What I Learned from Cancer

February 28, 2024

John Smelcer, PhD, CAGS

John Smelcer is the author of 60 books, including a dozen books of poetry. His most recent collection is "Raven." For a quarter century, he was Poetry Editor at "Rosebud Magazine," where he currently serves as senior editor emeritus. From 2016-2020, he was the Inaugural Writer-in-Residence for the Charter for Compassion, the world’s largest compassion movement with over five million members in 45 countries.

Writing poetry was something that got me through cancer and helped heal my soul.

In the fall of 2022, I was diagnosed with stage 2, non-specific non-Hodgkin lymphoma. For more than a year, I had complained about a growing mass in my left armpit to various doctors in my small Midwest town. I described the electrical pain that shot down to the fingers of my left hand. After so long, the hand was atrophying, wasting away, dying before my very eyes. Finally, doctors in a bigger city diagnosed my cancer and got me into treatment within days. I spent the next six months in and out of the hospital for chemo and immunotherapy. It was torturous, as one can imagine. My body wasted away until my shadow looked like a stick figure. Fortunately, I survived. In the year since I rang the bell, my body has mostly recovered what it lost.

One of the things that kept me going — besides my fervent desire to have more time with my wife and family — was poetry. Yes, poems. I wrote about what I was going through every day. I wrote around a hundred poems. It was good medicine. More than anything, the poems helped heal my soul. I started sending them off to magazines and organizations about cancer. Eventually, every poem was published. Millions of people read them. Once I was cured, I arranged the poems chronologically into a book. "Running from the Reaper: Poems by an Impatient Cancer Survivor" is now available online. The small book is good medicine for anyone who has been diagnosed with cancer, is going through treatment, has recovered or for anyone who loves or cares for someone with cancer. Poetry helped me through a dark and uncertain time. Perhaps it can help others, too. I share with you the very last poem I ever wrote about my experience, a poem about what I learned about life and about myself.