I’d been cancer-free for nine months when I found myself weeping over poorly made eggs-over-easy. The yolks were hard, instead of dripping and lovely and orange. Those rigid yolks were the proverbial last straw. I’d had cancer for God’s sakes, and I was crying over eggs? I was supposed to be a survivor.
We cancer survivors are everywhere these days — 4.8 percent of the U.S. population. When I was young, in the late 1960s, cancer seemed to always win. If you heard your friend’s grandma had cancer, you understood your friend’s grandma would be dying, probably soon. But things have changed. Thanks to early detection and more sophisticated medicine, more and more cancer patients enter treatment with the very real possibility that their lives will continue, and will continue well. They will enter the cancer-treatment system as a sick person and come out having earned the “survivor” label.
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