It's totally shame.

Uh-huh.

Like, it's just something that was always in me that goes, oh, I guess a bad thing should

probably happen to me.

Like, I didn't learn it later.

It just felt weirdly true.

I mean, like a large part of wanting to really hold that up to the light has informed a lot of my choices since.

Is what a weird response.

This is death, sex, and money.

The show from WNYC about the things we think about a lot and need to talk about more.

I'm Anna Sale.

Kate Bowler is a best-selling author, a professor of American religion at Duke,

and host of the podcast Everything Happens.

She's also a survivor of stage four colon cancer, and she lives with chronic pain.

When I wake up in the morning, I have a few minutes before I can tell how much pain I'm in.

So the first question is always,

do you take pain meds before it starts to get bad? How long? What's that runway?

Basically, I feel like I'm trying to just like scaffold my body as much as possible to get through

a day. So I'm kind of riding right on the edge of what I can do. Oh, so it's like when you're

thinking about, because you won't know how it's going to show up,

so you are like, you treat with anticipation looking ahead at your schedule and what the

demands on your body you're going to be.

...