Support & healing for victims

By Cameron Steele

I was 22 weeks pregnant and hiking under Mount Sinopah in Glacier National Park when I found a lump. It feels like Mount Montana named according to the wishes of my husband’s ancestors: hard, not moving, asking to be handled.

This is not my first rodeo with breast cancer – I was diagnosed for the first time in 2021 and has been through double mastectomy, endocrine therapy, and chemotherapy. I have spent years paying attention to my body, trying to live together, trying to adjust to the goal poles that always shift “new normal.” So when I found a lump during the holidays, I knew what diagnosis before the biopsy confirmed.

Find the right words

Triple-negative breast cancer, but this time with additional complications because I have to see myself through pregnancy and birth when we make a treatment decision. When I put my four -year -old son to bed at night after the official diagnosis came to Mychart, I tried not to cry Cancer hates kisses Children’s books lean on the pillow. My husband and I have withdrew the trusted story to help us with what sometimes feels like the hardest part of having cancer as a young mother -finding the right words for that experience. Is it possible to tell the truth about life with cancer in a way that makes us feel empowered? Can we use the love story, honesty, and ask questions to help us through inevitable pain and fear of diagnosis, care, and, hopefully, recovery?

This last question is an important question for me, as a writer and academic who has spent the last decade of studying and teaching the narrative of female disease, the first at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and now for cancer patients in UVA Hospital. I have taught writing as a way of healing: writing through cancer to patients and survivors who receive treatment at UVA for more than a year now.

I was in the middle of teaching the first workshop last summer when I got word that my own cancer returned. At that time, I wondered whether, now the line between “teacher” and “patient” has been crossed, I will be able to continue to teach the workshop. Is it too difficult to meet with other cancer patients every week because I deal with the reality of the recurrence and pregnancy of my own breast cancer? What hope can I offer to people when I am in the middle of myself? Can “write,” as encouraged by the title of the workshop, is it really a way to “heal?” If so, how come?

I have no answers to these questions. All I have is a newborn belief and the contract that I need to be shaken.

Find balance

To say that the Writing Through Cancer series has fulfilled every hope – from me, from fellow patients and people who survived in the workshop – to lose the wonders and strength of such support groups. That’s not something I do, as a teacher. This is something that we all do, as an intimate community, when we gather together in Zoom every Thursday afternoon with an open heart and willingness to tell the truth, with or without fear, anger, sadness, joy, humor, hope, or a number of emotions that attend the reality of life with cancer.

One of the hardest parts of cancer experience is learning how to balance the desire to satisfy life with the power to deal with the reality of the disease. In class, we wrote together about fighting for this balance. We write about our victory and loss. We write about what we don’t know how to say ‘in real life’: We express fear, hope, and dreams. We reclaim what is felt or feels confusing or difficult about the story and dividing them with each other, and at the end of every six-week-writing writing workshop-sometimes also sharing it with a bigger community through public reading in front of family, friends, and staff at Uva Health.

Finding ‘Zen Moment’

“Since the diagnosis of my first cancer, I feel blocked and emotionally cut off from my feelings,” said Sharon Zoumbaris, a breast cancer sufferer twice participating in the 2025 summer writing iteration through cancer. “This group has helped me access my emotions … Having a place to sit and feel comfortable with the mind of cancer, disease, treatment, mortality, and spirituality has become a far greater gift than what I know what I need.”

Liz Grissom, who participated in the Spring 2025 group at the same time as undergoing chemotherapy for the recurrence of breast cancer, agreed. “I am medical leave from work, and the workshop gives me something to be awaited, helps me process my emotions in a healthy way, and involve my creative thinking,” Grissom said. “I have been in contact with one of my colleagues, and we have compared treatment choices and regularly exchanged survivors. I started writing that I continued to do for two months, and then published.”

And Margarita Figuerosa, a patient with breast cancer and caregiver who is loved with cancer, said the group had helped free him from many emotional pressure that accompanied the diagnosis of the person he loved. “Classes are arranged in a way that makes it easy to participate, even for a novice writer,” Figuerosa said. “I have a moment of ‘Zen’ I am right after every class, the moment of catarsis after being free from the emotions that I hold on certain events in the past.”

Writing may not be able to cure our physical body or cure cancer. But learning to express vital and core emotions about prolonged disease and treatment experiences, and big questions that accompany it about life and death that accompany it, can inspire a patient with a sense of strength and easy sense. “As a cancer patient, I look for a survival experience that empowering than that makes me feel jammed or defined by disease,” Grissom said. “This feels like a support group where I can take a more active role and create art and friendship from chaos.”

Join our support group

The next six weeks will be open exclusively for breast cancer patients and survivors to respect the month of breast cancer awareness. We will start on Thursday, October 9, and meet every Thursday for six weeks in zoom from 2:30 to 4 pm

Additional workshops for patients and survivors of all types of cancer will occur in winter and spring 2026. To register to the workshop, email cancerupportServices@uvahealth.org.