Finding Community Among Fellow Patients With Cancer During Treatment

In this video, William Yank, a survivor of B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, reflects on what helped him cope mentally and emotionally during treatment beyond professional support such as therapy. His answer centers on community: Rhe relationships he built with fellow patients in the hospital and the connections he found with other people with cancer online.

Because Yank was treated as a pediatric patient, many of the other patients on his hospital floor were younger than 10. He describes watching these children go through treatment with little concern for the illness itself. Instead, they focused on living, playing and having fun, an outlook Yank found inspiring and tried to adopt himself. He made a point of befriending the young children as well as the other young adults on the floor, and several of those families remain connected to him today. Social media offered another outlet, allowing him to find other patients with cancer going through similar experiences and bond over what they shared. Yank calls this sense of connection tremendously beneficial to his health.

The first friendship he made was with Sam, a patient a few years older and the first young adult Yank met on the floor. Although both were neutropenic and were not supposed to enter each other's rooms because of infection risk, the two regularly broke that rule, visiting until staff sent them back to their own rooms. Sam's family once brought Yank Popeyes, and the two ate and talked together. The families have stayed close ever since, and Yank's family visits them on the East Coast every summer. He describes them as lifelong friends and family.

The second friendship was with Ben, a 13-year-old with osteosarcoma who had lost his leg to the disease. Yank remembers him as endlessly fun, someone he talked with constantly and played games like Fortnite with. They bonded over a shared love of salmon, Ben's favorite food, and took turns bringing it to each other depending on which of them was inpatient and which was outpatient at the time. Ben has since died, but Yank says he still thinks often about the relationships he formed during treatment and how much they meant to him.

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