Amanda Butler has built Cancer Baddies around something the cancer world desperately needs: honesty. In this conversation, we talk about the parts of cancer and survivorship that don’t always fit neatly into an inspirational story.

There are identity shifts, complicated emotions, intimacy after treatment, and what it actually means to keep living after your world has been turned upside down. It’s candid, funny, vulnerable, and the kind of conversation that makes you feel like you’re sitting with someone who gets it.

Cancer can change your body, but it can also fundamentally change the way you see yourself.

This episode explores body image, confidence, femininity, sexuality, intimacy, and identity after breast cancer, as well as the emotional healing that can continue long after physical treatment ends. It gives language to a part of survivorship that can be incredibly difficult to explain, even to the people closest to you.

So much of breast cancer care understandably focuses on diagnosis and treatment.

Dr. Eleonora Teplinsky goes further, tackling the questions that can become incredibly important once you’re living with or beyond cancer, including menopause, sexual health, mental health, and long term wellness. It’s less a traditional survivorship story and more a roadmap for navigating everything that can come with survivorship, which is exactly why I included it.

There’s an expectation that once treatment ends, you’ll get back to your old life. But what happens when your old “normal” doesn’t fit anymore?

Two-time breast cancer survivor Camille Bullock explores the physical and emotional changes that can linger after treatment and offers a different way to think about recovery. Instead of trying to get back to who you were, it’s about learning how to support who you are now.

Shannon Michelle’s story is extraordinary. After a motorcycle accident left her in a coma with a traumatic brain injury, she had to relearn how to walk, read, and speak, only to later be diagnosed with breast cancer.

Her conversation is about more than surviving two unimaginable experiences. It’s about accepting a life you never planned for, letting go of what you can’t control, and finding a way forward without pretending the hard parts didn’t happen.