What Helps During Chemo?

Let me say this as clearly as possible: If you’ve survived cancer and you’re now online selling a course to “help people get through chemo,” you need to stop. Immediately. Because what helps during chemo is different for everyone and thinking your course is the answer is delulu. It’s not inspiring nor helpful. It’s exploitation and it’s really effing gross.

I’m seeing way too many people who’ve been through cancer suddenly become experts, coaches, and self-appointed guides for others going through it. And while I get the desire to share, to want to help, let’s be real… this isn’t help. It’s a fuckin side hustle.

These courses are usually full of the same stuff that applies to literally everyone, cancer or not:

Prioritize your sleep
Work on your mindset
Eat your vegetables
Stay hydrated
Move your body
Learn to breathe
Rest is not optional
Try therapy.. blah blah blah

Cool. Thanks for the checklist. You’ve just described basic human maintenance. This isn’t “a thriving during chemo plan” This is surviving modern life.

Let’s call this what it is: you’re preying on people who are terrified, vulnerable, and grasping for anything that might help them feel less alone. You’re taking a moment when someone’s spinning, when they just heard the word “cancer” and using it to sell your healing plan. That’s not support. That’s sales.

 

 

Here’s What I Wish Someone Had Told Me Before Chemo

 

Not all chemo is the same and not all symptoms apply to all people or all treatment combinations. There are so many types of chemo and so many ways they’re administered that you don’t actually know what’s coming.

And that uncertainty? You assume the worst, that you’ll be some toxic chemical wasteland, covered in mouth sores and losing your mind and hair. But for me? That didn’t happen. And for you? It might. Or might not. And no online or even in person person can predict it.

What I can tell you is that I never once believed I had the answers for anyone else. When I was diagnosed, Instagram didn’t look the way it does now. It wasn’t full of charlatans and pastel-colored scams. People weren’t marketing their healing like it was a brand. If they had been, I might’ve fallen for it, because that’s what fear does. It makes you reach.

 

The Emotional Cost of These Courses

 

Let’s say someone buys your course. They do all the things. They drink the water. They meditate. They move their body and prioritize sleep and eat all the protein and green shit and avoid sugar and stay “positive.” And then their cancer gets worse. Or comes back. Do you understand what that does to a person?

You’ve now implanted the idea that if they had just done it “right,” maybe they would’ve healed. That is not helpful. Cancer already makes people feel like their bodies betrayed them.  If you really believe in your “protocol,” then give it away for free. Don’t put it behind a paywall and call it service when the content itself is just what everyone’s already trying to do every day just to survive. Call it what it is: a side hustle built on someone else’s suffering.

 

What Helps During Chemo

 

You wanna know what helped me get through chemo? Beer. So much beer. I gained weight during treatment, which confused my oncologist because most people lose weight and become frail. I didn’t. I numbed out with alcohol. That was my coping mechanism. Not exactly the kind of thing you want to package up as advice, and I wouldn’t. But here’s the thing. I also knew people who were going through the same chemo as me, who did all the “right” things, ate the clean food, meditated, journaled, moved their bodies and they died.

After cancer, my life changed. But that transformation had nothing to do with vegetables or morning routines. It had everything to do with a decade of therapy, bodywork, mental health breakdowns, breakthroughs, all complete with panic attacks. SO. MANY. PANIC. ATTACKS.

So no, I haven’t turned my experience into a plan because that would be delusional. And dangerous.

 

If You Just Found Out You Have Cancer

 

I’m not here to give you hope or to tell you to “stay strong.” I’m here to say: this is going to be really hard. And it’s okay to be scared.

If I were sitting with you right now, I’d just hold space and be scared with you. Because I refuse to bypass the pain or pretend it’s all part of a beautiful journey. Sometimes, it’s just fucking awful and you deserve to feel all of it without being told anything about how to to do it.

So to anyone turning their cancer into a content plan: You are allowed to heal and you are allowed to share but you are not entitled to make money off people’s fear.