I have cancer. It’s aggressive and debilitating and incredibly costly. I had surgery on Nov. 7 from which I have not yet recovered. I will have another surgery in December a week before Christmas. Radiation will follow. And perhaps other treatments.
Every day at some point I cry. It’s not a ritual — it’s just what happens. It’s flat-out terrifying to know you have cancer and it is moving in your body and there is nothing you can do about it.
I pray a lot. I pray to God, to the universe, to my late wife. I say too often to my lesbian family who has been taking care of me since my wife died suddenly during her own cancer battle to please not let me die.
The facts of cancer are ugly and painful and we never, ever talk about them in this society that fears cancer even as half of us — half — will get cancer. Right now, 21 million Americans have cancer. There are over 100 types of cancer. Health-care providers categorize them according to where they start in your body and the type of tissue they affect. Too many cancers.
Yet despite these shocking numbers, there are only a handful of preventative or other tests to tell us if we have cancer. So for many people, like my wife, their cancers are only detected in the final stages, when they are already metastatic.
Whenever I post to my large — 165,000 — followers on Twitter/X about my cancer journey, I am flooded with responses. My posts get hundreds of thousands of views and hundreds of replies. In addition to sharing their support for me, people are desperate to talk about how cancer has impacted their lives.
Yet as bad as cancer is now for America — and it is bad — cancer will impact people much more dramatically under the coming Trump administration. Right now people are getting cancer younger. Colorectal cancer (CRC) is now the leading cause of cancer death in men under 50 and the second leading cause in women under 50.
I had breast cancer when I was 26 and a recurrence at 28. In 2000, my book on lesbians and cancer was published.
When I was diagnosed, one in nine women got breast cancer. It is now one in eight. Breast cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in women in the U.S. overall, but it is the leading cause of cancer death in Black and Hispanic women.
Why have these statistics gotten worse over decades, instead of better?
Lung cancer — for which there is limited testing — is the leading cause of cancer death for both men and women overall.
So it’s bad to get cancer now, with a Democrat in the White House whose personal history of his son dying of an aggressive cancer being empathetic to the issue. Joe Biden’s “cancer moonshot” has attempted to at least acknowledge the breadth of cancer in America.
All that is about to change. Donald Trump has nominated Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head Health and Human Services, which oversees all branches of the healthcare system in the U.S., including the National Cancer Institute, the CDC, the NIH and the FDA.
Kennedy is a notorious anti-science conspiracy theorist. He has dedicated the past three decades to building a multi-million dollar foundation, The Children’s Defense Fund, and an industry surrounding that which includes a dozen self-published books claiming vaccines are ineffective, dangerous and cause autism in children. All of these claims are false.
Trump said in appointing Kennedy that he would “let him go wild” on health care.
Kennedy called his plan “Make America Healthy Again.” While no one is arguing with his suggestions that people eat healthier, avoid processed foods and exercise more — things the NIH, CDC and FDA have been promoting for years — Kennedy wants to remove scientists from these agencies and put his own people in their place.
Kennedy, a former environmental attorney, has no medical training and no executive experience. He also thinks you gave yourself cancer, and that cancer treatments are suspect. Kennedy has called fluoride an “industrial waste” and linked it to cancer and other diseases and disorders. That is false.
Kennedy also wants to stop research and development of more cancer treatments — something desperately needed with the growing cancer rates.
Kennedy also supports Trump ending the Affordable Care Act — popularly known as Obamacare — which makes health care accessible to well over 100 million Americans. Vice President-elect JD Vance has spoken declaratively about how the ACA saved his own family.
Even without congressional action, a second Trump administration will likely support major changes to Medicaid and the ACA’s marketplaces, affecting millions of Americans. People with cancer will be most at risk.
The threat to the entire health care ecosystem under Trump cannot be overstated. Trump’s additional nomination of Dr. Mehmet Oz, who lost his 2022 bid for the Pennsylvania Senate, which I covered for PGN and other mainstream outlets, will put even more people at risk.Fighting cancer, as I have reported in PGN for years, is a grim battle. But come January, when Trump begins his rogue presidency in earnest, it will be far, far tougher. I wish I had an answer on how we stop that from happening because under Trump and Kennedy, it’s about to become a matter of life and death.