By Cameron Steele
I was 22 weeks pregnant and hiking under Sinopah Mountain in Glacier National Park when I found the lump. It felt the way the Montana mountain named after my husband’s ancestor looked: hard, immovable, asking to be addressed.
This wouldn’t be my first rodeo with breast cancer—I had been diagnosed for the first time in 2021 and had been through a double mastectomy, endocrine therapy, and chemotherapy. I had spent years paying close attention to my body, trying to live with, trying to adjust to ever-shifting goal posts of “new normals.” So when I found the lump on vacation, I knew what the diagnosis would be before the biopsy confirmed it.
Finding the Right Words
Triple-negative breast cancer, but this time with the added complication of having to see myself through pregnancy and birth as we made treatment decisions. As I put my then four-year-old son to bed the night after the official diagnosis had come through on MyChart, I tried not to cry over the Cancer Hates Kisses children’s book resting on his pillow. My husband and I had pulled the trusty story back out for him to help us with what sometimes felt like the hardest part of having cancer as a young mom—finding the right words for the experience. Was it possible to tell the truth about living with cancer in a way that left us feeling empowered? Could we use stories of love, honesty, and wonder to help us through the inevitable pain and fear of diagnosis, treatment, and, hopefully, recovery?
These last questions are important ones for me, as a writer and an academic who has spent the last decade studying and teaching narratives of women’s illness, first at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and now for cancer patients at UVA Hospital. I’ve been teaching Writing As A Way of Healing: Writing Through Cancer to patients and survivors who receive treatment at UVA for a little more than a year now.
I was in the midst of teaching the first workshop last summer when I got the news that my own cancer was back. At the time, I wondered if, now that the line between “teacher” and “patient” had been crossed, I’d be able to continue teaching the workshop. Would it be too hard to meet with other cancer patients each week as I dealt with the realities of my own breast cancer recurrence and pregnancy? What hope could I possibly offer to people when I was in the thick of it myself? Could “writing,” as the workshop title encouraged, really be a way of “healing?” If so, how so?
I didn’t have answers to these questions. All I had was a nascent trust and a contract I needed to uphold.
Finding Balance
To say that the Writing Through Cancer series has fulfilled every expectation—of mine, of my fellow patients and survivors in the workshops—is to miss the magic and the power of such a support group. It wasn’t something that I did, as the teacher. It is something that all of us do, as an intimate community, when we come together on Zoom each Thursday afternoon with open hearts and a willingness to tell the truth, with or without fear, anger, sadness, joy, humor, hope, or any number of emotions that attend the realities of living with cancer.
One of the hardest parts about the cancer experience is learning how to balance the desire for a fulfilling life with the strength to face the realities of the disease. In class, we write together about striving for this balance. We write about our wins and losses. We write about what we don’t know how to say ‘in real life’: we express fears, hopes, and dreams. We reclaim what feels or has felt confusing or difficult about stories and share them with each other, and—at the end of each six-week writing workshop—sometimes also share them with the larger community through public readings in front of family, friends, and staff at UVA Health.
Ready to Try Your Hand?
Join this writing group and see other support groups for cancer patients.
Finding ‘Moments of Zen’
“Since my first cancer diagnosis, I felt blocked and emotionally cut off from my feelings,” said Sharon Zoumbaris, a two-time breast cancer survivor who participated in the Summer 2025 iteration of Writing Through Cancer. “This group has helped me access my emotions … Having a place to sit and be comfortable with thoughts of cancer, illness, treatment, mortality, and spirituality has been a much bigger gift than I even knew I needed.”
Liz Grissom, who participated in the Spring 2025 group at the same time as undergoing chemotherapy for a breast cancer recurrence, agreed. “I was on medical leave from work, and the workshop gave me something to look forward to, helped me process my emotions in a healthy way, and engaged my creative thinking,” Grissom said. “I’ve kept in touch with one of my fellow writers, and we’ve compared treatment options and regularly swapped survivorship advice. I started a piece of writing I continued to work on for two months, and it was later published.”
And Margarita Figuerosa, a breast cancer survivor and a caregiver of a loved one with cancer, said the group has helped free her from much of the emotional distress that accompanied both her and her loved one’s diagnoses. “The class is structured in a way that makes it easy to participate, even for a novice writer,” Figuerosa said. “I had my ‘moment of Zen’ right after each class, that cathartic moment after being free of an emotion that I was holding to a particular event in the past.”
Writing may not be able to heal our physical bodies or cure cancer. But learning to express vital and core emotions about the experience of prolonged illness and treatment, and the accompanying big questions about life and death that come with it, can imbue a patient with both a sense of power and a sense of ease. “As a cancer patient, I look for survivorship experiences that are empowering rather than ones that make me feel stuck or defined by illness,” Grissom said. “This felt like a support group where I could take a more active role and create some art and friendships out of chaos.”
Join Our Support Groups
Our next six-week group will be open exclusively to breast cancer patients and survivors in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. We’ll begin on Thursday, October 9, and meet every Thursday for six weeks on Zoom from 2:30 to 4 p.m.
Additional workshops for patients and survivors of all cancer types will happen in Winter and Spring of 2026. To register for the workshop, email cancersupportservices@uvahealth.org.