We’re looking to speak with people who have lived experience of cancer (in Aus). Our project explores power relations in oncology. In particular, we want to talk. with people from socially marginalised positions/identities & their experience of cancer & oncology 🖤

Please help & share

astonishing to think that 1 year ago i was recently bald, 35 weeks pregnant & after two rounds of chemo for a tumour that my oncologist named 'the beast'. getting scans & preparing for an early birth. terrified. uncertain.

i feel like i've been absent from the world for a year, and now i take my reentry - back to work, back to teach, back to chores and tasks. but still i take chemotherapy and still can't sleep and still fear recurrence almost every waking moment.

But! This time last year he was a tiny foetus braving my body’s “journey” with chemo & cancer. & now he’s !!! almost !!! 1 year old!!!!

“For years other people made me feel like my body wasn’t right, as if part of my body belonged to someone else and they had a right to it. Fucked if I’ll let this happen again. I looked at myself for the first time in so many years with actual care and saw not a body that tried to kill me, but a body surviving. I noticed its resilience and how it tried to conserve and protect me.”

In the summer edition of Meanjin, you can find my latest memoir: an uncharacteristically optimistic piece, about how a mastectomy - despite being quite pinkwashed/overlooked by the Breast Cancer Industrial Complex - allowed me to gain self acceptance.

& if you’re not already tired of reading about cancer, you can pre-order your copy now, or even better: subscribe
https://www.mup.com.au/books/meanjin-vol-81-no-4-paperback-softback

#breastcancerawareness #breastcancer #mastectomy #stayingflatisanoption #tnbc #triplenegativebreastcancer #cancerunder40 #pregnantwithcancer

[image marked as sensitive as it's of Mx scar. Lmk if you think images such as this don't need/do need sensitive warning]