The Podcast
You've gotten past the shock. Now what?
Most cancer content is aimed at the newly diagnosed — the raw, terrifying first weeks. But what about everything that comes after? Treatment decisions nobody warns you about. The identity crisis after you're declared NED or PCR. The career fallout. The sex life nobody asks about. The science your oncologist or surgeon doesn't have time to explain.
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The Podcast: Kicking Cancer's Ass
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Episode 59: My Dog Got a Colon Cancer Test. This 29-Year-Old Didn't.
Colorectal cancer is no longer a disease of older people. Three out of four cases diagnosed under age 50 are already advanced stage, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer projects that early-onset colorectal cancer will double roughly every 15 years if current trends continue.
Episode 58: Breast Reconstruction Options: What Your Surgeon Won't Quote
Most women deciding on breast reconstruction after a mastectomy are working from fear, not numbers. Dr. Merisa Piper is a reconstructive microsurgeon at UCSF who performs every option: breast implants, DIEP flap, other autologous reconstruction, and aesthetic flat closure. Because she does all of them, she has no reason to sell any of them.
Episode 57: Childhood cancer: how to protect their childhood
Four in ten cancers are tied to risk factors you already control. Cancer cases are set to nearly double by 2050, and they are climbing fastest in younger adults. Joelle walks through five evidence-based habits that make your body a harder place for cancer to take hold: what to eat, how to move, why weight matters, the truth about alcohol, and what every oncologist she talks to fears about vaping.
Episode 14: 5 Daily Habits That Prevent Cancer
Four in ten cancers are tied to risk factors you already control. Cancer cases are set to nearly double by 2050, and they are climbing fastest in younger adults. Joelle walks through five evidence-based habits that make your body a harder place for cancer to take hold: what to eat, how to move, why weight matters, the truth about alcohol, and what every oncologist she talks to fears about vaping.
Episode 56: The One Decision That Changed My Cancer Care
Iraq War veteran Laura Pearson was low risk by every measure when she felt a breast lump her mammogram had missed. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, she tells Joelle Kaufman how she pushed past a doctor's reassurance to get the bilateral diagnostic mammogram and biopsy that found her breast cancer, and how she traced it to the toxic burn pits she was exposed to during her deployment in Iraq, an exposure now recognized under the PACT Act.
Episode 55: I Went Flat and Never Missed a Beat
Drummer April Samuels was 41 and playing professionally when she was diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer, an aggressive type that had already run through her family screening history. In this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, April tells Joelle Kaufman how she went from diagnosis to double mastectomy in two weeks, why she chose to go flat and has never doubted it, and what she wishes every woman with fibrocystic or dense breasts knew about how often to get screened.
Episode 54: He built cancer surgery. Then told us to stop.
Dr. Charles Balch, professor emeritus at MD Anderson Cancer Center, helped make surgical oncology a specialty, led ASCO, and now runs ISOPT, the International Society of Oncology Prevention and Treatment. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, he tells Joelle Kaufman why the future of cancer care is prevention and early detection, not bigger surgery.
Solo Episode 13: What Does It Really Mean to Kick Cancer's Ass?
On the one-year anniversary of Kicking Cancer's Ass, host Joelle Kaufman answers the question the show's name keeps provoking: what does it actually mean to kick cancer's ass? A lot of people hate the warrior language around cancer, and Joelle thinks they have a point.
Episode 52: Don't Bounce Back. Get Ahead of It.
Naturopathic oncologist Dr. Jessa Landmann joins Kicking Cancer's Ass to make the case that most cancer-treatment side effects, from fatigue to joint pain to poor sleep, are easier to prevent than to fix.
Episode 51: Cancer Wasn’t the Hardest Part. My Friends Were.
The Thing Nobody Warns a Man About
Joelle ended the episode with a lightning round. One or two words per answer, quick as she could ask. Then she got to this one: complete the sentence. The thing nobody warns a man about cancer is _______.
Three men. Four time zones between them. Not one of them paused.
Episode 50: Annabelle Gurwitch Has Stage 4. And Better Things to Do.
Two Stages. Same Silence.
A few months into her Stage 4 lung cancer treatment, Annabelle Gurwitch’s son came home from college and found her unconscious on the bathroom floor.
She’d been on the recommended dose of her targeted therapy. She’d known for weeks it was unlivable. She hadn’t told her doctor. She thought tolerating it was what a good patient did.
Episode 49: MDS, AML, Liver Failure. We Ran It Like a Startup.
Heidi Kay Carson's husband Chad was 33, healthy, and holding a PhD in computer science when a routine blood test set off a 14-year medical odyssey that ended with two simultaneous organ failures and no US hospital willing to treat him.
In this episode, Heidi walks through the decisions, the dead ends, and the unconventional moves that got them further than anyone said was possible, and what she has built since Chad passed in 2019.
Episode 48: Chemo Ended. Two Weeks Later, I Hiked Zion
Two weeks after her last chemo infusion for HER2-positive breast cancer, yoga teacher Larissa Noto hiked Zion National Park. Her oncologist found out about the trip mid-call when she mentioned she was already in Vegas.
Joelle Kaufman talks with Larissa Noto, founder of The Lovely Little Lotus. Larissa spent years as a corporate attorney before pivoting into a full-time career teaching yoga and mindfulness, and now serves as Director of Teacher Trainings at The Yogalo in Pennsylvania. In December 2024, one month after her father was diagnosed with prostate cancer, Larissa was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer. She was treated at Lehigh Valley Health Network with second opinions from Memorial Sloan Kettering and Fox Chase. Her treatment included active chemotherapy followed by a full year of Herceptin and Perjeta, plus a lumpectomy with axillary lymph node work. She did not have reconstruction.
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