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Deltra James was diagnosed at 33 with de novo Stage IV, Triple Negative metastatic breast cancer (MBC). She is a New England based mama, poet, patient advocate, and co-host of the Empowered Intimacy podcast. In this episode Deltra reads her piece “For Now is as Good as Forever: Dating with Advanced Breast Cancer” from the 2024 “MBC: Advocacy” issue of Wildfire Journal.
Her essay is about one woman’s experience of dating alongside her metastatic breast cancer diagnosis, and podcasting about it. April and Deltra will discuss being open to sharing cancer stories, cancer’s impact on established relationship vows, dating new people after cancer, and empowered intimacy challenges after cancer. This episode contains sexual content.
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More From The Burn
Today's storyteller brings us inside the architecture of a life built for achievement — degrees, titles, rooms where decisions are made, a carefully calculated climb through the ranks of academia. Breast cancer forced her to stop. This is a story about what happens when the scaffolding you've built your identity around suddenly can't hold you anymore — and what you discover when you stop climbing long enough to ask: what is worth, really, if it isn't this?
This conversation explores self-worth beyond achievement, identity shifts after cancer, redefining success, balancing ambition with self-care, navigating long-term survivorship challenges, and finding purpose and meaning in life after diagnosis.
Today's storyteller brings us somewhere most breast cancer narratives don't go — into the messy, funny, vulnerable, and ultimately tender territory of sex after surgery. This is a story about a Frankenstein-ed body, a 24-year-old on OKCupid, naked takeout from a Taiwanese restaurant, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. It's about the very specific calculus of figuring out what your new body can feel, and who you trust to help you find out.
This conversation explores sex, intimacy, and dating after cancer; learning to accept a changed body; realizing that other people aren’t judging us as harshly as we judge ourselves; cancer becoming one part of our identity rather than our whole identity; ongoing anxiety in survivorship; and the changing challenges of survivorship over time.
Today's storyteller brings us into the quiet, exacting world of tiny things — and what it means to build something beautiful when the larger story of your life has gone completely out of your control. This is a piece about chemo brain and lost words, about a miniature garden assembled with tweezers and a glue gun while a wound vac churned beside her, about what happens when you can no longer offer the people you love the story they want to hear.
This conversation explores chemo brain, finding comfort in small things, friendship, uncertainty, redefining health and wholeness, resistance, creativity, finding your own cancer story, and how cancer changes your perspective on life and the future.
