Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking - The Atlantic

"Mary Elizabeth Williams was just 44, a staff writer at Salon and a mother of two who was freshly reunited with her husband (from whom she had separated two years earlier), when she noticed a bump about the size of a pencil eraser on her scalp. It didn’t hurt. It didn’t itch. “I’m sorry to tell you this,” her dermatologist said, “but you have malignant melanoma,” a cancer that kills some 10,000 people annually.

Back then, in 2010, her tumor was only Stage 2. But a year after it was removed—along with a chunk of her scalp—the disease came back. This time it was Stage 4; there is no Stage 5. Her long-term prognosis? She could have as little as six months to live.

Then she got lucky: She qualified for a clinical trial at New York’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, testing drugs that were supposed to harness a patient’s immune system against the disease. As the first line of her new memoir reveals, “Spoiler: I lived.”

Surviving Cancer Without the Positive Thinking - The Atlantic