A growing collection of posts on social media is helping thousands cope with cancer in an unexpected way: via pithy humor, foul language and deadpan one-liners that trade euphemisms and inspirational thoughts for raw, often difficult truths.
These memes – pictures and short videos culled from pop culture and overlaid with text — from popular sites such as Snarky Cancer and The Cancer Patient deal with issues including overlooked side effects, awkward conversations with family and fears of dying. For followers of the accounts, they’ve become a source of comfort and community.
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Snarky Cancer also has a website that sells T-shirts — 10% of all gross profits go to various cancer foundations and societies — with designs ranging from “Game of Thrones” references (“A Girl Has No Hair,” “A Girl Has No Boobs” and “What Do We Say to The Cancer Gods? Not Today.) to the more universal favorite, “Fuck C*ncer, *Only one obscene word here.”
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Not surprisingly, Snarky Cancer sprang from the family’s own experiences. Shelly-Stephens and her son, Tre, both have an extremely rare hereditary genetic condition called Li-Fraumeni syndrome that greatly increases the risk of developing cancer at a young age.
Shelly-Stephens was diagnosed with breast cancer at 21, skin cancer at 22, and sarcoma in her 40s. Tre was only 2 years old when he was diagnosed with rhabdomyosarcoma. He then received two additional sarcoma diagnoses in his 20s — leiomyosarcoma at 21 and osteosarcoma at 22 and 24.
“We affectionately call ourselves mutants,” Shelly-Stephens says, pointing out one of her favorite T-shirt designs, an image of a DNA double-helix beneath the words, “I have killer genes.”
Snarky humor, Shelly-Stephens says, has always been her family’s go-to coping mechanism. She realized it was time to share the laughs on Tre’s 21st birthday, when she gave him a gift wrapped in paper she’d decorated with the words, “Cancer sucks, but you don’t, so here’s a present.”
“I turned to my husband and I said, ‘Oh my god, there needs to be like, a line, of this shit,'” she says.
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“My whole philosophy in life is, ‘If you go through hell, you reach back and help the person who’s behind you,” Shelly-Stephens says. “We’re all just trying to make cancer suck less. … When somebody messages us on Instagram and says, ‘I wore this to my treatment today,’ or ‘I wore my Scanxiety shirt and everybody loved it and it made me feel so much better’ … it’s those little things that can make such a huge difference during some of the darkest times of people’s lives.”
‘Are you a tumor? Because you’re really growing on me’
One enormously popular Instagram account, The Cancer Patient, which recently partnered with Snarky Cancer to print some of its memes on T-shirts, is an ever rawer account of living with cancer. The account was created in 2018 by a now-29-year-old cancer survivor and has since gained over 33,000 followers. The Cancer Patient candidly addresses the challenges of, for example, having sex, dating and going to the bathroom while dealing with cancer and its side effects.
SurvivorNet reached out to the admin behind the account, and they told us that they would prefer to keep their name and gender anonymous, so that followers could continue to visualize the humorous posts — including those that deal with sex and dating — from their own personal perspective rather than the perspective of the one creating the memes.
“I'm honestly surprised how the page got big so fast,” the survivor shared with us via email. It’s just a testament to how the cancer community is longing for an approach like this. ”
One of the highlighted “stories” on account reads: “Part of the reason I started this page is I’m tired of seeing cancer social media pages … only post bout what and how a cancer patient should look like. … No one talks about how we cry at the parking lot before chemo or how we stay up all night googling cancer shit. … Real issues in the community are barely acknowledged and talked about because we are too busy making cancer look inspirational. You know it and I know it. And we all know that part of the reason this page is successful so far because I don’t shy away from opening discussions about the difficult topics or the stuff that no one talks about.”
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Next to the moving message is a laugh-out-loud highlight reel of “Cancer pickup lines.”
“Are you a tumor?” one reads. “Because you’re really growing on me.”
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