By Cameron Steele

I was 22 weeks pregnant and hiking below Mount Sinopah in Glacier National Park when I found the lump. It looked like the Montana mountain named after my husband’s ancestor: hard, immobile, begging to be tackled.

This wouldn’t be my first rodeo with breast cancer: I had first been diagnosed in 2021 and had undergone a double mastectomy, endocrine therapy, and chemotherapy. I had spent years paying close attention to my body, trying to live with it, trying to adapt to the ever-changing goal posts of the “new normal.” So when I found the lump on holiday, 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 deal with pregnancy and delivery while we made treatment decisions. As I put my four-year-old son to bed the night after the official diagnosis came in on MyChart, I tried not to cry over the Cancer hates kisses children’s book placed on pillow. My husband and I had trotted out the trusty story to help us with what sometimes seemed 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 made us feel empowered? Could we use stories of love, honesty, and wonder to help us overcome the inevitable pain and fear of diagnosis, treatment, and hopefully recovery?

These last 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 Healing Method: Writing Through Cancer to patients and survivors receiving treatment at UVA for just over a year.

Last summer I was teaching my first workshop when I received the news that my cancer had returned. At the time I wondered whether, now that the boundary between “teacher” and “patient” had been crossed, I could continue teaching in the laboratory. Would it be too difficult to meet other cancer patients every week as I face the reality of breast cancer recurrence and pregnancy? What hope could I offer people when I’m in the middle of this? Could “writing”, as the title of the workshop encourages, really be a way of “healing”? If yes, how?

I had no answers to these questions. All I had was a nascent trust and a contract that I had to maintain.

Finding balance

To say that the Writing Through Cancer series has met every expectation of me, my fellow patients, and workshop survivors is to miss the magic and power of such a support group. It wasn’t something I did as a teacher. It’s something we all do, as an intimate 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 other sets of emotions that accompany the reality of living with cancer.

One of the most difficult parts of the cancer experience is learning to balance the desire for a fulfilling life with the strength to face the reality of the disease. In class we write together about finding this balance. We write about our victories and defeats. We write about what we can’t say ‘in real life’: we express fears, hopes and dreams. We retrieve what seems or has seemed confusing or difficult about the stories and share it with each other, and at the end of each six-week writing workshop, we also sometimes share them with the larger community through public readings in front of family, friends, and UVA Health staff.

Finding “Moments of Zen”

“Ever since my first cancer diagnosis, I felt stuck 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 feel comfortable with thoughts about cancer, illness, treatment, mortality, and spirituality has been a much greater gift than I thought I needed.”

Liz Grissom, who attended the Spring 2025 group while undergoing chemotherapy for a breast cancer recurrence, agrees. “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 stimulated my creative thinking,” Grissom said. “I stayed in touch with one of my fellow writers and we compared treatment options and regularly exchanged survival tips. I started a piece of writing that I continued to work on for two months, and it was later published.”

And Margarita Figuerosa, a breast cancer survivor and caregiver of a loved one with cancer, said the group helped her free herself from much of the emotional distress that accompanied both her and her loved one’s diagnosis. “The course is structured in a way that makes it easy to participate, even for a novice writer,” Figuerosa said. “I had my ‘Zen moment’ right after each class, that cathartic moment after freeing myself from an emotion I was holding onto about a particular event in the past.”

Writing may not be able to heal our physical body or cure cancer. But learning to express vital, fundamental emotions about the experience of prolonged illness and treatment, and the accompanying big questions about life and death that come with it, can instill in the patient both a sense of empowerment and a sense of ease. “As a cancer patient, I seek out survival experiences that are empowering rather than experiences that make me feel stuck or defined by the disease,” Grissom said. “It felt like a support group where I could take a more active role and create art and friendships out of the 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 will start on Thursday, October 9th and meet every Thursday for six weeks on Zoom from 2.30pm to 4.00pm

Additional workshops for patients and survivors of all types of cancer will take place in the winter and spring of 2026. To register for the workshop, email [email protected].