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Emily Voreas was diagnosed at 33 with Stage IIIb breast cancer, and also carries the BRCA2 gene. Emily has a Masters in Elementary Education and currently works as a reading interventionist. In this episode she reads her poem “Where does the story end?” from the 2024 “Family” issue of Wildfire Journal. Her poem is about four generations of women and cancer. April and Emily will discuss family cancer legacies, fertility, aesthetic flat closure, and the evolving advocacy in each generation of breast cancer.
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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.
