I wanted to share the way it feels to live with this disease. It’s almost science fiction, like Calvino’s invisible cities. But what I was looking for was experiential information about what it feels like to have cancer, to go on living with it – how there’s an entire concurrent world, operating alongside the only one I’d known, occupied by sick people and our caregivers. When I got sick, I found a lot of disheartening statistics, clinical information, and services available to me. Younger people like me, just hitting their stride in life, knocked down by the punch in the stomach of a terminal illness. I talked, not just to other people with breast cancer, but people with advanced cancer, who can’t be cured. Later, my husband and I attended a retreat for young adults with cancer. I have no desire to share those earliest comics. Those first drawings were very uncomfortable, but I felt a little better after each one. At first, these drawings were just about the past – about childhood memories of discomfort, shame, and fear. After a few months of talking, I started to draw comics in response to therapy.

Hats off to anybody who gets through something like this without help I rely on capable psychiatrists. And I hunkered down, managing one day at a time.

So I set up a private blog to share clinical updates with close friends and family. I grudgingly talked to doctors, but I didn’t want to go to support groups because I feared they would either be full of much older patients trying to work through death-related issues (something I wasn’t ready to consider), or young women, just finished with their treatment for an earlier stage cancer, looking at me like I was their nightmare come true. When I was first diagnosed with Stage IV metastatic breast cancer, I didn’t want to talk about it to anybody.

In-Between Days by Teva Harrison