Living With Cancer: The Journey From Victim to Survivor

“It is, of course, likely that the language about cancer will evolve in the coming years. It must change decisively, when the disease is fi nally understood and the rate of cure becomes much higher.” –S. Sontag, 1978, p. 88 We all know the statistics. Today, more than 10.5 million cancer survivors, repre-senting 3.6 % of the population, are living in the United States (National Cancer Institute, 2006). Much has changed in the decades since Sontag (1978) wrote Illness as Metaphor and articulated our societal perceptions that cancer = death and people with cancer were victims