Our guest today is Arlene Karole, lifelong learner, passionate journaler, and educator who has worked in healthcare for decades. Since her breast cancer diagnosis in 2015, she has been an advocate for patient empowerment and social support for women. Her recent book Just Diagnosed: What to Expect, What to Know and What to do Next is an invaluable resource for anyone with cancer. Arlene's Reading List: 1. Radical Remission: Surviving Cancer Against All Odds by Dr. Kelly A. Turner 2. The Blood Sugar Solution: The Ultra Healthy Program for Losing Weight, Preventing Disease, and Feeling Great Now! by Mark Hyman M.D. 3. Love, Medicine and Miracles by Dr. Bernie S. Siegel 4. Eat Right for Your Type by Peter J. D'Adamo 5. Prepare for Surgery, Heal Faster by Peggy Huddleston 6. Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl 7. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey 8. Nutrition and Breast Cancer Risk Reduction 9. The Well-Managed Healthcare Organization by Kenneth R. White, John R. Griffith 10. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) - Healthy People 2030 CancerTalks is an interdependent community project with a production team of three and we count on your contributions. We’d like to thank Jarratt Applewhite for his generous contribution. If you've learned from or been inspired by these conversations please consider joining Jarratt and becoming a donor. To support us starting at $5 a month, or to make a larger tax-deductible contribution, visit Patreon.com/cancertalks. If you enjoyed this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. If you’d like to be in community with other cancer thrivers seeking personal transformation join us on Zoom. Visit cancertalks.com/zoom to register.
As we head into season two of CancerTalks Podcast, Claire and Cheryl thought it would be nice to tell you a little bit about themselves and share the origin story of CancerTalks. Through this conversation, they arrive at a new realization of what CancerTalks is really about, namely, coming together to find ways to embody a world without cancer. If you find yourself unable to imagine a world without cancer, we invite you to listen to Cheryl and Claire’s conversation as they try to describe what it might feel like. One of the many people who we think is embodying a world without cancer is Rupa Marya, co-author of Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. On a recent podcast, Rupa describes what she means by deep medicine and invites us to rethink our understanding of health. Her description aligns perfectly with our vision of a world without cancer so we decided to share the whole thing right here, edited slightly for flow: Deep medicine is recognizing that health exists beyond individuals. Health is an emergent phenomenon of systems within systems working in their optimum state. So we can try to get health as an individual, but we will not be as successful as [we would be] getting health for whole communities together… And by that, I mean the human and the more than human communities. I mean the water, and the air, and the microbes in the forest. So deep medicine is understanding how all of those things must intersect to create health, and that we have to open our perspectives and our ways of knowing to all the keepers of deep medicine, not just the doctors or the healthcare workers, but that our farmers, our frontline indigenous grandmothers standing up against Line 3 right now; that these are all people working for health. And when we work together and collectively and across disciplines together, we can create a different kind of reality. We can create a health for everybody. When we start imagining food as a right as it has been for thousands of years before capitalism, where our food and medicine have always been coexistent. They haven't been separated from each other—and it’s still that way in many cultures around the world. When we insist upon our medicine, being outside of the tiny vocabulary of pharmaceuticals, not that we abandon science, Western science, or we abandon even those pharmaceuticals, but we abandon the logic of domination that they have been structured by and that we take back our right to have access to these things to be healthy when we need them. And that we incorporate the full range of languages and vocabularies of medicines, be they plant medicines, medicines of song, medicines of relationships, in order to achieve a vision and a reality of our health. So these practices are not… I'm not just talking about things that don't exist. These are things that are an active practice in communities around the world today. CancerTalks is an inter-dependent community project with a production team of three and we count on your contributions. We’d like to thank Karen Richmond for her generous contribution. If you've learned from or been inspired by these conversations please consider joining Karen and becoming a donor. To support us starting at $5 a month, or to make a larger tax-deductible contribution, visit Patreon.com/cancertalks. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. If you’d like to be in community with other cancer thrivers seeking personal transformation join us for free workshops on Zoom. Visit cancertalks.com to register.
Cristina Whitehawk’s superpower is love. In this week’s episode, Cristina says with great conviction, “Love heals; hatred doesn’t.” Even as Cristina was going through chemo, she made a decision to love the cancer inside her. Through her journey with cancer, Cristina started to accept that she was an author. Cristina writes from the inside out. Some of her transformative teachings include how to forgive, how to appreciate, and how to receive. If you enjoy this conversation, we'd love it if you could leave a review in your podcast app. If you're moved to donate, please visit https://www.patreon.com/cancertalks. This podcast is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Visit https://cancertalks.com/mystory to share your story! You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook.
Charlie Altekruse is a loving father who shares his wife Barbara’s cancer story. Barbara inspired anyone she met to notice everyday miracles, even as she was transitioning to another realm. Charlie joins us from Berkeley, California where he lives with his two boys.
Parul Somani is a gifted public speaker who inspires people all over the world to build resilience. The Founder of Silver Linings, Parul offers actionable insights on thriving through hardship. If you enjoy this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. This podcast is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Go to cancertalks.com/mystory to join the conversation. If you are moved to donate, please visit patreon.com/cancertalks. This episode was produced by Claire de Laszlo and Rory Amunrud, music and editing by Annie Murnighan. Special thanks to our donors and volunteers. We couldn't do this without you.
Vanessa Bradley Bocandé is an investor, philanthropist, and former executive. She is always seeking out projects that will make a difference in people’s lives and the world at large. Vanessa participated in the 2019 conference where CancerTalks was born. This episode is dedicated to Vanessa’s sister Angela.
Kristi Nelson is Executive Director of A Network for Grateful Living and a stage IV cancer thriver. Tune in to hear how her cancer experience led her to the transformative practice of taking nothing for granted.
Naturopath Beatrice Levinson is an expert in gut health as it relates to our mental and physical well-being. Joining us from France, she shares her personal cancer story, along with a lifetime of wisdom in natural medicine.
Hear how Jan Adrian of Healing Journeys transformed her cancer diagnosis from a death sentence into a life sentence.
This week, Claire writes about Palestine. As of yesterday, more than 30,000 have been killed by the Israeli occupying forces. What does the genocide in Palestine have to do with cancer? When we think about cancer prevention, we think of things like clean air, food and water, access to routine screenings, stress reduction. None of those things are available anywhere in Gaza right now. Please take a moment with me to honor everyone who has died from cancer in Palestine, everyone living with cancer in Gaza now, and everyone who will have to live and die with cancer as a result of the genocide.
Deborah Bellen is a personal finance coach who helps people understand their emotional relationship with money. Although she is not professionally a hospice nurse, she has been on eleven hospice journeys with loved ones. From a very young age, Deborah saw that death was a very important part of life. In this episode, she shares many moving stories of what it means to walk with someone between life and death. If you enjoy this conversation, please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate.
Megan-Claire Chase, a.k.a. Warrior Megsie, is a breast cancer survivor and advocate from Atlanta. Her blog, Life on the Cancer Train, details her experience as a young adult cancer survivor while advocating for better treatment and resources. It's known for being authentic, raw, and informative - with a twist of humor. Megan-Claire is a powerful public speaker, researcher, and published writer. Her work has been featured in various magazines, including Cure Magazine, Elephants and Tea, Cancer Today, and WebMD. She's a passionate advocate who uses her life on the cancer train to support and advocate for patients and survivors diagnosed with cancer. Special thanks to our guest host, Lisa Nelson, for guiding this conversation! If you enjoyed this conversation, please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate.
This week's guest is Elizabeth Benedict - a bestselling author whose novels include Almost and Slow Dancing. Her most recent book is a cancer memoir entitled Rewriting Illness: A View of My Own. Elizabeth's nonfiction spans a range of themes from sexual politics to money to literature and includes The Joy of Writing Sex, which has been the classic reference for writing about sex in fiction for the past 25 years. In this episode, we explore many different ways of understanding the cancer journey, including the way a doctor’s own emotional landscape affects the process of diagnosing a patient. If you enjoyed this conversation, please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate. This episode was produced by Claire de Laszlo Marshall, with editing and original music by Annie Murnighan. Elizabeth’s Reading List In Gratitude by Jenny Diski The Anatomy of Hope by Jerome Groopman MD On Mortality by Atul Gawande Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag
Emma King is a midwife in the making, a clinical herbalist, almost a nurse, a birth doula for both postpartum and abortion, as well as a death doula. Emma is a white, monied New Yorker who grew up in Manhattan in a home marked by chronic/terminal illness. She is a big, soft-egoed Leo/emotive perverted Scorpio, sometimes a novice tattooer, a bi, incorrigibly contradictory girl, a lover, and a fighter.
Our guests this week are Claire Jones and Amaranthia Sepia. Not only are Claire and Amaranthia mother and daughter, they are also sisters and soulmates. The episode follows the story of their life together, supporting each other through disability. Claire and Amaranthia’s most recent project is called Sista Creatives Rising, a platform for events including their upcoming series "Art & Mind," which showcases creative folk who are underrepresented women and marginalized genders. Claire & Amaranthia’s Resource List: "The world is what you make it" | Sadhguru | MotivationArk Audio book: Seat of the Soul by Gary Zukav Audio: 10 Skills That Will Pay Off Forever Audio: The Positive Affirmation Meditation - Louise Hay Guided Breathing: Deep Relaxation Audio: Heal Your Body by Louise Hay If you enjoyed this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate
Our guest today is Lisa Nelson. Lisa was born in Jamaica and raised in Queens, New York. She has worked for many years as an oncology social worker and is also an end-of-life doula. Lisa has a podcast of her own called Diary of a Black Social Worker where she shares diverse narratives of social work practice: Personal triumphs, challenges, education and reflections about the day to day life of an oncology social worker of color. Lisa’s Resource List Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto by Tricia Hersey Couched in Color Podcast with Dr. Alfiee M Breland-Noble Dear Death: Finding Meaning in Life, Peace in Death, and Joy in an Ordinary Day by Diane Button A Comforted Heart by Kelly Grosklags The Bible Seinfeld episodes
Our guest today is Sharon Finkel. Sharon is a New Yorker, born and raised. She is the mother of two young boys and the daughter of Soviet immigrants. Sharon has a long career as a lawyer but her true passion is in health and wellness. Her diagnosis and health care journey have been catalysts for exploration in functional medicine which she has found to be enormously helpful throughout treatment, recovery and the healing process. Beyond Breast Cancer Speaker: Sharon Finkel If you enjoyed this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate.
In this week's episode, Cheryl has a beautiful conversation with Molly Reno. Molly is a Somatic Coach with a long history as a Human Rights attorney. After her first encounter with breast cancer, she began leading support groups for cancer patients and became certified in a healing technique called Emotional Brain Training. Molly shares about her experience of staying awake to the cycle of life and death. Like all of us, she finds herself going back to sleep sometimes, but she always seems to find a way to wake up again and that is a true inspiration. If you enjoy this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. To check out our upcoming community workshops, visit cancertalks.com/zoom. If you’re moved to donate, we would be very grateful. Our work is funded by your generous contributions. For more information visit cancertalks.com/donate. This podcast was produced by Claire de Laszlo with editing and original music by Annie Murnighan. Cheryl Buck is the vision and heart behind CancerTalks, Kaitlyn Stein makes this work financially sustainable, and Nora Rice helps spread the word through social media direction. As always, we want to extend a special thanks to our donors and friends. We couldn't do this without you! Learn More Grace in Dying by Kathleen Dowling Singh The Way of Grace by Miranda MacPherson Meditations on Boundless Love (Audio) by Miranda MacPherson The Five Invitations by Frank Ostaseski Cured by Jeffrey Rediger A Matter of Death and Life by Marilyn Yalom, Irving Yalom Wintering by Katherine May In Love by Amy Bloom The Mindfulness Self-Compassion Workbook by Kristin Neff PhD and Christopher Germer PhD The Myth of Normal by Gabor Mate Go In and In by Danna Faulds (or any book of hers) Feast of Losses: A communion of Grief and Gratitude spoken by Kim Rosen and accompanied by Jami Siebers https://jamisieber.com/feast-of-losses Card Deck: The Cultivating Grace Card Deck by Miranda MacPherson Podcast: Tara Brach particularly the interview of Roland Griffiths PhD on meditation and psychedelics in the face of stage IV cancer Podcast: Insights at the Edge (Tami Simon founder of Sounds True)
Claire invited Polly Hoppin on to CancerTalks to highlight the power and the potential of focussing on cancer prevention, in addition to treatment. Polly co-founded the national Cancer Free Economy Network. The Network shares our vision for a world where no one gets sick from toxic chemicals polluting the places they live, learn, work, and play. CanerTalks just became an Ally member of the network and we’re excited to be part of their amazing work. Polly is also director of the Cancer & Environment Initiative at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell and Senior Advisor to the Cancer and Environment Network of Southwestern Pennsylvania. Polly received her Doctor of Science degree from Johns Hopkins University, in the course of which cancer arrived at her family’s doorstep—an experience which, along with her own cancer journey more recently—enriched her life and work. If you enjoy this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. To check out our upcoming community workshops, visit cancertalks.com/zoom. If you’re moved to donate, we would be very grateful. Our work is funded by your generous contributions. For more information visit cancertalks.com/donate. This podcast was produced by Claire de Laszlo with editing and original music by Annie Murnighan. Cheryl Buck is the vision and heart behind CancerTalks, Kaitlyn Stein makes this work financially sustainable, and Nora Rice helps spread the word through social media direction. As always, we want to extend a special thanks to our donors and friends. We couldn't do this without you!
Jimmy Maxwell is a pianist and band leader based in New Orleans who has played a central role in organizing the music of Mardi Gras for decades. He is also a lover of myth and has recently become the audio archivist for the Joseph Campbell foundation. Jimmy's Reading List: The Emperor of all Maladies by Siddhartha Murkherjee The Gene by Siddhartha Murkherjee The Hero With a 1000 Faces by Joseph Campbell Thou Art That by Joseph Campbell The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by Joseph Campbell The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson If you enjoyed this conversation please leave a review in your podcast app. CancerTalks is a platform for anyone who has been touched by cancer. Write to us at info@cancertalks.com if you have a story to share. If you’re moved to donate, please visit cancertalks.com/donate. This podcast was produced by Claire de Laszlo with editing and original music by Annie Murnighan. Cheryl Buck is the vision and heart behind CancerTalks, Kaitlyn Stein makes this work financially sustainable, and Nora Rice helps spread the word through social media direction. As always, we want to extend a special thanks to our donors, friends, and volunteers. We couldn't do this without you!