Support & Healing for Victims

By Cameron Steele

I was 22 weeks pregnant and hiking Mount Sinopah in Glacier National Park when I discovered the lump. It felt like what the Montana mountains named after my husband’s ancestors felt like: loud, unwavering, begging to be addressed.

This isn’t my first rodeo with breast cancer—I was first diagnosed in 2021 and have undergone a double mastectomy, endocrine therapy, and chemotherapy. I had spent years paying attention to my body, trying to live with it, trying to adapt to the ever-changing goals of the “new normal.” So when I discovered the lump on vacation, I knew the diagnosis before a biopsy confirmed it.

Finding the Right Words

Triple-negative breast cancer, but this time with the added complication of having to go through pregnancy and birth while we were making treatment decisions. As I put my then four-year-old son to bed the night after the official diagnosis appeared on MyChart, I tried not to cry over him. Cancer Hates Kisses a children’s book was placed on his pillow. My husband and I have retold this trusted story to help us deal with what sometimes feels like the hardest part of having cancer as a young mother—finding the right words for the experience. Is it possible to tell the truth about living with cancer in a way that makes us feel empowered? Can we use stories of love, honesty, and miracles to help us through the inevitable pain and fear of diagnosis, treatment, and, hopefully, recovery?

These latter questions are important to me, as a writer and academic who has spent the last decade studying and teaching women’s illness narratives, first at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and now to cancer patients at UVA Hospital. I have been teaching Writing As a Means of Healing: Writing Through Cancer to patients and survivors receiving treatment at UVA for over a year now.

I was teaching my first workshop last summer when I got the news that my cancer had returned. At that point, I wondered if, once the line between “teacher” and “patient” had been crossed, I could continue teaching the workshop. Was it too difficult to meet other cancer patients every week as I faced the reality of my breast cancer recurrence and my pregnancy? What hope can I offer people when I am in the midst of it myself? Is it possible that “writing,” as the workshop title suggests, can actually be a way of “healing?” If yes, how?

I don’t have the answers to these questions. All I have is a nascent belief and a contract I must uphold.

Finding Balance

To say that the Writing Through Cancer series has lived up to every expectation—mine, my fellow patients, and the survivors in the workshops—is to miss the magic and power of such support groups. That’s not something I do, as a teacher. This is something we all do, as a close-knit community, when we gather on Zoom every Thursday afternoon with open hearts and a willingness to speak the truth, with or without fear, anger, sadness, joy, humor, hope, or any of the emotions that accompany the reality of living with cancer.

One of the most difficult parts of the cancer experience is learning how to balance the desire to live a fulfilling life with the strength to face the reality of the disease. In class, we wrote together about trying to achieve 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 retrieve what we found confusing or difficult about the story and share it with each other, and—at the end of each six-week writing workshop—sometimes also share it with the broader community through public readings in front of family, friends, and staff at UVA Health.

Finding ‘Zen Moments’

“Since my first cancer diagnosis, I have felt blocked and emotionally disconnected from my feelings,” said Sharon Zoumbaris, a two-time breast cancer survivor who participated in the Summer 2025 edition of Writing Through Cancer. “This group has helped me access my emotions… Having a place to sit and feel comfortable with thoughts about cancer, disease, treatment, death, and spirituality has been a much greater gift than I knew I needed.”

Liz Grissom, who is taking part in the Spring 2025 group while also undergoing chemotherapy for a recurrence of breast cancer, also agrees with this. “I was on medical leave after work, and this 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 kept in touch with one of my fellow writers, and we had compared treatment options and regularly exchanged survival advice. I started a piece of writing that I continued working on for two months, and then it was published.”

And Margarita Figuerosa, a breast cancer survivor and caregiver for a loved one with cancer, says the group has helped relieve her of much of the emotional stress that accompanied her and her loved one’s diagnosis. “The class is structured in a way that makes it easy to participate, even for beginning writers,” Figuerosa said. “I have a ‘Zen moment’ right after every class, a moment of catharsis after being freed from the emotions I was holding on to a particular event in the past.”

Writing may not heal our physical bodies or cure cancer. But learning to express vital, core emotions about the experience of prolonged illness and treatment, as well as the accompanying big questions about life and death, can give patients a sense of power and comfort. “As a cancer patient, I look for empowering survival experiences rather than ones that make me feel trapped or limited by the disease,” Grissom said. “This felt like a support group where I could take a more active role and create art and friendship out of chaos.”

Join Our Support Group

Our next six-week group will be open exclusively to breast cancer patients and survivors in honor of Breast Cancer Awareness month. We will start on Thursday, October 9, and meet every Thursday for six weeks via Zoom from 2:30 to 4:00 p.m.

Additional workshops for patients and survivors of all types of cancer will be held in the Winter and Spring of 2026. To register for a workshop, email [email protected].