The S[AYA]me Old Song

[IT’S THE SAME OLD SONG]

Adolescents and young adults (AYAs) build careers, families, and futures. Cancer shoves a wrecking ball through all of it. This piece from Business Insider (source in comments) lays out the ongoing and neverending reality that this population already knows in their bones.

Your job rules your access to care. Your paycheck decides whether you see top doctors. Your employer determines whether you get leave, support, and coverage. You fight for your life and your livelihood at the same time.

I lived this before there was language for it and that experience sat in my gut for years until I founded Stupid Cancer in 2007 and helped create what became the young adult cancer movement.

We turned a forgotten population into a national force. We changed how hospitals talk about AYA. We made survivorship something you plan for, not something you apologize for.

So reading this story hurts in a different way. Not because we failed, but because the problem evolved faster than the protections.

The patients featured in this piece face a system that still forces them to work through chemo, fight for insurance, hide their diagnosis, lose wages, drain savings, and pretend everything is fine on Zoom.

They should not be carrying this alone in 2025.

Yet here we are.

Still, I see progress. People now have language, data, and community. Employers are waking up. Researchers are naming what we lived through in the dark. These are better problems than the ones we started with twenty years ago, but they are still brutal problems. The next chapter demands policy, protections, and a culture that stops punishing people for surviving.

Your vote matters. If this hits home, tell me where you have seen it happen. Add a comment or a rage repost and drop your story in the thread. One reply pushes this in front of more people who deal with the same mess.

Are you new here? My condolences and my thanks. Follow along and stay loud with the rest of us. More voices means more pressure on a system that counts on silence

SOURCE ➡️ https://www.businessinsider.com/young-cancer-work-career-impact-2025-11