How to thrive with terminal cancer
This story was originally published in the Warwick Beacon, a publication partner of Ocean State Stories.
Read this story in its original form and all other Beacon stories by clicking here.
By MATTHEW LAWRENCE Beacon Media Contributor
CRANSTON — Elissa Kalver knows firsthand about suffering. At 34, she was diagnosed with an aggressive metastatic breast cancer. Four years later, she launched a nonprofit and written a new book, We Got This: How I Learned To Thrive with Terminal Cancer.
Raised in the Boston area, Kalver was studying at Babson College when she met her husband Eric in an Apple store. Eric, a native of Edgewood, was studying at Berklee College of Music. The couple now live in Los Angeles with their five-year-old daughter but return to Rhode Island to visit Eric’s family.
“Each year of her life is such a drastic change,” Kalver says of her daughter. “I want her to understand cancer from me while I’m still alive. I want her to know what I’ve lived with and thrived with.”
“My first really intimate experience with cancer was actually in Rhode Island twelve years ago,” Elissa says. “Eric’s mother Arlene was treated at Rhode Island hospital for lymphoma. And after being told she wouldn’t make it through, she’s been in remission for eleven years.”
After getting involved in his mother’s care, Eric started running marathons to benefit the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society (now rebranded as Blood Cancer United). He’s currently training for his eighth marathon.
Because her diagnosis is terminal, Elissa says that she is still on active treatment. “It’s not curable,” she says frankly. “There’s a limited amount of treatments. Any time I have new growth they need to change treatments because it means that the treatment I’m on isn’t working anymore.” Kalver is now on her sixth line of treatment.
When she was first diagnosed in 2021, Kalver says, she began telling friends and family one by one but soon realized that this took a lot of time. “I made the decision to start posting about it publicly. That provided me with a ton of support and made it easier to update people.”
It also led to a lot of offers for help, and those offers gave Kalver the idea for We Got This, a nonprofit registry for people with cancer.
“The registry is for people of all ages with all types of cancer,” Kalver says. “This year we’ve grown from 1,600 users to 12,000 users. A lot of that was after I appeared on Good Morning America. That allowed people to learn about it,” she says. “That was really validating.”
The idea makes it easier for friends and family members who might want to help a cancer patient but might not know exactly what they could use. It also takes some pressure away from a patient who isn’t naturally vocal about asking for help, or who doesn’t have the energy to field all the phone calls and texts. This holiday season, the site even launched a handful of recommended gift items, including a heart-shaped pillow to rest an arm during IVs or blood draws. There are also skin care products specifically for people undergoing radiation.
“There’s not a whole lot that we can control,” Kalver says. “Having things that bring you comfort is more valuable than ever, and with the registry it can be done instantly.”
“If you think about baby registries, there are all sorts of things to make the newborn feel welcomed, things that they require but also things they will want.”
Kalver says the registry at We Got This works the same way as a baby registry or a bridal registry. “People register for barf bags and wigs,” she says. “But we also had someone register for a squishmallow [pillow].”
Kalver began fundraising to build We Got This in November 2021, and within weeks she had raised $106,000 from over 800 interested donors. Since then, she has turned the registry into a full-time job.
Before this, Kalver was a corporate retirement advisor. “I went to school for entrepreneurship,” she says. “I’m interested in different types of businesses. For a while I owned a gym.”
“This is the greatest thing I’ve gotten to do,” she says about We Got This. “But it’s still a lot like running a business, there’s still a lot of back-end work.”
We Got This is also the title of Kalver’s first book, which was released this summer.
“It’s not something I ever thought I would do,” she says. “It’s about my experience of being diagnosed, and about the ability to live and thrive. My husband also wrote a chapter from the perspective of a caregiver.” The book also touches on subjects including chemo treatment, what not to say to a cancer patient, fear around death, and her experience as a cancer patient who is also the mother of a young child.
In November, Kalver brought the book to William Hall Library in Cranston. “The event had about eighty people,” she says. “And it was really special being in front of family and friends. The women from the TroubleMakers for Good helped coordinate and plan it.” Cranston was one of four stops on Kalver’s short east coast book tour and TroubleMakers for Good was co-founded by Cranston residents Bari Harlam and Meredith Curren.
Kalver hopes the book will also draw attention back to the registry.
As the director and sole full-time employee of a nonprofit, Kalver actively fundraises. Each summer the organization hosts a golf tournament in Andover, Massachusetts, and this month We Got This organized a comedy event called Cancer Is a Joke. The event featured a number of comedians including Grace Helbig, a comedian who like Kalver developed breast cancer while in her thirties.
The show took place in Los Angeles and featured appearances from comedians, influencers, and the indie pop band Lucius, old friends of the Kalvers dating back to Eric’s Berklee days. The live audience was made up of two hundred “patients, survivors, and thrivers,” Elissa says.
“We can still laugh and experience joy even through the hard times,” she says. “We deserve to.”
Cancer Is a Joke is streaming on demand through the end of the year. Tickets are $19.99 and can be found at WeGotThis.org.
