I had a motto while dealing with both breast cancer and an unfaithful husband: “If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” I tried to find absurd humor in every situation I was faced with and wanted to avoid the cancer victim mentality. I’m a two-time breast cancer survivor with a mutated BRCA gene that makes me more susceptible to cancer.

Laughter really is the best medicine. Numerous studies have shown its positive effects, both psychological and physiological. So my advice to anyone in similar circumstances to mine is to focus on laughter therapy. What makes you laugh? For me, anything done by the Monty Python team works every time. When I was doing cancer treatment, I avoided anything dreary and depressing like the plague. As a former BBC journalist, I had prided myself on always being up-to-date with world affairs. Now I rarely bothered to keep up with the news. Instead, I focused on comedies.

Seeing humor in life isn’t the same thing as always cultivating a positive attitude. That’s hard to manufacture, and people who chastise you for feeling down aren’t helping you. I can think of one or two people who sternly insisted I must stay positive when I was dealing with my breast cancer who themselves manifested bucket loads of negativity when problems arose in their own lives. Yes, do whatever you can to keep your spirits up but don’t ever feel bad about feeling bad. Each side of the positive thinking debate has research to support it. Some studies show a positive attitude helps cancer recovery, while others indicate that positive thinking doesn’t improve the outcome. It’s impossible to be positive all the time, especially when bad things are happening, like breast cancer or breast cancer treatment, for instance, or being in pain from cancer or cancer treatment.

But finding something to laugh at can take your mind off the pain and hardship. That’s what American political journalist Norman Cousins did very effectively. Immobile and in extreme pain from ankylosing spondylitis, that doctors thought he wouldn’t recover from, he watched stuff like Marx Brothers films and Candid Camera. He discovered that just ten minutes of induced hearty laughter would produce about two hours of painless sleep. Eventually he was almost pain-free. “Hearty laughter is a good way to jog internally without having to go outdoors,” he said.

I’m a humorist, but also a very anal BBC-trained journalist, so when I wrote my new self-help memoir, My Wild Ride: How to Thrive After Breast Cancer and Infidelity, it had to not only be funny but also well-researched and hard-hitting. I bring up serious issues, but there’s always a humorous angle. Like the fact that right now I’m totally and utterly braless, and that’s braless not brainless! Why? One of the books I read for my research was Dressed to Kill: The Link Between Breast Cancer and Bras. Great title. The authors present compelling evidence that the link between bras and breast cancer is stronger than that between smoking and lung cancer. Sadly, mainstream cancer groups haven’t accepted this, pointing to just one study done in 2014 showing no link, with no control group and which only looked at postmenopausal women, in whom the damaging effects of bras were much weaker.

Some of my friends thought I was completely nuts to turn down mastectomies and go for lumpectomies both times I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m happy with my decision, but maybe my tombstone will read “Here lies CJ because she refused to lop off her boobs.” Breast reconstruction can cause all kinds of problems. Many women now choose to go flat after mastectomies as breast implant illness is very real, Nicole Daruda’s breast implant illness and healing Facebook group has more than 170,000 members to date. Yet a biased new industry-funded study that tries to imply a big factor is that the women who complain about implant illness are just neurotic. Seriously! That study is so bad that it’s good, In a Monty Python kind of way.

The 5-year survival statistics for early stage non metastatic breast cancer are close to 100%, but that being said, cancer is a crapshoot. I’m not a doctor, so I’d never want to tell someone else how they should deal with their cancer, but that didn’t stop people from bombarding me with unsolicited advice. I did both allopathic and alternative cancer treatments. My hippy dippy friends insisted “Chemo and radiation is toxic and doesn’t work!” A more strait-laced pal declared “Alternative medicine is pure quackery!” Did I make the right decisions? All I can say is, to quote Monty Python, “I’m not dead yet!” I’ve got the Spamalot badge to prove it!

This was the speech given by CJ Grace at the Global Breast Cancer Conference on October 5, 2022, organized by Regeline “Gigi” Sabbat and Ragne Sinikas.