Cancer Just Is: Convictions of a 20-Something Exploring His Illness, Faith & Culture

With unguarded humor and honesty, Morgan J. Bolt balances his experiences as a cancer patient with the mind-set, faith, and theology that helped him both to endure his prognosis and treatments and to relish the opportunities that came along the way.

Just a few months after graduating from college, Morgan Bolt was diagnosed with desmoplastic small round cell tumors (DSRCT), a rare pediatric cancer. Over the next four years, together with his wife, Christina, Morgan endured aggressive radiation and chemo treatments, multiple surgeries, and the reality of confronting his own mortality.

Throughout Morgan’s memoir of his journey with DSRCT, he breaks down common preconceptions about cancer and cancer patients, including why people get sick, prejudices facing disabled people, why prayer is weird, and how the church both supported and abandoned him in his illness. The most vital of these preconceptions is also the first: cancer is not evil. Cancer just is.

Barely a month after publication, Morgan lost his battle with cancer. His message is alive and timeless.

Praise for Cancer Just Is

"I'm better off because I encountered this book, and you will be too. Read it, consume it, and hold on to that love. For the love that made you will indeed be the love that brings you, and all of us, home." —Rob W. Lee, author of Stained-Glass Millennials and A Sin By Any Other Name

"In this gripping narrative, Morgan Bolt speaks with such an honest, eloquent, and compelling voice that it must join the chorus of America’s most memorable literary narrators. But instead of rafting the Mississippi River, exploring the West, or wandering New York, Bolt’s journey takes him into the harrowing clinical corridors of a young cancer patient prematurely confronting death. His powerful account of that pilgrimage, however, is a bittersweet celebration of a life, told with disarming humor, unflinching candor, and a remarkable wisdom and faith that will be a gift to all who listen." —Kerry Temple, editor of Notre Dame Magazine