I told my oncologist that treatment's going to have to wait 'cause I'm booked up. And she just looked at me with eight eyes and said, “Valerie, if you don't treat this, this is fatal."
Performer and playwright Valerie David has had cancer three times: stage 3 non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, stage 2 breast cancer, and stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. During chemo and radiation, she journaled about her experiences and recorded audio diaries when writing became too exhausting. This became the catalyst for her to write The Pink Hulk: One Woman’s Journey to Find the Superhero Within, Valerie’s award-winning, one-woman show that she has performed for the last decade without interruption, both domestically and globally. She also landed in the 3% of patients who achieve a 100% response to treatment after advocating for a specific drug she learned about while copyediting its ad campaign eight months before her own stage 4 diagnosis.
They dive deep into:
- Requesting baseline vocal cord imaging before chemo starts
- How her copyediting work on an ad campaign led to advocating for a drug that helped her become a three-time cancer survivor
- Recording audio diaries when journaling becomes too draining
- The importance of patient advocacy: Calling the specialist yourself when your care team stalls
- Switching hospitals after 20 years mid-treatment
- Performing The Pink Hulk on the very day she found out about her stage 4 diagnosis
- Why life expectancy framing from support counselors causes real harm
- Her HER2-positive, PR-positive, ER-negative diagnosis and why it changed her chemo protocol
Learn more: kcapodcast.com
