Kicking Cancer's Ass

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.

Laura and Joelle talk about self-advocacy when your risk scores say you're fine, the higher cancer risk facing female veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, why women use VA services far less than men, and how the VA became the highest standard of care Laura has experienced even though she has excellent private insurance. She shares the private oncologist who dismissed the burn-pit link, how she chose a mastectomy with reconstruction, how she kept running through recovery, and how she told her two kids she had cancer without passing them her fear.

This is essential listening for newly diagnosed women, female veterans, caregivers, and any clinician who has never asked a patient about military or environmental exposure. Search terms: breast cancer, veteran health, burn pits, PACT Act, VA cancer care, self-advocacy, mastectomy recovery.

Topics Discussed

• Low risk on every score, cancer anyway

• Demanding the diagnostic test, not the screening

• The burn pit answer to “why me”

• Cancer among Iraq and later-war veterans

• The private oncologist who wouldn't listen

• Why the VA became her best care

• Women veterans who stop mentioning they served

• Telling her kids without handing them fear
  

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.

She also shares how she built Breast Cancer Can Stick It, the nonprofit she started by selling t-shirts out of her car, and Drumathon, the event that has helped raise nearly $700,000 for treatment assistance, mammograms, and research. April hosts three shows for the cancer community: The Beat, the monthly Mighty and Metastatic, and the annual Triple Negative Breast Cancer Broadcast.

If you or someone you love is facing triple negative breast cancer, weighing a mastectomy or reconstruction, or looking for a community that leads with hope and humor instead of pity, this conversation is for you.

Topics Discussed:

• Diagnosed at 41, flat by choice

• The screening most dense-breasted women never get

• Selling “Breast Cancer Can Stick It” from her trunk

• Drumathon: strangers on stage with rock stars

• Why survivors confide in each other, not family

• Foobies, chicken cutlets, and cancer humor

• Triple negative: aggressive, but chemo-responsive

• The odd blessing of a cancer year

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.

They cover how immunotherapy works (and why it treats the immune system, not the tumor), how six weeks of treatment now clears most stage 3 melanoma without an operation, and why cancer is rising fast in people under 50 who fall outside standard screening guidelines. Balch explains the difference between immunotherapy and chemotherapy, the link between obesity, processed food, vaping and cancer risk, and why a simple FIT test, an AI-enhanced mammogram, or affordable genetic (NGS) testing can catch disease while it's still curable.

If you or someone you love has been told “you're too young,” has a family history of breast, colorectal, or melanoma cancer, or wants to understand personalized risk and screening, this conversation is a practical, hopeful roadmap. Balch's advice comes down to three words: know your risk.

Topics Discussed: 

• Know your risk: family history, lifestyle, genes

• Why “early” cancer isn't early: the billion-cell dime

• Age-based screening is missing younger patients

• Immunotherapy that treats you, not the tumor

• Stage 3 melanoma cleared without a scalpel

• The cheap FIT test your doctor skips

• New blood tests: promise, and their limits

• Why knowing your risk is a gift, not a sentence

Most people have never heard of a hospitalist until they meet one. Dr. Monique Nugent practices hospital medicine, the specialty that meets you in the five days when you’re sick, scared, and moving fast through a parade of specialists. In this episode of Kicking Cancer’s Ass, Monique and host Joelle Kaufman talk about the conversations that happen at the edge of serious illness and end of life, the ones the oncologist often doesn’t have and the hospitalist does.

They cover what a healthcare proxy really means, how to ask whether a decision is truly life-or-death before you panic, why “medical time” confuses newly diagnosed patients, and how to have advance care planning conversations with your family before a crisis forces them. Monique, author of Prescription for Admission, also explains why the warrior language around cancer (“fight,” “beat it,” “don’t give up”) can quietly harm the people we love most.

Honest, funny, and unguarded, this is a conversation for cancer patients, caregivers, and anyone who has ever sat in a hospital room not knowing what to ask. Released concurrently with Joelle’s guest appearance on Monique’s podcast, Prescription for Admission.

Topics Discussed:

• The doctor you never choose, who holds your hardest hour

• Why we hide the truth from the people we love most

• The mercy of being asked to be the villain

• “Medical time,” and the question that stops a panic decision

• Proxy, not decision-maker: honoring beats guessing

• Why “keep fighting” can quietly harm

• The dining-room conversation that releases your family from guilt

• You are not cancer: before, during, and after

Prescription for Admission - https://drmoniquenugent.com/podcast/   

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.

In this solo episode she makes the case that kicking cancer's ass has nothing to do with winning. You can do it and still die of cancer. It's about authorship: deciding what role the disease gets to play in your life and how you respond, on the good days and the hard ones.

Joelle tells her own story: a BRCA1 mutation, a surgery meant to prevent cancer that instead found it, twelve rounds of chemotherapy, and a clinically complete response she refuses to credit to her attitude. Then she plays back the advice of 52 guests, patients, survivors, caregivers, oncologists, scientists, and therapists, who almost never answer with fighting. They talk about staying the quarterback of your care, building a team, being good to your body, and finding the joke.

For anyone newly diagnosed with breast cancer or living with hereditary cancer risk, this is a year of hard-won wisdom in one place.

Topics Discussed:

• Why the host agrees with her own critics
• Authorship, not outcome: the real definition
• A surgery to prevent cancer that found it
• VoldaPort, and naming what scares you
• Why she won't credit the good scan to attitude
• 52 guests, and how few said "fight"
• Softness and laughter as survival tactics
• Hope that used to be a poster, now data

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.

She explains why cancer-related fatigue lingers long after chemotherapy ends, the role of inflammation and mitochondrial dysfunction, and why her head-to-toe approach starts with nutrition and movement before sleep.

Dr. Landmann breaks down high-dose IV vitamin C, including the difference between oral and pharmacological vitamin C (building on Dr. Lise Alschuler's earlier episode) and the first 2025 meta-analysis showing improved survival alongside chemotherapy and radiation.

She covers acupuncture for the joint pain caused by breast cancer medications like Tamoxifen, an approach endorsed by the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and shares how one patient doubled her energy through a simple change in meal timing.

Host Joelle Kaufman, a multi-generational cancer survivor, adds the prevention-first strategy she used during her own Stage 2A breast cancer treatment, and connects the exercise-and-recurrence research from Dr. Jay Harness's episode.

A practical conversation for anyone navigating chemotherapy, radiation, hormone therapy, survivorship, or life after treatment. Dr. Landmann's book, Beyond Cancer Fatigue: A Path to Reclaiming Energy, arrives April 2026.

Topics Discussed:

• Why fatigue outlasts the chemo that caused it

• Nutrition and movement before sleep, on purpose

• High-dose IV vitamin C, minus the myths

• The 2025 survival data, finally enough to pool

• Acupuncture for joint pain, endorsed by ASCO

• The meal-timing fix that doubled one patient's energy

• Why "just rest" is bad medicine

• Prevention during treatment, not rehab after it

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.

Loss of friendships.

Don said it first. Michael said “yep” before Don finished the word. Jay explained it the way only someone who lived it can: when you get diagnosed, the people back home either step up or they disappear.

Nobody hands you that brochure. We talk about scans and ports and the language of fighting. We don’t talk about the friend who stops texting back because your diagnosis scares him and he doesn’t have the words, so he just goes quiet, and one day you realize he’s been quiet for months.

Don, Michael, and Jay are three members of Man Up to Cancer, a nonprofit built on a simple, almost rude idea: men are smarter and stronger as a pack than as lone wolves. Don has beaten cancer three separate times. Michael was told his stage four was inoperable and went and got a second opinion anyway. Jay was diagnosed at 36, in the middle of the pandemic, doing chemo essentially alone while his wife Zoomed into appointments.

What they have now is not a support group. It’s a chat thread that runs all day, men who tell each other when their mental health is slipping, a 200-person retreat in the Poconos every September where grown men throw “I love you” around like it’s nothing. They didn’t get that from the friends who left. They built it.

In the full piece this week, I get into the part that surprised me most: the research says the friends who disappeared may have mattered more to these men’s survival than almost anything their doctors did. Not as a feeling. As a measurable predictor of who lives longer and lives better. And what Man Up to Cancer figured out, maybe without naming it, is how to make that support automatic instead of something you have to go beg for at the worst moment of your life.

Topics Discussed:

• The cave men disappear into after a diagnosis

• Why men “check out” when women “reach out”

• The friends who vanish, and the science of why that matters

• “Man up” reclaimed: courage to ask, not grit to suffer

• Michael’s second opinion that overturned “inoperable”

• Don’s Lynch syndrome and three separate cancers

• What 200 men actually do in the Poconos

• Walking to the kitchen counts as being active

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.

I knew Annabelle’s book before I knew her story. The End of My Life Is Killing Me: The Unexpected Joys of a Cancer Slacker is the funniest, most honest, and most useful thing I have read about living with an incurable diagnosis. Annabelle has been kicking lung cancer’s ass at Stage 4 for five years, on a targeted therapy she was told would stop working in eighteen months. She is alive because she spoke up. She calls herself a cancer slacker, not a cancer warrior. The phrase is funnier than it is, and more serious than it sounds.

What I did not expect, walking into the conversation, was how much of her experience I recognized in mine. I had Stage 2A breast cancer, called my treatment my cancer obliteration project, built a spreadsheet by the second round of chemo to stay ahead of side effects, and still found myself filtering in person. Two different stages. Two different prognoses. Same self-silencing.

In the deep-dive for paid subscribers: what the FDA is finally doing about a fifty-year-old assumption in cancer drug dosing, why the rules that determine who gets lung cancer screened are medical sex discrimination, why lung cancer research is funded at a fraction of its mortality burden, and the spreadsheet. It’s free at joellekaufman.com.

Topics Discussed

• The reframe that replaced “live like you’re dying”

• Stamtisch and the German word for Sunday joy

• Why “warrior” didn’t fit. “Slacker” did.

• The night her son found her on the bathroom floor

• Why she’s been at half the recommended dose for five years

• Big wellness, the sugar myth, and emergency chocolate

• The class action against pharmacy benefit managers

• The one piece of advice no one expected

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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.

In this episode, they dive into:

• How needing a liver transplant and a bone marrow transplant at the same time created a catch-22 with no protocol, Chad was removed from the US liver transplant waiting list the day his bone marrow failure was confirmed, forcing them to find a completely different path

• Why they flew to Korea for a living donor liver transplant,  South Korean hospitals were performing 400+ living donor liver transplants a year when US hospitals were still treating it as a last resort, and Heidi became Chad's donor herself

• The startup framework they used to run a terminal diagnosis , most startups fail, they knew that, and they applied the same thinking to a poor prognosis P53 mutation: put every resource, connection, and decision toward beating the odds rather than accepting them

• The clinical difference between a liver transplant and a bone marrow transplant that most caregivers don't grasp going in,one is a parts swap, the other rewrites every system in the body, and the recovery gap between Chad's two transplants was only four to five months

• What Heidi learned about caregiver sustainability during six weeks in a Korean ICU, the specific things she did to stay functional, and why she believes the disease affecting two people instead of one is always the worse outcome

• How telomere biology disorder goes undiagnosed for decades , Chad's first abnormal blood result was in 2005 and the underlying cause was not identified until years later, because the classic external markers were absent and most clinicians had never seen it

• What Team Telomere has built since Chad's death,  updated clinical guidelines now driving a measurable uptick in diagnoses, two active clinical trials that did not exist when Chad needed them, and the Carson Family Research Award funding the next shot on goal

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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.

Larissa walks through how she kept teaching through chemo, why she did not quit the teacher training program that began the day after her diagnosis, and why journaling and mindful breathing carried her through the worst of it. Joelle shares her own story of chasing pathology slides through a hospital basement, working with a psycho-oncologist, and cold capping to keep her hair through chemo.

In this episode: how to control the narrative when cancer is rewriting your life, why anger is just fear wearing a costume, the wall of wigs Larissa's three sons named (including the pink curly one she rang her bell in), and the one question Joelle asks every guest.

Larissa Noto is the founder of The Lovely Little Lotus and Director of Teacher Trainings at The Yogalo. She is writing a book on breath work through the trajectory of life.

Full article and resources at cancercurveballslugger.substack.com. Kicking Cancer's Ass moves people from powerless to powerful through real stories, cutting-edge science, and proven strategies.

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