This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Breast Cancer, Self-Advocacy & Telling the Messy Truth with Allison Sweet Grant | 435

Episode Date: September 16, 2026

We love a comeback story. The recovery after the diagnosis. The victory after the struggle. The inspiring lesson wrapped up with a pretty bow and, preferably, some flattering lighting. But what about when you’re still in it? Allison Sweet Grant was barely 40, a mother of three, and just beginning her literary career when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Her memoir, Lump: A Memoir in Ineloquent Reflections, tells the truth about breast cancer treatment and recovery without cleaning it up for public consumption. There’s fear and hope. Gratitude and anger. Humor and grief.  In this episode, Allison and Nicole talk about the messy emotional reality of a breast cancer diagnosis, chemotherapy and cancer recovery, including the pressure to stay positive, the complicated role of caregivers, and why gratitude doesn’t cancel out grief. We explore: Why gratitude, grief, fear, anger, humor, and hope can all exist at once The pressure cancer patients can feel to stay positive or find the “silver lining” How cancer affects spouses, children, caregivers, and the entire family Why humor and sarcasm can be powerful coping mechanisms during difficult experiences How the need to be liked or seen as a “good patient” can keep women from asking important questions Why bringing an advocate to medical appointments can make a difference How fear influences major healthcare decisions — and why Allison wishes she had paused more The ongoing fear of cancer recurrence and what it means to live in the complicated space between patient and survivor Because the truth doesn’t need to be positive, polished, perfect, or profound to be worth telling. Thank you to our sponsors! Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to HeyPolo.com/work or use code WORK and get 70% off your first year Connect with Allison: Website: https://www.allisonsweetgrant.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Lump-Reflections-Allison-Sweet-Grant-ebook/dp/B0GL1H4FJL/  Related Podcast Episodes: Survival Is Woman’s Work with Kathy Giusti | 391 Joan Lunden on Reinvention, Leadership & Life Beyond the Script | 392 161 / Survivorship and Breast Cancer with Virginia Carnesale Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Check us out and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to The This Is Women's Work podcast, we're together, we're redefining what it means, what it looks and feels like to be doing women's work in the world today. And part of that work has to be having the courage to tell the truth about experiences that haven't been resolved, reframed, overcome, tied up with a pretty bow, or turned into a five-step framework. Because the problem that I see is we're mostly told about people's challenges once they've overcome them. We hear about the success on the other side of extreme obstacles, the achievement after the hardship, the recovery after the disease, the win

after the loss, the triumphant return preferably accompanied by an inspirational soundtrack and some flattering lighting. And listen, I get it. I hate reading a book with a bad ending. I want the redemption. I want the victory. I want to close the book with a happily ever after, even though I don't really believe in happily ever after. But our lives are not rom-coms. And I've started to worry about the message we send when most of the stories we hear about struggle are told only from the other side of it. Because what does that say to the person who is in it? To the person who is scared and pissed off and hopeful and devastated and grateful and resentful and all of the things all before breakfast. Who hasn't found the lesson yet? Who's not feeling inspired or inspirational? Who has no fucking clue how the story

will end? Are we telling them that it shouldn't be talked about until they get to the other side? That there's something wrong with them not being there yet? That there is a timeline, a finish line, someplace we're supposed to get to as quickly as possible. I mean, we're supposed to suffer quietly and efficiently, right? And then circle back when we've identified. the lesson. And I worry about how quickly we're expected to jump from diagnosis to recovery, heart rate to new love, failure to undeniable success. And maybe that's because pain without resolution still scares the shit out of us. There's no meaning to grab onto you, no inspiring takeaway, no guarantee that everything will be okay. Just the bewildering, infuriating, heartbreaking reality

of being in something, you would very much prefer not to be in. And listen, I understand the instinct to hide the dark stuff until you get back into the light. And we don't owe anyone access to our pain. But more and more, I find myself drawn to the people who are willing to tell the truth while they're in it. The courageous, vulnerable, dark, funny, complicated, unpolished truth. People who are unapologetically real. Those are my people. And our guest today is one of them. Allison Sweet Grant was barely 40, a mother of three, and just beginning her literary career when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Her new memoir, Lump, a memoir in Inequent Reflections, tells that story through essays and verse with honesty, humor, fear, anger, hope, and none of the emotional airbrushing we've come to expect from stories like these. Allison, thank you for being here. And I want to start with what draws me to your book,

which is the unwillingness to clean up your experience, for the reader and just being honest and real about it. And so my question is, why did you want to write about your cancer journey the way you actually lived it, not just from the other side? Hi, Nicole. Thank you so much for having me. You know, when I thought about writing about my breast cancer experience, the first thing I did was really think about all of the books that I had about breast cancer that either I purchased myself or were given to me as gifts while I was sick. And so many of them were helpful, but in a very specific way. They were prescriptive. There were lists of here's what you need to do. Here are all the tests you're going to have. Here are all the labs that you need.

And they were very much encyclopedia like or dictionary like in terms of this is the spot you're in and this is where you need to be. And I really wanted to do something different. I wanted to write in a way that was an invitation to women and men who were going through breast cancer, who were the caregivers of people who were going through breast cancer, and really talk about the experience, not as a, this is a plan and this is how you're going to get where you need to be, but as a way to, as a way to, to invite people to come as they are in a very honest and messy way and tell the truth about what I went through, what I experienced, whether that be fear, anger, pain, all of the messy things that maybe we're not supposed to talk about right away, or at least not to talk about so much. Not publicly. Exactly, exactly. One of those things being, you know, I suffer from brain fog as a result of my

chemotherapy. And I'm always afraid when I'm talking about my experience that I'm not going to be able to articulate myself in a way that gets the point that I want to make across. And that's something that I still struggle with today. And I worry about when I'm on a podcast. But I want to talk about it. I don't want to hide it because if I'm going through it, I know that there are many people out there who are experiencing the same thing. I just want to be as forthcoming about it as possible. Well, and again, that's what's so attractive to me is the honesty and the realness of it and the letting it be messy and talking about it from that place. I don't think we see that very often. So my question is, why was it important to you? And I'm assuming it was important to you. So if I'm off-based,

you can tell me that I am. Why was it important to you to express the, you know, not just allow yourself, but to also communicate about the messy, imperfect, unpolished parts of your journey? Writing about breast cancer for me was in a way very selfish because I did it as a way to process everything that I was feeling. Yes, I wanted it to be relatable to, everybody else who was going through it or who was watching somebody else go through it. But mostly it started as a way to just get all of that tension and anxiety and fear out of me and down onto paper so that I could look at it from a more objective lens.

I like poetry. I decided to write about my experience mostly in poetry because it is the way that I get at the heart of things. It is the way that I understand things best. And I am hopeful that it's the way that I can communicate things best, you know, in terms of this book. I also think that when you're going through breast cancer treatment, it can be overwhelming the amount of information and new information that people have to deal with. And for me, sometimes sitting down with a heavy book, it was just too much, even to get through a chapter, you know, sometimes it was just too hard, too exhausting. And so I wanted to tell my story in sort of a bite-sized way that people could come to it on their own time, take away from it what they wanted, and then come back to it, and not feel like it was a drain on them in order to understand the full, you know, the full picture.

Yeah. I want to talk about the humor elements of it as well. But before we do, do you feel like there was or is an emotion that you weren't, and I'm just going to put in air quotes, supposed to have through your journey? Did you feel like any of your feelings or emotions were off limits to talk about? I'm not sure if there was a feeling that I wasn't supposed to have, but I do feel like I was supposed to be overwhelmingly grateful. grateful for the treatment, grateful for the advances in technology, grateful for the medical care that I received. And that's tricky because I was grateful, immensely so. But it wasn't always the strongest emotion. Oftentimes the fear and the anxiety and the pain overtook the gratitude. And it was a hard balance because I think that the public wants you to be grateful and they don't want to hear about the other messier stuff because even if they've never been through an experience like that, you always think maybe I might be, right? And I only want to see the good parts, right? I don't want to know how scary this might be

because that might make them scared, you know. So I felt like I was a little bit walking a tightrope between managing my own emotions, managing the emotions of my family and my children, and also those of my friends who were trying to be supportive at the time. But yeah, I mean, it's a hard spot for a patient to be in, I think. Yeah, I think two thoughts were going through my head as you were sharing that. First, it's kind of what I was trying to get to in my sort of long-winded intro is that, that more often than not, these experiences are paradoxical. You can be grateful and pissed. You can be hopeful and have fear. And I think that that's true for most of us whenever we're going. I have not

been diagnosed with breast cancer, so I don't know that specific experience. And I think that a lot of times when we're going through hard things, it's acknowledging that the paradox exists and that they're both okay when everyone around us or the feeling that we're supposed to only focus on the gratitude and the hope and the positive, uplifting, polished stuff. And it doesn't leave a lot of room for us to say or hear the sides we don't want to, which then when you're in it can make us feel kind of alone or wrong. So before I go to my second thought, any reactions or thoughts on that? Yeah. Well, actually, it's so interesting because, I mean, there are, I think, many parts of lump where that's demonstrated. I have a line actually in one of the poems that's

gratitude and grief are not adversaries. You know, you can, both can be there in the same breath. And I think that really gets to the heart of what you're saying. You can have all of these conflicting emotions and they're all completely valid and they're all completely. okay, but it makes things messy. And something that you also mentioned in your intro about wrapping everything up with a tight, pretty bow is another image that I talk about, which is people often want to see only the pretty side, right? Only the hopeful side and sort of brush everything else under the rug. And that's just not the way cancer works. You know, there is hope for sure. But there's also like a hell that everybody goes through when you're diagnosed and when you go through treatment

and that is not something that you can easily hide. Yeah. I think what I'm hearing is that both can be true. One doesn't cancel the other out. So that hell doesn't cancel out the hope. And I think it's okay to acknowledge both. And what I think is that we need to hear it more. And that's why I like that you did that in your book.

The second thought that popped in my head is around the expectations of our loved ones, right, to the people who are caring for you, your husband, your children, your family, your friends. Do you feel like there are any emotions that they're not allowed to experience or have? I would imagine there's a lot of pressure to be supportive at all times and hopeful at all times, and that doesn't leave a lot of room for them to experience the paradox. Any thoughts on that? Yeah. I mean, it was definitely hard.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer right at the beginning of COVID. And so it was a challenging time for everybody. Everybody was scared. Nobody knew what was going on, you know. And then when I was diagnosed, I walked into the hospital alone. Nobody came with me to any of my appointments, any of my treatments. The hospital itself looked like something I had never, you know, abandoned in many ways. you know, your question really makes me think about my kids who were very young when I was diagnosed. And

one of the things that my husband and I felt most strongly about was being honest with them, completely honest with them, but in a very age appropriate way. So not scaring them, but trying to reassure them, but also not lying to them. Like this is, how do you do all of those things when you don't know what's going to happen, when you don't know what your prognosis is. It was something we had to come back to again many times to adjust the information that we were giving them, to continue to allow them to ask questions and answer them as honestly as possible. And to involve them in my care, when I knew that I was going to lose my hair, the first thing we did is have the kids pick out rainbow wigs, you know, and cowboy hats and show them like, yes,

this might be a scary thing, but we can do something fun with it and try to make the experience a little less uncertain. And I think that kind of gets at what you were asking. You know, with my husband, I think the hardest thing for him was exactly, as you said, being supportive and not not letting his own fear his own anxiety sort of like leach onto me you know what I mean um to not contribute any more to my own it's really hard to be a caregiver and to feel like you're sort of stuck in the middle right because you know caregivers need their own support as well um in order to provide support to the person that they're caring for and in some ways I've never said this to him, but I think thinking about it now, in some ways, I think that role might have even been harder than mine because he had to give in all directions, I think, whereas as the patient, I was mostly, you know, just receiving the care.

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Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Do you feel pressure to find the silver linings? Is it helpful when you find them? I feel pressure often to find that silver lining or the lesson or the everything happens for a reason experience. And I also acknowledge that it is helpful when I find those things. So I'm curious your experience. I did feel pressure and I still do feel pressure to look for the silver lining. I mean, it's natural when somebody's going through something so difficult to say here, like here's the bright side of things, right? Like at least it wasn't this, at least that. And it can be helpful. But I think it's also really important to acknowledge the suffering that comes with a cancer diagnosis. No matter what degree, no matter what the diagnosis or prognosis, cancer is a scary thing. Just the word itself can really put you into a tailspin. And so while yes, it's good to have like something to strive for. It's good to say, here's this thing that could be worse.

I'm glad it's not. I think it's still really important to acknowledge how difficult it is and how frightening it is. Because I think those emotions, if you don't acknowledge them, they just get buried and bubble up later. And I don't know, I feel like when you deal with them up front, it's sort of just a healthier way to go through the experience. Yeah. So one of the ways I deal with dark or hard emotions is through humor. And I know your book has some elements of that for sure. Did that feel, I don't know, I think sometimes people don't want us to be funny about hard things or, you know, it's like inappropriate to laugh about something. Why was humor important to you? Is it important to you? Does that help you through your experience? Is there an inappropriate element of it? What are you? your thought? I think a lot of the humor in the book actually came out of sarcasm, which is my love language, which is something that comes very naturally to me. There was a lot of absurdities in cancer care,

in cancer treatment, you know, one of the pieces in my book is sort of a riff on an insurance form. there's just so many things that happen that are outrageous and I don't know if this is like undignifying during cancer care and like to a degree where it's like crazy and so I guess I tried to take those crazy moments that felt so outrageous to me and turn them into something that I could laugh at not so much because they were funny but because I didn't know what else to do with them. And that's where a lot of the humor and sarcasm comes from. Again, completely my love language. I don't know if that makes me twisted or not, but it is what it is. So I can relate. One of the things you do talk about in your book is advocating for yourself and this juxtaposition

of advocating, but also wanting to be, and I'll put in air quotes, a good patient. I don't know if that's a woman thing or not. I'm curious your thought. but this idea of being a good patient, doing all the right things, checking the boxes, not getting too upset, not asking too many questions, not questioning. Do you find that to be a more dominant experience for women? And if so, why do you think that is? Yeah. I mean, personally, I think that it is.

And that's not to say that men don't also experience feeling dismissed or what have you in terms of their medical care. But I do think women want to be liked. And I know with my husband, like, I'll come home from the doctor's office and tell him how an appointment went. And I'll say, well, actually, I didn't ask that because, you know, maybe they were getting annoyed. And I could see I was running over time. And I didn't want to be, you know, a bother. And he looks at me and says, why do you care so much that they like you, you know, or why are you so worried about coming across this way?

And I do think that's because as women, we want to be easy and flexible and pleasing and all of these things. But when it comes to your health care, that really shouldn't take precedent. And it's something that I myself am still working on. You know, I want to ask the questions. I want to know the answers. And maybe I'm a bit of a nuisance. But I only get one body. I only have one life.

this is information that I need. It is something that I am still working on. And I also think I have a little bit of like, well, they're the expert, right? They went through all these years of medical school. They have the degrees. They see this day in, day out. What do I know, right? My question for you is how do you advocate for yourself while respecting the doctor as an expert? And also, you know, acknowledging that they may be an expert. on a disease or an experience, but nobody knows us, our body is better than we do. So how do we advocate and also be open to expertise? I think it's all about communication because you're right. You are the expert on you. But that doesn't mean that a physician is not the expert on whatever,

you know, whatever ailment it is that you're in the office for. I think it's about asking the right questions, having an advocate with you who can help you ask the right questions, who can remember things that maybe you forget if you're in a stressed or anxious state, and who can also help to advocate for you in a way that, like, there's no, your advocate being annoying to the physician, it's not going to affect them, right? Like, they're going to go home and never think, see this person again. So it's okay for them to maybe be like a little bit of like a bull in the China shop for you because it's not going to hurt them in any way if it helps you to get the information that you need or to express whatever it is that you need. So that was one of the hardest things for me

going through cancer treatment during COVID was that I was alone. And sometimes I would have a friend or a family member like on FaceTime or on the phone with me, but it's not the same as having somebody there physically by your side to support you. Yeah. I also have to imagine just like you mentioned earlier, brain fog or you can only retain so much information when you're in it and having a second set of eyes or ears or all of that makes perfect sense to me. My last couple questions are around, and I'm not going to try to polish this up, but I do think hindsight gives us a unique perspective. And not to say that you have full hindsight, but as you look back on what you wrote and what you experienced over the last six-ish years,

is there anything that you would do differently knowing what you know today? You know, when you're diagnosed with cancer, when I was diagnosed with cancer, things happened very quickly. From the day that I was diagnosed to the day that I started chemotherapy was about a two-week window. So many decisions were made under pressure, not necessarily pressure from men. medical personnel, but just the pressure of, you know, death sort of hanging over your head, the possibility of death hanging over your head. So many decisions I made out of fear. And so if I could go back, the one thing that I would do differently is to pause.

It's a hard thing to encourage people to do because there is like a time crunch. You are under, you know, pressure. Decisions have to be made. But I, I wish there was a way I could go back and make those decisions from a wider lens, considering factors that I just didn't consider at the time. Instead of just focusing on, oh my gosh, I have cancer, I'm going to die. I have to do this, this, this, and this. I wish I would have taken some time to quietly reflect on those decisions, how they might affect me in the future.

and made them from a place of confidence rather than fear. I think we can all completely relate to this. I am a realist, which is what all pessimists call themselves, right? And so I tend to default to worst case scenario or fear can jump right into that driver's seat very quickly and permanently if I let it. And so I totally understand the pause and the pressure. And one of the things, and I'm curious your thoughts on this because it may not apply in a situation like this, but I do find forcing myself to ask the opposite question. So, for example, what am I deciding because I'm afraid of death? And then asking myself, forcing myself to ask the question, what would I do if I knew everything would be okay?

or like what's the worst that could happen, then forcing myself to ask, what's the best that could happen? It's just forcing my brain to ask the opposite of what it defaults to when I'm afraid or when there's pressure or when I'm overwhelmed. I may not eliminate the feeling entirely,

but just forcing myself to look from that other perspective. I found that to be helpful. I'm curious your thoughts, Is that at all what you're getting at here with the idea of taking a little bit of a pause? Absolutely. I think looking at the like looking at the counterfactual, right? Like what you don't know, what you might not know, what could possibly be and considering all of those things as opposed to looking at the scariest thing, right? The darkest thing, the most threatening thing.

And then making your decisions off of that. So I think those kinds of questions are exactly the questions that you need to ask yourself in order to take that pause. Okay, my last question is, what are you still making sense of? I started this episode, and I think what I love so much about your book and your approach is being in it. And I would imagine that you're still in it in some way. So my question is, what are you still navigating through? What are you still trying to make sense of or what feelings are you feeling that maybe don't make sense? Yeah. You know, I think I feel incredibly fortunate that I am still here six years later. And I think about that every day, that every once in a while I find myself in a head space where I still feel like a cancer patient. I'm still afraid. I'm afraid of reoccurrence all the time, you know. And it's hard to live in both worlds, to live as something.

who's doing well and, you know, is in recovery, but also live as somebody who knows how quickly and how easily things can change. I don't know. I guess I feel a little bit like, you know, like a state line where you can't really be in two places at once, but you kind of are, you know, and that's something that I still struggle with. Feeling like I'm better, feeling grateful, feeling happy, getting out there and living my life, but also still feeling like, whoa, like, let's take a step back. Like, you're still a cancer patient. You still know that things could happen at any moment. And that's something that I wrestle with a lot of the time. Well, I will close us out with what I started with, which is I am so grateful for your honesty and for talking about how hard it is to live in both worlds or to, you know, have this. what I would refer to as a paradoxical experience,

because I don't think we're hearing it enough. I don't think it's talked about enough. Then it feels weird when we're experiencing it. But I think that's just normal human experiences, the both and the and the all of that. So, Alison, thank you for your realness today and for writing this book and giving people an additional tool

when they're going through breast cancer. So again, for the listener, the book is called Lump. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy books, but let's keep our local bookstores in business. For you, for a loved one, for someone you know who's going through breast cancer themselves, breast cancer awareness month is coming up, buy them, send them to the people. And Allison, thank you for being here today and for doing this incredibly important work. Thank you. Thank you, Nicole, for having me. It was a pleasure speaking with you. The pleasure was all mine. Okay, friend, here's my final.

reminder, it's okay to not be okay. And it's okay to be honest about that. It's okay to be lost, scared, hurt, angry, and it's okay to be hopeful, grateful, or find something funny in the middle of something awful. It's okay to be messy. Your truth doesn't need to be positive, polished, perfect, or profound in order for you to tell it. When it comes to your health, ask the questions, push back, get another opinion, say the uncomfortable thing, because there may be no worst time to prioritize people pleasing being good or being well liked than when your health and your life are on the line. Tell the truth about where you are. Whether that's to one person or many is up to you. Advocate for what you need and trust yourself enough to do both because telling

the truth and trusting yourself, well, that is woman's work.