I’m Obsessed With Terminally-Ill Celebs With Cancer

When I was a twelve-year-old girl, I was introduced to the brutality of the C-word, and how it shows no mercy to those who fall under its ferocious spell when the mother of my childhood friend suddenly died from pancreatic cancer.

After that, there was a long period of early adulthood that spared me the fascination with a disease that both fascinated and horrified, but that all changed when I got caught up in the Cancerfest of 2009.

It began with British reality TV star Jade Goody, a twenty-seven-year-old mother of two adorable boys, who turned her chaotic childhood into the launching pad for a career in a clogged genre, that was in the beginning stages of evolving into what it has become.

I found her on PerezHilton, which sounds so dated, but back then he was the main source for celebrity gossip. And what I discovered wasn’t the typical fare of salaciousness.

This young woman was truthfully living out her nightmare of terminal cervical cancer, for all to see, and her ability to navigate the challenges of dying a public death while providing captivating storylines — depicting how she was navigating her last days — was essentially the kind of entertainment I hadn’t anticipated.

YouTube became my daily destination for all things pertaining to the…