I am a psychoanalyst long in the tooth, comfortable with most things medical, graphic, and even perverse, and I am a straight White cisgender heteronormative older female. Until 2008, my anus was an exit, not an entrance. By 2008, at age 66, I’d managed painful losses and traumas. But nothing was as surprising or strange to me as a diagnosis of a Stage III B-C anal cancer with a squamous cell tumor that had found its way into two lymph nodes. It was galloping quickly, and I was about to be kicked to the curb.
Judith Logue (Wed,) studied this question.