Who is Planet Cancer?

Planet Cancer is a community of young adults with cancer. (You know, that age between "pediatric" and "geriatric," where no one knows whether to give you a lollipop or have a serious talk about your fiber intake.) It's a place to share insights, explore our fears, laugh, or even give the finger to cancer with others who just plain get it. We don't deny the dark side of illness and death here. But we also firmly believe that laughter and light can turn up in the strangest places.

Welcome to Planet Cancer. No, we didn't choose to come here either. But, just like you, we ended up as honorary natives of this terrible and wonderful world. Like other planets, Planet Cancer rotates regularly between the dark side of night and the brightness of day. All too often, we lose ourselves on the dark side, forgetting that where there is night, day must follow; and where there is life, there is the light of hope and laughter. Although we acknowledge and accept the night, we want to remind you of the lightness of day by recording on these pages the often entertaining, frequently bizarre and occasionally informative experiences and thoughts of your fellow natives on Planet Cancer.

—Robin Blue, Paul Cox and Heidi Schultz Adams (Dallas, Texas, 1995) When Robin, Paul and I wrote that welcome paragraph, all of us were in our twenties; either in the midst of or barely out of treatment for cancer. Not only had we endured the incredible indignity of a cancer diagnosis in what should have been the best years of our health, we had also all suffered from an immense void in services and support for cancer patients our age. The majority of the other patients we encountered were separated from us by mental, emotional and physical lifetimes. As young adults with cancer, we felt that we had fallen through the cracks, and we wanted to reach out to others having the same experience.

The fact that the three of us had come together at all was quite an accomplishment, given the fact that the young cancer patient population is relatively small and geographically spread out. We would never have found each other without the efforts of Linda, a dedicated nurse who realized that we needed each other. We needed to talk to others who could relate to the problems of moving back in with parents. Others who could understand the difficulties of dating with cancer. With each other, we didn't have to talk around cancer. We waded right in and said exactly what we felt and thought about important things, like living, dying, and how to handle mouth sores. And above all, we laughed. Vomit, doctors, hospitals, baldness: every topic was fair game for what we discovered were fairly twisted senses of humor. Laughter didn't mean that we denied the seriousness of our situation, however. To us, the ability to laugh meant that we had not let the gravity of our situations crush our spirits. We were deadly serious about laughing, because every laugh was an affirmation of life. Somewhere in there, we bonded on a deeper level than most people could fathom, even though we knew little about each other apart from our status as cancer patients. But in that rarefied world where we had been exiled with a single diagnosis – Planet Cancer, as we called it – we were able to help each other in ways that no one else could.

Within a year of our meeting, after I moved to another state, Robin and Paul had both relapsed and died; Robin from melanoma and Paul from Hodgkin's disease Every year, nearly 70,000 young adults between 18 and 40 will be diagnosed with cancer in the U.S., representing nearly 7% of all cancer diagnoses. The young adults served by Planet Cancer are marginalized in a medical infrastructure that does not have a "home" for them, lacking specific resources geared toward their unique needs and issues. Survival rates for this age group have not improved in over 30 years, yet the medical community still doesn't recognize young adults as a specific group in need of unique medical, emotional, and psychosocial tools.

Planet Cancer exists to provide this critical community of peer support and advocacy for young adults with cancer.

Planet Cancer's mission is to connect young adults with each other, to empower them and to help them access support and resources they wouldn't have known about otherwise. We're also here to raise our voices in the medical and research communities on behalf of young adults; to say: Young adults DO get cancer. We DO have unique needs. Our survival rates are NOT improving. Don't let us fall through the cracks for ONE MORE MINUTE.

To learn more about Planet Cancer, please visit www.planetcancer.org.