Information about risk, prevention, screening, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, and support for all cancers Alysa Cummings is a certified poetry therapist who focuses her energies full-time in support of cancer survivors using writing as a tool for healing.
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CancerLand Bookshelf: The Cancer Monologue Project
After my first cancer surgery, I woke up hungry. Ravenously hungry. Give-me-something-to-eat-now-or-else hungry. The way my stomach was growling, you would think that I had been fasting for weeks, and not just since midnight the night before being admitted to the hospital. But now it was after 5 pm, I was out of recovery and [...]
CancerLand Bookshelf: My One-Night Stand with Cancer
The CancerLand journey is made up of moments. Strange moments. Defining moments. Once-in-a-lifetime types of encounters, often intensely traumatic experiences that mark and change you: physically, emotionally, spiritually. Forever it seems. Ask any cancer survivor. Some will say it’s the moment of diagnosis – the day that a doctor says those life-changing words, I’m sorry, [...]
Greetings from CancerLand: Donations Gratefully Accepted
Donations. I’m a volunteer in charge of donations for a local office of a cancer organization. So for a few hours every week, I sort through bags stuffed full of donations. Cancer-related types of donations to be exact: wigs, hats, scarves, bras and breast prostheses. Special items that cancer survivors often need and don’t have [...]
CancerLand Bookshelf: Bald in the Land of Big Hair
It was the late, great Art Linkletter who coined the phrase, Kids Say the Darndest Things to describe the uncensored and often very funny comments that fly out of kids’ mouths. Well, I’d like to borrow those famous words and edit them ever so slightly to read, People Say the Darndest Things to Cancer Survivors. [...]