A Malignant Melanoma Walks Into a Bar...

Crammed inside a subway car in Manhattan—feeling remarkably generous, as I often do these days—I smiled at a young woman with a fancy black ponytail hairdo who was intensely staring at me. She didn't smile back. She said: "This is the second time you stepped on my shoe." (Article continued below...)

It was quite possible that I stepped on her foot. I'm a little clumsy nowadays. Almost three years ago, at age 29, I was diagnosed with stage III colon cancer The chemotherapy treatment that followed left me, among other keepsakes, with neuropathy in my feet, numbness and tingling similar to what advanced diabetes patients experience. One day I walked two blocks barefoot before I noticed my missing sandal.

"I'm sorry," I said, then whispered, "I know this will sound strange, but I can't feel my feet."

She rolled her eyes.

It was funny. In this crowded train, nobody was paying attention to my cancer, and it all seemed surreal again: my numb feet, my uncertain life expectancy, the loneliness, all coupled with gratitude for being alive, even if it means sharing a world with this bitch on the 1 train.

Cancer. Hilarious. I later typed these words into Google and found Kaylin Andres, a 24-year-old San Francisco fashion designer who was diagnosed with Ewing's sarcoma, a rare form of bone cancer normally found in children, last September. She uses her blog, Cancer Is Hilarious, to document her experience in a way young people could relate. Thank God for cancer humor. I need something other than yet another study that offered grim survival rates or scary-sounding side effects.

Cancer Is Hilarious is just one of the hundreds of blogs combining realistic cancer confessions with humor: Making Cancer My Bitch. My Blood Hates Me. What’s Up Your Butt?Kiss My Bald Head. I’m Not an Asshole. Surgically Speaking. I’ve Still Got Both My Nuts. Virtually all of them are written by cancer patients younger than 40. The blogs are just one way younger patients are addressing the absurdity of life with cancer with humor, rather than pink-ribboned, glassy-eyed earnestness.

About 70,000 people between the ages of 18 and 40 are diagnosed with cancer every year, representing about 6 percent of all new cancer cases. About 10,000 young adults die from cancer annually, more than from any other disease. This is not the best statistic to stumble on when you are looking online for hope, as I did in September 2006 after my doctor told me he found a growth in my colon. There I was—nonsmoker, athlete, young—diagnosed with colon cancer, the disease that more commonly afflicts overweight, elderly men. And all I could think was: how inconvenient. I was a travel writer and had just scheduled trips to Rome and Cologne for the following week. Bummer. I would have to reschedule those flights.

Then I did what anyone of my generation would do: I Googled "colon cancer." Within seconds, I found out that my cancer stage, advanced stage IIIC, gave me a 44 percent chance to survive five years. I swore I would never use the Internet to research colon cancer again. (That promise lasted all of five days)

At the same time, I started receiving books, stacks of self-help volumes from well-meaning people. Books claiming that cancer was hate materialized in the body of people who don't love enough. Books promising you can cure cancer by drinking wheat-grass juice. It made me want to throw up, even before my chemotherapy regimen started and I became a vomiting expert. I didn't need more things to make me feel guilty and excluded. I already felt like an outsider. I was by far the youngest patient in the oncology ward. I was too cynical to believe herbal remedies were going to cure me but unwilling to venture onto medical Web sites, where the depressing prognosis stats were lurking, ready to scare the hell out of me.