Kicking Cancer's Ass

Wenora Johnson is a patient advocate, an eight-year U.S. Navy reservist, and a survivor of three cancers. She was 45, fit and symptom-free when a FIT test she'd ignored for two weeks led to a stage 3B colorectal cancer diagnosis. Genetic testing later found Lynch syndrome (an MSH2 mutation). A preventive hysterectomy then found endometrial cancer.

On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, Wenora tells Joelle Kaufman how she found a Lynch syndrome vaccine trial on clinicaltrials.gov and emailed the principal investigator herself. She offered to help with the research even if she didn't qualify, and she got in.

They also talk about why colorectal cancer is rising in younger adults and why at-home screening tests matter, how family silence about what relatives died of keeps people from the screening they need, why Wenora kept her diagnosis from her own children, and who clinical research still leaves out, especially Black women.

If you have a family history of cancer, or you're wondering whether a clinical trial could be right for you, this episode gives you two concrete moves: how to reach a trial's research team directly, and what to ask your family before your next appointment.

Topics Discussed

• The FIT test that sat on the toilet for two weeks

• Stage 3B at 45, after 15 years of feeling fine

• The phone call after surgery: her grandfather, at 38

• Why she hid her cancer from her own kids

• Lynch syndrome found her second cancer first

• Finding a trial and emailing the researcher yourself

• Why cancer trials need more Black women in them

• What doctors should say instead of "don't worry"

Don Helgeson has had three cancers: melanoma at 27, colon cancer at 37, and stage 3B prostate cancer at 51. One inherited gene connects all three: Lynch syndrome, a hereditary condition that raises the risk of colorectal cancer and several others.

Don is a retired Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer who served 28 years. He's a volunteer leader with Man Up to Cancer and carries the MSH2 form of Lynch syndrome, which he inherited from his mother. She was diagnosed with colon cancer at 42. Her openness led her brother and sister to get screened, and both were diagnosed.

Joelle and Don talk about what genetic testing for hereditary cancer changed for his family, and why his first PSA test came too late. They cover the question every carrier should ask: which cancers does my gene raise my risk for, and when should screening for each one start? Don also talks about finding men his own age to ask about sex after prostate cancer, why he's seen a counselor for close to 20 years, and the day his last child's genetic test came back.

For anyone with a family history of cancer, anyone who carries a hereditary cancer gene, and the men who don't like to ask.

Topics Discussed 

• His mother talked about it. Two siblings got screened.
• The letter Don calls "congratulations"
• Testing the family, one 50/50 at a time
• Ask which cancers your gene raises, not just which gene
• His first PSA came at 50. Guidelines say 40.
• He asked men his age, and got a treatment his surgeon hadn't mentioned
• A counselor for 20 years, before cancer ever needed one
• "It ends with me"

Dr. William Bestermann is an internist and cardiovascular specialist who spent his career treating heart disease, diabetes, and chronic kidney disease, and who survived lymphoma himself. He founded the first ICU in Beaufort, South Carolina, ran 180 patients through the NIH's ACCORD diabetes trial, and has written about optimal medical therapy on Substack for six years.

His argument is that oxidative stress is the root cause of nearly every chronic disease, cancer included. Excess oxidant production plus weakened antioxidant defense produces inflammation, and inflammation is where cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, and autoimmune disease all start. Antioxidant supplements like vitamin E were tested against this and failed. The drugs that actually work on the mechanism are ones most people already recognize: metformin, statins, losartan, and the newer diabetes drugs.

He also explains why he'd start treating at 130 over 80 rather than waiting, why abdominal fat is the largest gland in your body, and what a quadrillion oxidants per cigarette puff does to your DNA.

The practical piece: he names one study, the Steno-2 trial, that produced the best outcomes ever recorded in type 2 diabetes, and tells you to bring it to your doctor and ask for that standard of care by name.

Host Joelle Kaufman is a BRCA1 carrier, a triple-negative breast cancer survivor, and the host of Kicking Cancer's Ass.

Topics Discussed

•  Ask for Steno-2 by name at your next appointment

•  Why vitamin E failed every trial it entered

•  The article that ended one cardiologist's certainty

•  130 over 80, and what to start then

•  A quadrillion oxidants per puff, and what they fracture

•  Same buildings, same doctors, 89% fewer deaths

•  The metformin cancer claim, and where it broke

•  Heart disease outranks recurrence for older survivors

Kathy Baker's family looked like a textbook case for hereditary cancer. Her sister had breast cancer at 32. Her mother had three separate primary cancers. Her grandfather died of aggressive prostate cancer and his mother died of pancreatic cancer. Her oncologist recommended genetic testing in 2000 and she refused, because each of those cancers already had an explanation and none of the explanations was a gene.

She tested nine years later, in 2009, and came back positive for a BRCA1 mutation. Early ovarian cancer was found during the risk-reducing surgery that followed.

Kathy is the founder of My Faulty Gene, a nonprofit that funds genetic testing for patients who are uninsured or who do not meet standard testing criteria, and that helps families appeal insurance denials. In this conversation with Joelle Kaufman she explains cascade testing: what a family history of cancer actually tells you, why a first-degree relative carries a 50% chance of sharing your mutation, why an inherited mutation cannot skip a generation, and why the father's line gets missed by families tracking only breast and ovarian cancer. She and Joelle also cover what genetic testing costs now, what GINA protects and what it does not, why Medicare will not cover testing unless you already have cancer, and what to do when a physician tells you a finding on a scan is nothing to worry about.

If you test positive, there is a specific list of people who need to know. This episode is how to build it.

Podcast Keywords: family history of cancer, genetic testing, BRCA, hereditary cancer, cancer prevention, cascade testing, genetic counseling, cancer risk, ovarian cancer, previvor, patient advocacy, cancer survivorship

Topics Discussed

• Why a "clean" family history often isn't one

• What your relative's tumor test can reveal about you

• The 50% rule for every first-degree relative

• Why an inherited mutation can't skip a generation

• Tracing the father's line, not just the mother's

• What to do when a doctor says don't worry about it

• Getting life insurance in place before you test

• Why Israel tests on demand and Medicare won't

Somebody you love has cancer and you don't know what to do. You send an article. You say let me know if you need anything. You wait to be asked, and the ask never comes.

Juliann Halvorsen is a therapist at Cancer CarePoint, where she has spent six years running cancer support groups and one-to-one counseling, all of it free to patients and families. On this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, she and Joelle Kaufman get specific about how to help someone with cancer without making it worse.

They cover why joining a cancer support group can be the wrong first move for someone newly diagnosed and what belongs there instead, how to interview a therapist rather than audition for one, what anger does when it stops protecting a person and starts costing them, and what actually happens on a first call to a cancer support organization. Juliann walks through the identity shift that arrives once active treatment ends, which is why life after cancer is its own problem and not a finish line.

Joelle names the two things she told everyone she did not want during treatment, and the instruction her grandmother gave her grandfather before she died.

For anyone facing a cancer diagnosis, caring for someone who is, or standing in a kitchen trying to figure out what to say.

Topics Discussed

• Why the casserole comes from a near-stranger
• Telling everyone, and telling them what you don't want
• Asking for a name instead of a link
• Interviewing a therapist instead of auditioning
• Why a support group can wait
• Harnessing anger instead of carrying it
• Handing someone a permission slip before they need it
• Who am I now, after treatment ends

Michael Dorian was a veterinary technician living with AIDS when the towers fell. He put on scrubs, got past the barricades at Ground Zero, and spent 24 hours on the pile pouring saline into the eyes of firefighters blinded by asbestos and concrete dust. Fifteen years later he was diagnosed with a rare, aggressive skin cancer that had already reached stage 4, one of tens of thousands of 9/11-linked cancer diagnoses that keep accumulating decades after the attacks.

His friend Neil Adams, author of From The Pile, joins Joelle Kaufman to tell the rest of it: the fight with the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which refused to accept the respirator, blanket, and World Trade Center debris Michael had kept in a box for fifteen years as proof he was ever there. What finally qualified him for $100,000-a-course experimental treatment was a single television interview he had nearly forgotten, and the search for that tape became a news story of its own.

This episode is about what Michael did with the years while he fought. Two death sentences, one at sixteen and one at fifty, and a life organized entirely around putting small unexpected good things in front of other people. Joelle calls those happiness tripwires. Michael planted thousands of them.

Kicking Cancer's Ass is about being the CEO of your own cancer journey.

Topics:

• A vet tech in scrubs walks onto the pile

• Twenty-four hours flushing firefighters' bleeding eyes
• Why the debris he saved wasn't proof
• The tape that had been recorded over
• What actually counts as evidence of exposure
• Health Program eligibility is wider than you think
• Registering with the VCF isn't filing a claim
• Happiness tripwires, laid on purpose, while dying

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.

Dr. George Beauregard spent twenty years as a board-certified internist and could count the colorectal cancer patients he'd seen under 50 on one hand. Then his son Patrick was diagnosed at 29. Patrick was a Marine and a runner with no family history and no risk factors, and his first symptom sent him straight to the emergency room with cancer that had already spread to his lungs.

In this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, George and Joelle Kaufman get practical about early-onset colorectal cancer screening for people the guidelines leave out. What colon cancer symptoms actually look like in your thirties, which at-home tests you can get without a colonoscopy (fecal immunochemical test, Cologuard, ColoSense, and the new FDA-approved blood test), what a false positive really costs you, and the one rule George says is absolute if any alternative test comes back abnormal.

They also get into where this is coming from. IARC traces the rise to exposures in childhood and early adulthood, which raises an uncomfortable question about a screening system built entirely around what happens after 45.

You'll leave knowing the specific test to request at your next annual physical, and how to push back when you're told you're too young.

George Beauregard is the author of “Reservations for Nine: A Doctor's Family Confronts Cancer.”

Kicking Cancer's Ass is about being the CEO of your own cancer journey.

Topics Discussed

• Why 45 is already too late
• The $24 test to request at your annual physical
• 22.5% of eligible 45-year-olds get screened
• What to do the day a test comes back abnormal
• 17 polyps, and he wasn't eligible
• IARC traces the rise to childhood exposure
• The genetic and lifestyle audit nobody offers you
• Fertility preservation before the first round of chemo

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.

She gives Joelle the complication rates most patients never hear. Implant infection at 15 to 20 percent, not the two or three percent some centers quote. Capsular contracture at the same rate. Both doubled permanently by prior radiation, even radiation from twenty years earlier. Implants requiring replacement three or four times over a woman's life. On the DIEP flap side, total flap loss under one percent, with delayed wound healing as the far more common issue. And going flat as a legitimate choice with the fastest recovery and lowest complication rate, not a consolation prize.

They also cover what a mastectomy does to sensation, why resensation research is still preliminary, how to manage pain without narcotics, what to do about drains, and the one thing to ask for at a consultation that tells you whether you are with the right surgeon.

The takeaway you can use tomorrow: ask your surgeon for your infection rate, your capsular contracture rate, and whether your radiation history doubles them. If the numbers come back suspiciously low, ask what they are based on.

Kicking Cancer's Ass is about being the CEO of your own cancer journey.

Topics Discussed

• Why 75% choose implants, and it isn't outcomes
• The infection rate to make your surgeon quote
• Radiation from 20 years ago still counts
• Implants are car tires, not furniture
• Flap failure vs implant infection, side by side
• Record every appointment and keep the transcript
• Recovering without narcotics, on a strict schedule
• The photo request that reveals your surgeon

A pediatric cancer diagnosis comes with a plan for the body. It rarely comes with a plan for the child inside it, their identity, their autonomy, their childhood. That is the part families have to advocate for themselves. Kylee McGrane-Zarnoch founded A Moment of Magic to help them, and since 2017 it has reached more than 185,000 medically vulnerable children through 4,000+ trained college volunteers in children's hospitals nationwide, completely free.

In this episode of Kicking Cancer's Ass, Joelle Kaufman and Kylee turn a childhood cancer journey into a self-advocacy playbook: what cancer really takes (autonomy) and how to take it back, why you get to choose your own labels instead of accepting “sick” or “fighter,” a simple deep-breathing trick (bubbles) for a child facing a port access, how to protect the well siblings, and what cancer survivorship really asks of a family once the bell is rung. You leave with one specific thing you can do to advocate for your whole self, or your child's.

Topics Discussed

• What cancer really takes: autonomy, and how to take it back
• Why your labels are yours alone to choose
• The 99-cent tool that calms a kid before a port access
• Protecting the well sibling everyone forgets
• Why caregivers can carry the trauma hardest
• Controlling your own story instead of reliving it
• Joy as an act of self-advocacy, not a distraction
• Survivorship: the support that vanishes when fear peaks

For patients, parents, survivors, and anyone supporting a family through cancer. Learn more at amomentofmagic.org.

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.

Prevention and early detection have saved more lives than treatment. This episode covers the science behind each habit so you can start today.

Topics discussed:

• Cancer cases projected to nearly double by 2050
• Early-onset cancers rising in adults under 45
• Prevention and early detection saving 80% of avoidable deaths
• Whole foods and protein as cancer-fighting fuel
• The social trick that makes exercise stick
• Body fat as an inflammatory, metabolically active organ
• Where GLP-1 medications help and where they fall short
• Alcohol classified alongside asbestos and tobacco
• Vaping risks oncologists fear most