How I Wrote My Way to Cancer Survivorship
- - How I Wrote My Way to Cancer Survivorship
Eve McDavid January 22, 2026 at 5:32 AM
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How I Wrote My Way to Cancer Survivorship
The first time I heard Lin-Manuel Miranda sing the words, “I wrote my way out,” in his musical Hamilton, my body awakened. I knew exactly what he meant.
Born a writer, I wove tales of animal capers for my elementary school classmates. In middle school, I wrote poetry. High school’s persuasive papers and college essays helped me find home: journalism. The field is both an art form and a storied field of human communication. Studying it sharpened my instincts, empowered me to courageously ask bold questions, gather truth, and communicate it clearly. Writing is not merely expression, I learned, it is agency.
But after college, my writerly habits and identity fell dormant. I charted a career on the digital frontier — first in strategy and marketing — and was later recruited by Google to commercialize its storytelling acquisition: YouTube. My love for reporting channeled into datasets, marketing briefs, pitch decks, and reams of elegant, archived emails.
Then, in 2020, at age 33, an aggressive and deadly stage IIB cervical cancer adenocarcinoma diagnosis with SMILE markers arrived. Discovered during pregnancy after months of reporting bleeding and exhaustion to my care team, the disease erupted every belief system I held and tore my spirit down to the studs. Our family’s sense of safety evaporated, my feminine identity and any discernible future collapsed. And my voice, my want to speak up, disappeared into the storm.
Still, hope sprouted through: Our son arrived safely, and with our toddler daughter, we miraculously became a family of four. I swiftly entered standard of care treatment — chemotherapy, external beam radiation, and brachytherapy — and for the next 56 days, I walked the path anyone who lives beyond this diagnosis must follow. With my fight-or-flight survival response at its peak, I remembered the antidote to uncertainty: getting started. For the first time since journalism school, I cracked open my reporter’s notebook.
At first, I quietly recorded the logical and practical from treatment’s front line — a time capsule of appointments, medications, observations, infusions. And most delightful and distracting, I jotted journal entries inspired by the artists — James Taylor and Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, and Elton John — who sang to me about heartbreak and happy endings while I lay prone with radioactive beams and devices tuned to my pelvis. The daily ritual mattered — writing gave my hands purpose and calmed my racing mind. Line by line, graf by graf, I reconstructed my identity, anchoring myself in the page.
By the late summer of 2020, my treatment was over, yet the pandemic set in, and I faced the insufficiently studied physical, mental, financial, and societal toxicity of survivorship. We’d fled our city home at my doctor's urging, “You’re immunocompromised, Eve, you might die from Covid.” We leapfrogged around the northeast in short-term rentals — close enough to a hospital for emergencies, isolated enough to heal in nature — searching for glimmers of certainty and safety. For a writer, proof of possibility is seeing one’s own words on a page. So, with each move, I kept writing. The practice brought me clarity — I understood I was not meant to return from this journey unchanged.
Recovery is the liminal space where one’s unlikely survival begins to reintegrate with ideas and realities of the future. Our young family hobbled along, and I tried to feel better, to believe in an outcome where what we’d just survived made sense. At bedtime, I read fairy tales to our babies and wondered, What stories could help cervical cancer survivors feel better? Stories that soothe, yet also tell the truth. Stories that honor resilience and sacrifice and never minimize pain. Where was the Dr. Seuss for us survivors? I wondered.
In 2020, I searched for these stories and found a thin, dark landscape. Cervical cancer is an alienating disease, personally and culturally. Brave survivors who come forward must communicate a difficult truth: HPV, the most common sexually transmitted infection, can cause cancer in our reproductive organs. That simple, fundamental science becomes shameful in the context of society’s constrictive norms. In my bones, I felt a far deeper story to report. So I kept writing and researching. I soon reached the same conclusion that clinical experts know to be true: Cervical cancer is preventable, treatable, and curable. The science exists to eliminate the disease. But stigma, silence, and an extraordinary funding deficit thwarted field progress for decades.
a woman holding a book called mama chava
Cervical cancer is not uncommon, and it is not rare: It causes more than 350,000 annual global deaths, and HPV, its root cause, is involved in 5 percent of all cancer diagnoses affecting men and women. On the rise are late-stage diagnoses like mine that bankrupt families during prime earning and childbearing years; only recently have screening guidelines and access expanded.
For so long, culture has taught us to hide, rather than spotlight the causes and consequences of this diagnosis: pleasure, sexual activity, infection, illness, infertility, incontinence, early menopause, and death. Speaking up is simply a bridge too far.
But stories, superior to any other human invention, pierce the silence. Stories take us from recognizable pasts to futures we can believe in and give us language, frameworks, and opportunities for the trauma we endure along the way. I began to write the unsung totality of my survivorship: resilience, recovery, and rising again. I could tell I was healing. By the time I reached remission in 2021, my reawakened love of writing now looked more like the poems of my youth. My fluid scrawl spilled out lyrically — soulful odes and ballads featuring bold female leads whose greatest chapters, like mine, only occurred after navigating deep, dark wilderness and remerging visibly changed.
eve mcdavid standing in front of a sign that says "cervical cancer forum"
Now, in my quiet moments, I sat and wrote epic poetic journeys of heroes and how they come through catastrophe: the human condition’s unstoppable tenacity to adapt and keep going. To survive. I wrote about caregivers and their sacrificial, curative, devoted love. I wrote about the many women I’ve met who survived the same gynecologic horrors, similarly healing and also becoming stronger. I wrote for mamas at home during those isolated days, singing their babies to sleep with songs to help them sleep, too. And I wrote happy endings for partners with bright futures because, in the hardest calls with the highest stakes, they chose each other.
Time kept moving, our kids kept growing, and so did my confidence and conviction to share my stories broadly, knowing this simple tool would help others the way it had helped me — first with family, then with friends, colleagues, and competitions. Reading to larger and larger rooms, I dropped into the character of a wise village storyteller whose tales of past, present, and future narrate our language and culture. Naming this embodiment codified how, for me, writing delivered an unanticipated personal transformation. Combining the names my husband and kids call me, I created “MAMA CHAVA,” an original voice of survivorship wisdom that describes new beginnings we can all believe in.
Visiting Botswana with the WHO and Gates Foundation.
In the six years since my diagnosis, much has changed again, this time by choice. I reached the 5-year, no-relapse milestone. I exited Google and launched a startup that builds medical device technology to improve disease outcomes. Global advocacy has taken me around the world, from Botswana to the White House, and our children are old enough to read, write, and tell their own stories. I published the first MAMA CHAVA book and host events that create safe spaces to speak up. Every day, I remain awakened by the transformative power of writing.
Each January, our community announces and celebrates Cervix Cancer Awareness Month, committing to a future in which women no longer perish from preventable cancer. This year, I proudly add MAMA CHAVA’s stories to the canon of literature on cancer survivorship — stories of bright light and deep darkness, of healing and of hope, of wisdom and of warning. And now, every time I’m unsure of what lies ahead, I pick up my pencil and begin again.
Eve McDavid is the CEO and Founder of Mission-Driven Tech, a Cervix Cancer innovation company. She is also the author of MAMA CHAVA TELLS THE TRUTH: Tales of Trauma, Transformation and Transcendence. Eve’s work has been featured in The Washington Post, Business Insider, ABC-7, and by the White House Cancer Moonshot. She lives in New York with her husband and two children.
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