Kicking Cancer's Ass

Did your 23andMe come back clear? Did your doctor say you don't need genetic testing because you have no family history of cancer? Dr. Kathleen Blazer, a certified genetic counselor who leads City of Hope's Cancer Genomics Education Program, explains why neither one settles your cancer risk. Kathy has trained more than 2,300 genetic counselors, physicians, nurses and physician assistants i...

How do you build resilience before life tests it? Dr. Wayne Rosenfield, PhD, is a psychologist and trauma therapist who lectures on post-traumatic growth after medical trauma. He has also lived it: Gaucher disease since childhood, stage 3 angiosarcoma at 39, and an above-the-knee amputation while his kids were five and six. Wayne and Joelle Kaufman talk about why the protective factors that carry...

Every October the country turns pink, and metastatic breast cancer research gets a sliver of the money. In this solo episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, Joelle Kaufman asks one question about pink ribbons, cancer gifts, and every offer of help: who is this for? Joelle is a BRCA1 carrier and triple negative breast cancer survivor, the author of Crushing the Cancer Curveball, and the host of Kickin...

Wenora Johnson is a patient advocate, an eight-year U.S. Navy reservist, and a survivor of three cancers. She was 45, fit and symptom-free when a FIT test she'd ignored for two weeks led to a stage 3B colorectal cancer diagnosis. Genetic testing later found Lynch syndrome (an MSH2 mutation). A preventive hysterectomy then found endometrial cancer. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, Wenora te...

Don Helgeson has had three cancers: melanoma at 27, colon cancer at 37, and stage 3B prostate cancer at 51. One inherited gene connects all three: Lynch syndrome, a hereditary condition that raises the risk of colorectal cancer and several others. Don is a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who served 28 years. He's a volunteer leader with Man Up to Cancer and carries the MSH2 form...

Dr. William Bestermann is an internist and cardiovascular specialist who spent his career treating heart disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, and who survived lymphoma himself. He founded the first ICU in Beaufort, South Carolina, ran 180 patients through the NIH's ACCORD diabetes trial, and has written about optimal medical therapy on Substack for six years. His argument is that oxi...

Kathy Baker's family looked like a textbook case for hereditary cancer. Her sister had breast cancer at 32. Her mother had three separate primary cancers. Her grandfather died of aggressive prostate cancer and his mother died of pancreatic cancer. Her oncologist recommended genetic testing in 2000 and she refused, because each of those cancers already had an explanation and none of the explana...

Somebody you love has cancer and you don't know what to do. You send an article. You say let me know if you need anything. You wait to be asked, and the ask never comes. Juliann Halvorsen is a therapist at Cancer CarePoint, where she has spent six years running cancer support groups and one-to-one counseling, all of it free to patients and families. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass,...

Michael Dorian was a veterinary technician living with AIDS when the towers fell. He put on scrubs, got past the barricades at Ground Zero, and spent 24 hours on the pile pouring saline into the eyes of firefighters blinded by asbestos and concrete dust. Fifteen years later he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive skin cancer that had already reached stage 4, one of tens of thousands of 9/11-linke...

Colorectal cancer is no longer a disease of older people. Three out of four cases diagnosed under age 50 are already advanced stage, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer projects that early-onset colorectal cancer will double roughly every 15 years if current trends continue. Dr. George Beauregard spent twenty years as a board-certified internist and could count the colorectal cance...

Most women deciding on breast reconstruction after a mastectomy are working from fear, not numbers. Dr. Merisa Piper is a reconstructive microsurgeon at UCSF who performs every option: breast implants, DIEP flap, other autologous reconstruction, and aesthetic flat closure. Because she does all of them, she has no reason to sell any of them. She gives Joelle the complication rates most patients nev...

A pediatric cancer diagnosis comes with a plan for the body. It rarely comes with a plan for the child inside it, their identity, their autonomy, their childhood. That is the part families have to advocate for themselves. Kylee McGrane-Zarnoch founded A Moment of Magic to help them, and since 2017 it has reached more than 185,000 medically vulnerable children through 4,000+ trained college volunte...

Four in ten cancers are tied to risk factors you already control. Cancer cases are set to nearly double by 2050, and they are climbing fastest in younger adults. Joelle walks through five evidence-based habits that make your body a harder place for cancer to take hold: what to eat, how to move, why weight matters, the truth about alcohol, and what every oncologist she talks to fears about vaping....

Iraq War veteran Laura Pearson was low risk by every measure when she felt a breast lump her mammogram had missed. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, she tells Joelle Kaufman how she pushed past a doctor's reassurance to get the bilateral diagnostic mammogram and biopsy that found her breast cancer, and how she traced it to the toxic burn pits she was exposed to during her deployment...

Drummer April Samuels was 41 and playing professionally when she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive type that had already run through her family screening history. In this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, April tells Joelle Kaufman how she went from diagnosis to double mastectomy in two weeks, why she chose to go flat and has never doubted it, and what she wishes e...

Dr. Charles Balch, professor emeritus at MD Anderson Cancer Center, helped make surgical oncology a specialty, led ASCO, and now runs ISOPT, the International Society of Oncology Prevention and Treatment. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, he tells Joelle Kaufman why the future of cancer care is prevention and early detection, not bigger surgery. They cover how immunotherapy works (and why i...

Most people have never heard of a hospitalist until they meet one. Dr. Monique Nugent practices hospital medicine, the specialty that meets you in the five days when you’re sick, scared, and moving fast through a parade of specialists. In this episode of Kicking Cancer’s Ass, Monique and host Joelle Kaufman talk about the conversations that happen at the edge of serious illness and end of life, th...

On the one-year anniversary of Kicking Cancer's Ass, host Joelle Kaufman answers the question the show's name keeps provoking: what does it actually mean to kick cancer's ass? A lot of people hate the warrior language around cancer, and Joelle thinks they have a point. In this solo episode she makes the case that kicking cancer's ass has nothing to do with winning. You can do it an...

Naturopathic oncologist Dr. Jessa Landmann joins Kicking Cancer's Ass to make the case that most cancer-treatment side effects, from fatigue to joint pain to poor sleep, are easier to prevent than to fix. She explains why cancer-related fatigue lingers long after chemotherapy ends, the role of inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, and why her head-to-toe approach starts with nutrition an...

The Thing Nobody Warns a Man About Joelle ended the episode with a lightning round. One or two words per answer, quick as she could ask. Then she got to this one: complete the sentence. The thing nobody warns a man about cancer is _______. Three men. Four time zones between them. Not one of them paused. Loss of friendships. Don said it first. Michael said “yep” before Don finished the word. Jay ex...

Two Stages. Same Silence. A few months into her Stage 4 lung cancer treatment, Annabelle Gurwitch’s son came home from college and found her unconscious on the bathroom floor. She’d been on the recommended dose of her targeted therapy. She’d known for weeks it was unlivable. She hadn’t told her doctor. She thought tolerating it was what a good patient did. I knew Annabelle’s book before I knew her...

Heidi Kay Carson's husband Chad was 33, healthy, and holding a PhD in computer science when a routine blood test set off a 14-year medical odyssey that ended with two simultaneous organ failures and no US hospital willing to treat him. In this episode, Heidi walks through the decisions, the dead ends, and the unconventional moves that got them further than anyone said was possible, and what she ha...

Two weeks after her last chemo infusion for HER2-positive breast cancer, yoga teacher Larissa Noto hiked Zion National Park. Her oncologist found out about the trip mid-call when she mentioned she was already in Vegas. Joelle Kaufman talks with Larissa Noto, founder of The Lovely Little Lotus. Larissa spent years as a corporate attorney before pivoting into a full-time career teaching yoga and min...

Why does the second cancer hit harder than the first? Even when it’s smaller? Even when you’re a psychotherapist? Dr. Erin Gray, two-time cancer survivor (BRCA2 breast cancer in her early 40s, then thyroid cancer eight years later), had her own answer when it happened to her. The thing that separates the diagnoses you survive well from the ones that wreck you isn’t preparation. It isn’t knowing wh...

Everyone said Joelle was done with cancer. She wasn't. Three years past her pathologically complete response, she has a urologist, a cardiologist, and an annual abdominal CT scan she'll get for the rest of her life. The word done was on the chart. It was not on the calendar. And she's one of the easier cases. The most common cancer post on Reddit is some version of three words. Done. Now what? One...