A Problem For Future Me: Cancer and the Worries That Can Wait
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"That's quite literally someone else's problem. And that someone else is me — just not me today."
Ten years before her diagnosis, Kimberly was a 25-year-old mom of two, building a business, and exhausted all the time. Her doctor told her to take a nap. It took a decade — and a colonoscopy that a doctor couldn't finish because the tumor blocking it was too large — before that exhaustion had an explanation: cancer that had already reached her liver.
What follows isn't really a story about chemotherapy schedules, though there's plenty of that. It's a story about information — how much of it Kimberly wanted, and when. She asked her husband not to tell her anything he'd learned from his own research. She asked her oncologist for exactly one word to describe how treatment was going ("significant improvement") and built her hope around that word for months, until an offhand comment in an appointment revealed the word "incurable" she'd never been told directly.
Kimberly and Cody talk through what happened in the months after that — how she decided a diagnosis didn't get to dictate her days, how she built rhythms into a brutal chemo schedule to protect the good alongside the bad, and how she now runs an online community, Cancer Is a Joke, built on the idea that laughter belongs in this conversation too. And they return, again and again, to the idea Kimberly opens with: that the hardest parts of an uncertain future don't have to be carried today, because there's a future version of her — and of all of us — capable of carrying what today's version can't.
Topics Covered
Late-Stage & Incurable Cancer Diagnosis · Chemotherapy & Long-Term Treatment · Anxiety & Mental Health Coping Strategies · Hope, Faith & Living with Uncertainty · Caregiving, Marriage & Family Communication · Humor & Online Community in Illness
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Wesley Winn, “Joyride”
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