choices in the last 20 years-- have been due to my low self-esteem issues. Have always been due to low self-esteem. I'm tempted to write an entire dissertation but will just leave it at that.

I wish someone had told me this 10 years ago, but alas. I had to figure it out on my own.

So, it's been necessary to work on other things besides this blog & cancer advocacy-- problems that existed before cancer, but have been exaggerated by the trauma of chronic illness. For years now I haven't been able to put my finger on my own unhappiness. I'm starting to get it now.

this book is written for middle-aged housewives but totally changed my life. 

I have been freelance designing and am still looking for a stable job. Still waiting for a disability decision. Still in chronic pain. Still don't have insurance & have been turned away from care several times because I can't pay out-of-pocket. I've looked into getting insurance through the freelancer's union but they don't accept pre-existing conditions (yet). what bullshit.

Still trying to figure it out, 3 years later.

On a positive note, here are two rad girls that have both survived Ewing's Sarcoma. I met Melissa at the beginning of the year and already feel so close to her-- like a sister. She found me through this blog, which is true confirmation that I'm doing something right by sharing my life. Feels like fate. I'm so glad she reached out to me. Another one of us in remission, fuck yeah.

I'll figure it out eventually.

June & July have been full of the usual minutia of a young, broke(n) cancer survivor trying to earn a living in a creative field. Mainly... looking for jobs, interviewing for jobs, doing unpaid projects for jobs, and then not being called back, ever, for jobs. On the upside, my portfolio is bangin' & every time I do unpaid work for a company it increases its bangin'ness.

The downside is that I can't afford a living, still. Barely making it through rent every month, barely paying my cc minimums, barely affording food (I usually dig up quarters every evening to buy some produce for dinner from the local bodega). Forget about medical care, because I have none. I had a sinus infection a few weeks ago that required treatment, and luckily I was able to find a great Free Clinic here in Brooklyn that would dispense antibiotics at no cost-- the catch is you have to wait 8 hours to be seen just like the other 30 people in the room. Doing that once every now-and-then for an emergency is totally bearable, doing it every time you have a medical issue? not so much.

Honestly-- everything I've been going through is normal for someone my age with self-inflicted creative goals. I could've been an accountant, right? (yeah right.)

I knew it would be difficult moving to NY and I did it anyway. Struggle is requisite to personal growth & fulfillment, I say to myself as I try to avoid conversation with the homeless gentleman with gonorrhea seated next to me. We both left that day with a gigantic gift baggy of condoms & lube, swag from the city health initiative. I hope he used his, and not just for water balloons like I did.

What I didn't bargain for, here in NY chasing the design dragon, was Cancer. If I could've known about my future cancer/chronic pain/medical issues, I would not have spent my life learning the art of the cloth. I would've sensibly found myself a steady job that left me unfulfilled but offered medical insurance, peace of mind, and a decent quality of life.

oh well.

Anyone need a freelance designer? I have a bangin' portfolio...

May: cancerversaries, birthdays, and NPR shits & giggles.

May is both the anniversary of my release from the Abu-Graib of all cancer treatments, and my birthday-- the one where I turn 27 and lose the health insurance I had through my mom. It's a complicated month.

Here's the post from my last chemo, May 2009

I've been thinking a lot about after-care. It's been two years since my last cancer remission, and I'm only just beginning to see a therapist to unload all of this emotional baggage I've been carrying around. It's hard to get [free] help from resources like cancercare.org and SamFund because there's so much red-tape & many, many exclusions.

I am of the opinion that everyone should stop mindlessly running, walking, and buying for Cancer Non-profit Monoliths who have lost their way... who have minimal outreach services compared to the millions they make as a non-profit organization. They profit from our collective guilt and ambivalence. What we should be doing is investing in finding a less invasive, less brutal way to cure cancer, and providing palliative services for the millions of young adults dealing with the aftermath, as well as studying the long term effects.


As of now I don't have health insurance, and that's really scary. I should have never gone to art school. I've racked up a few medical bills so far, which of course I can't afford to pay and so they go to collections, where they will languish until I either die or become filthy rich. Thank god for HHC and Planned Parenthood!

Despite everything I had a very nice 27th birthday. We went to Coney Island for the first time, rode rollercoasters til we were dizzy, ate icecream, and saw a guy wearing a shirt that said "SIT ON MY FACE AND I'LL GUESS YOUR WEIGHT". All in all an enchanting evening.

blending in 

I was on NPR's The Takeaway this morning talking about the comic, and I was so focused on trying not to use "fucking" as an adjective, as I am wont to do, that I said "shitting" instead. I also completely forgot what I was talking about several times & totally derailed. 7:45am is a fucking ungodly hour to be articulate. I refuse to listen to it, but you can find it here. Don't judge me dudes.

I laugh everytime I think about Celeste's face as I mention how funny vomit and shit can be.

on Ruysch and his mummies, death, and pleasure.

Some time ago a friend introduced me to the NLM's Dream Anatomy Catalogue, from which I've found many amazing anatomical engravings and illustrations for inspiration. This is where I stumbled across Frederik Ruysch (1638-1731), a Dutch anatomist and a pioneer in techniques of preserving organs and tissue (a precursor to the BodyWorlds franchise?). Ruysch made artistic arrangements of his material and had his own museum of curiosities. Among the displays were a number of dioramas assembled from body parts and starring melodramatic fetal skeletons, flora and fauna. He was one of the first anatomists to venture completely from scientific documentation to ars moriendi, making surreal collages from the dead and discarded.

In Giacomo Leopardi’s "Dialogue Between Frederik Ruysch and his Mummies", written in 1824, Leopardi imagines Ruysch being awakened in the middle of the night by his specimens, who for a brief interval, are granted the power of consciousness:

RUYSCH. …but since time is short and leaves no choice, let me know in brief what kind of sensations of body and mind you experienced at the point of death.
MUMMY. I didn’t notice the actual point of death.
THE OTHER MUMMIES. We didn’t either.
RUYSCH. How come you didn’t notice it?
MUMMY. Just as you never notice the moment you begin to sleep, no matter how much attention you pay.
RUYSCH. But to fall asleep is natural.
MUMMY. And you don’t think dying is natural? Show me a man, or an animal, or a plant that doesn’t die.
RUYSCH. I’m no longer surprised that you go on singing and talking if you didn’t notice when you died. ‘Unwitting of the blow, he went ahead/Combating still, and yet already dead,’ writes an Italian poet. I thought that on this question of death, those like you would know something more than the living. But going back to our subject, at the point of death didn’t you feel any pain?
MUMMY. What kind of pain can it be if one who feels it doesn’t notice it?
RUYSCH. At any rate, all are convinced that the sensation of death is extremely painful.
MUMMY. As if death were a sensation, and not the opposite…
RUYSCH. Then what is death if it’s not pain?
MUMMY. Pleasure rather than anything else. You should know that dying, like falling asleep, does not take place in an instant, but by degrees. True, these degrees are more or less greater or smaller according to the variety of the causes and to the kinds of death. In the last moment, death brings neither pain nor pleasure, no more than does sleep. In the preceding moments it cannot produce pain because pain is something alive, and, at that time, that is, after the beginning of death, man’s senses are moribund, which is like saying weakened in the extreme. It may well be a cause of pleasure, for pleasure is not always something alive; in fact, most human pleasures consist in some sort of langour, so that man’s senses are capable of pleasure even when they are near extinction since very often langour itself is pleasure, especially when it frees you from suffering; for, as you well know, the cessation of pain or discomfort is in itself pleasure. So, the langour of death ought to be the more welcome as it frees man from greater suffering…

Something to think about and explore...

southern comfort

bonaventure cemetary, savannah GA

Here are just a few pictures of the spanish moss from my trip to Savannah & Charleston. A friend is looking to buy a house down south, so I went with her, hoping to deter the chance of getting harassed while waiting at 4am in the Charleston bus station. The 20 hour bus ride was miserable for my body. Looking at decrepit historical houses and experiencing the strange but hospitable southern milieu was beyond fascinating. We went to several cemeteries on our trip, and they were all gorgeous. 

"after life's fitful fever, he sleeps well."

PSA: being a cancer survivor is fucking cool.

Couple of things:

1.) Our kickstarter has four more days left-- get your butt on over there if you'd like some hand-made cancer merch! (I tried the scarves on personally to make sure they'd fit bald heads everywhere.)

Right now, Jon & I are fleshing out the "Cancerland" chapter of our comic-- there are just so many parallels to be made between amusement parks and cancer. For instance, both require you to waste an exorbitant amount of time waiting in lines. Both involve riding scary machinery, causing you either to giggle or puke your guts out (or both simultaneously). Many jokes will be made about CT scans (hold your breath, exhaaaleee), MRI's, and radiation lasers. We'll have an old-timey side-show freak section as a nod to our Last Gasp publishers. Every backer gets a ticket!

What would be your ultimate Cancerland ride? The grossest one I've thought of so far is Splash Mountain: the colon-cancer log ride. That one's for Becca. I'll fast-pass it to the front of the line every time.



2.) i2y is having its annual Stupid Cancer Ungala on June 7th here in NYC. If you're in the area, I'd love to meet you there. I'll be handing out copies of our preview comic, commiserating, and getting sloshed. The only thing I disagree with is this whole "no black tie" business-- I'll be dressed to the nines as usual.