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Young cancer survivors write their way to hope
Shared experiences inspire poems, prose and friendship in NY group
 | Jodi L. Sax, 40, left, Suzanne Smith, 29, center, and Arlissa Gorosave, 30, share many experiences as members of a writing group for young adult cancer survivors. |
Tina Fineberg / AP |
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NEW YORK - ”My finger rubbed the side of my left breast for the millionth time and found the warm bump growing inside me. I knew it was cancer. ... I knew one day it would come. ... I did not know it would come at 28.” — Arlissa Gorosave
She married in Arizona on a Saturday. On Sunday, her groom took a plane to New York and his new job. On Monday, she set off in the U-Haul truck for the 2,000-mile drive to meet him.
Maybe they would stay in Manhattan forever, maybe they would move on after a year or two. But for now, the big city seemed like the perfect place to try to make a living as a writer. “I didn’t have any fear,” Arlissa says softly. “I didn’t have any anxiety. I was just ready to work hard, and whatever happened, happened.”
What happened, only a few months later, was cancer. She had always known it might come. Her grandmother had it, and it had killed Arlissa’s mother soon after she was born.
She’s 30 now. A survivor, and a writer. Like the rest of us.
We were all writers and all cancer survivors, the eight of us, sitting at a makeshift conference table, scribbling away.
One night a week, we came together in this nondescript room, and our instructor, a 30-ish soccer-playing poetry lover named David, gave us exercises to write on the spot. A poem about a place you don’t miss. An outline about a relationship you lost. A paragraph about a moment when you knew your life had changed. We didn’t have to write about cancer, he said.
But, really, wasn’t that why we were there?
Young survivors
Here, we’d found people who might understand what we were going through. The problem wasn’t a lack of fellow survivors; our ranks have tripled since 1960 to more than 10 million. But most of them are over 65, according to the National Cancer Institute. We in our 20s and 30s make up only 5 percent, and our fears and hurts and furies are often different, something that becomes clear in what my classmates and I wrote.
We were done with treatment now, in some cases for years, but we were left with all kinds of scars. Suzanne worried about dating someone who didn’t know she’d lost a breast. Jodi wanted to do something new with her life. Me, I needed to figure out how to stop feeling so tense.
And Arlissa mourned a fading chance to make it as a writer.
She grimaces as she hunts for grants for beginning writers, only to find that they’re mostly limited to people still in their 20s. “That’s where I was, and that’s what I could have been doing, and I lost this time,” she says.
Instead of writing plays or poems, she’s spent the last two years wrestling with cancer’s aftermath. “When my treatment finished, I thought I was going to be able to jump up and take on the world where I left off, but that didn’t happen. I don’t remember 29 at all,” she says.
She turned to a survivors’ support group, but her youth made her feel alone. They weren’t as sensitive to the changes cancer had wrought on their appearance. They did not have doctors telling them that they should have children before 35, so reproductive organs can be removed to guard against more cancer.
The others “were already in the middle of what they wanted to do, or retired from it.”
For Arlissa, our writing group has been “perfect.”
“There was this huge gap. I didn’t know how to talk about things I needed to talk about.” Now, she says, “I’m beginning to find those things.”
She wrote about finding the lump in her breast and about her husband telling her, “If all you do today is grow some hair on your head then that is enough.” She wrote about how, as a teenager, she discovered a calendar where her mother had chronicled her final months.
But cancer has made even the act of writing more difficult. She has trouble gripping a pen, and she can’t always think of the word she wants, the way she could before.
“As a writer, it’s very frustrating,” she says.
Breast cancer at 26
“I’m young but I knew.
I have no family history but I knew.
Just like you feel the presence of
a ghost in the room,
or a stranger in the house
I knew.
I just hoped it
wasn’t true.”
— Suzanne Smith
Even before Suzanne was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 26, “things were not going good,” she says. “I was in a bad relationship. I was drinking. I was confused. I didn’t know where my life was going.”
Amid the turmoil, she’d fallen away from acting, which had been her passion. Cancer, she says, was almost a gift: “I said, ‘OK, well, this is like a sign that I shouldn’t kill myself.”’
Three years later, she says, she’s become more compassionate. She’s learned that she can count on people for help. She loves working as a storyteller for young children.
But she hasn’t found her way back into acting, and she can’t figure out how to handle dating, something earlier support groups didn’t address. So far, she hasn’t gone out with anyone who didn’t already know she lost a breast.
“It’s so weird, having to tell someone,” she says. “I’m scared.”
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