It’s Okay to Be a Coward About Cancer

In the fall of 2005, weeks after selling a pitch to turn the Terminator movie franchise into a scary robot television show, I ate a bad farmers market burrito and ended up with kidney cancer. It’s not an uncommon diagnostic journey for the disease: You set out expecting something familiar — for me, food poisoning — but quickly find yourself at a partial lower left nephrectomy.

You can pretend you know what it feels like to have cancer, or how you’d respond to the news.