How Writing About Your Cancer Experience Can Help You Cope & Heal

July 26, 2024
A black pen rests on a hard-cover notebook beside a cup of coffee

Photo by Bookblock on Unsplash

If you’re looking for ways to cope with cancer and boost your wellness, have you thought about writing? Here’s how it helped Brad, who shares his story and offers tips on writing about the cancer experience.

 

 

Meet the Author

Brad was diagnosed with T-cell lymphoma in 2015 and underwent extensive and challenging treatment. Writing poetry helped him cope with his diagnosis, treatment, and recovery. Brad now facilitates online Writing as Healing workshops through the UC Davis Cancer Center, among other organizations.

No educational or professional credentials are needed for someone to sit down with a pen and paper (or at a keyboard) and write healing words.

Brad Buchanan
Author, poet, cancer survivor
Brad

Writing — and poetry in particular — was my most reliable resource for self-healing during the very intense two-year period when cancer started appearing in my body, and finally drove me to seek life-saving experimental treatment from a clinical trial. This ordeal was overwhelming in many ways: chemotherapy, a stem cell transplant, more chemo, radiation, and an acute case of graft-versus-host-disease that induced months of blindness and nearly proved fatal.

Being able to express my thoughts and feelings (fear, anger, grief, gratitude, and sometimes joy and relief) through poetry and blogging enabled me to rebound from every setback and find a reason to keep on going.
 

Writing As a Coping Activity
 

Coping With a Diagnosis

From the moment I noticed some funny lumps along my jawline in the summer of 2014, I suspected that something serious was wrong with me. I had also lost a lot of weight and was feeling unusually tired in the evenings. None of the first four doctors who examined me over the next six months took my symptoms as warning signs of cancer.

Instead of panicking and getting angry, I coped by writing poetry about my own uncertainty. The first poem in this vein, which ended up being pretty prophetic, was called “The Differential Diagnoses.” The title was inspired by the term doctors use for the list of possible conditions that might account for ambiguous symptoms:

the alphabet
once scattered
throughout my blood
has metastasized
producing a poem:
“Cancer and its Early 
Equivocations”
a subcutaneous 
haiku sequence 
individual nodules
linked mainly
by their distinctive form
perhaps only 
the harmless conceit
of an overly active
imagination
but something in me 
wants the capital
T-cell truth
to be spelled out
accurately at last
in all its baroque
malignancy
give me straight talk
in off-rhyme
and halting measure
or an epigram, even
with murderous 
closure

This poem even predicted the type of lymphoma I eventually learned I had: T-cell lymphoma. So, when I was finally diagnosed, I took this news in stride. Having written poetry about my first symptoms gave me a greater feeling of acceptance. There was no sense of shock or paralysis. In a strange way, I even felt some vindication when I learned my diagnosis.

This pattern happened over and over: I would write about something I feared. When it came to pass, I simply accepted it and moved on.
 

Coping With Fears

For me, poetry has always seemed like the most powerful, vivid, and emotionally effective way to tackle the theme of death. Since I have been given more than my share of dire prognoses, I have written many poems about the fear of dying. 

The most memorable poem is the one I wrote after my cancerous lung tumor burst and I was rushed to the hospital. It’s called “Emergency” — and I thought it might be my last. 

As I wrote the poem, I felt my fright receding. The poem helped to ground me in my new life as a cancer patient who would soon need active treatment, and who would have to get used to being hooked up to an IV for days at a time.

One of the worst aspects of being treated for cancer was the endless jabbing with needles and IVs. The physical pain was not the problem. It was my tendency to faint (or “vagal,” in the nurses’ lingo) at the sight of needles — a tendency that I found so shameful. I was also genuinely concerned that I would fail to get proper treatment and testing unless I overcame my squeamishness. 

Again, writing helped me here. I wrote a poem called “Vagal” that poked fun at my tendency to pass out. As the poem’s last line indicates, understanding the response I was having to the sight of needles as a simple physiological reaction in my vaso-vagal nerve enabled me to overcome the sense of shame I had experienced:

The vagus nerve is the one you keep
Whenever you stay calm—
Until you find that losing it 
Will bring no special shame—
 

What the Research Shows

 

There are a lot of interesting studies about the benefits of writing. Some of them suggest that writing a detailed narrative about one’s illnesses or traumas is the most beneficial way to write, especially if the narrative contains insight, gratitude, and the theme of redemption or recovery.

If we can integrate our illness or trauma into our overall life stories, we can create what clinical psychologist Jonathan Adler calls a “narrative identity” that enhances physiological and psychological health. These benefits, such as reducing stress and boosting the immune system, can help people with chronic illnesses cope with ongoing physical and emotional challenges.

Of course, sometimes illness and trauma are extremely chaotic. So, it can be difficult to create these kinds of optimal, redemptive, and gratitude-rich narratives while remaining true to the sometimes painful, random-seeming experiences themselves.

Chronic illness is something that, by definition, resists complete “healing” and recovery. There’s a limit to what we can expect writing to accomplish in that context. However, writing about emotional topics has been proven over and over to help alleviate some of the suffering caused by ailments such as asthma, arthritis, gastro-intestinal disorders, and other problems.

As social psychologist James Pennebaker and physician Gabor Maté have shown, it takes a lot of energy and tension to repress our negative emotions.1,2 We can use those emotions much better (if we express them safely) in the service of our overall wellness.

 

"My motto, which I have stolen from other writing teachers, is simple: 'A writer is someone who writes.'"

 

Tips to Write About Your Cancer Experience

 

My advice is not to write about trauma too soon after the event, which in practice probably means not before you have seen a professional therapist. I worked on my own various medical traumas with therapists before I found ways to write about them in a direct and helpful way.

Once you are ready, here are a few other tips:

 

1. Use prompts.

As a facilitator of writing-as-healing workshops, I have seen firsthand that prompts can really unlock a lot of buried emotion in people, especially if they are presented not as “assignments” but as opportunities to write on a given topic. And in my experience as a writing workshop participant, I have found myself able to write things in response to a prompt that I had never found a way to express unprompted.

The most generative prompt I have ever written to was very simple: 

“Write about a transformative experience in your life, but in the third person and in the present tense.” 

This prompt allowed me to write about the day when I had my own stem cell transplant in a new and more creative, even playful way. The poem that resulted is still one of my favorites.

 

2. Write with others in a professionally facilitated setting.

Writing workshops are not a substitute for qualified professional therapeutic help, but they can help us process some of the less obvious aspects of a trauma that don’t get addressed in therapy.

A professionally facilitated group is a safe space to write and share your words, and it helps participants by allowing them to trust that their writing will be listened to with respect and care. The facilitator must make the workshop principles very clear to everyone at the outset.

The reason why writing is important in the first place is that it helps us to make meaning out of difficult and chaotic experiences. That meaning is given its fullest scope when our words are listened to and validated. Once the safety of the group setting has been established, sharing one’s writings can bring tremendous emotional relief. Just the act of reading one’s words aloud can produce new and healing emotions. 
 

3. Ignore your inner critic.

My motto, which I have stolen from other writing teachers, is simple: “A writer is someone who writes.” 

No educational or professional credentials are needed for someone to sit down with a pen and paper (or at a keyboard) and write healing words. We all need to ignore our inner critic, the voice of that one teacher or editor who told us that we were lousy writers. 

 

How can blogging help?

For Brad, blogging about his cancer journey was a tool to keep his friends and family informed and updated. In addition, he notes, “Just setting down the facts in clear language was helpful as a way to process the many difficult issues that kept cropping up.”

If you’d like to blog about your cancer journey, you can get started any time. Set up a personal network site today — join our free online digital community to get started, then invite your friends and family to follow and support you. 

 

About Brad Buchanan

Brad taught literature and creative writing at Sacramento State University until his retirement in 2016. His poetry, short fiction, and scholarly articles have appeared in more than 200 journals. He has published four collections of poetry, including “The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative” (Finishing Line Press, 2019), three academic books, and a medical memoir. Learn more about Brad

 

References
  1. Maté, Gabor. When the Body Says No: Exploring the Stress-Disease Connection. Nashville, TN: Trade Paper Press, 2011. 
  2.  Pennebaker, James W., and Joshua M. Smyth. Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain. New York: Guilford Press, 2016.