as teens and adults wonder, yo know, how did I get my cancer?

Where did this come from?

And it's, you know, Is it the seven years of bad luck I got from not sending that chain text message?

You know?

My name is Michaela.

I'm the program director here at 1330 Cancer Connects.

1330 cancer connect provides free peer support for teens and young adults who have our peer support allows them to find others their age who they can connect with through expressive art programs, nutrition, fitness and just for fun, hang out social so we do that both in Rochester, New York as well as Syracuse, New York.

So sometimes you just got t laugh is our annual comedy show.

And it actuall started out of our yearly gala.

So we have a gala every year we do called journeys.

during the gala our members always do some type of performance.

And one year a local comedian, Todd Youngman, came to us and he wa like, why not stand up comedy?

is exciting.

No, this is this is the most exciting thin that's happened for me in May.

Besides the fact that I have a colonoscopy coming up on the 27th.

And at first we were like, there's no way, like, our members are not going to get up there Todd was like, no, let's just try it out and let's see what they And it caught on.

And then we decided since people really loved it let's do it at the comedy club that following spring and now every spring since then, we've continued to do it.

you'll never guess how we met.

Cancer.

our members create their own sets, so they write it themselves.

It's all their story, it's really just a wa for the audience to get a peek into what it's like being a teenager, young adult with cancer, as well as giving our members the space to work through some of those thing that without the kind of safety blanket of like comedy or a laugh around it, maybe harder to talk about.

And any like heavy, traumatic event in your life, a lot of times people go to dark humor.

I think it's just when you're in one vein, you try and go to the complete opposite.

And so if I'm having a sad time, I'm going to try and laugh.

And so the comedy show just allows them to sort of structure it into a piece, not only about their cancer and having it within this age range, but also just everything that comes along with being a teen or young adult.

there's a lot of turmoil just in that.

And cancer puts its hand in all of those things.

Last year I was in a meeting and somebody had mentioned something about having had cancer, and I made meeting go, oh my God, I had cancer.

To the horror.

a lot of people, especially people who have never been touched with cancer when I tell them that like, oh yeah, we do this cancer comedy show, they're always like, what's wrong with you?

Like, what is funny about this?

But anyone I talked to has a Touch Bar.

They're like, oh my God, that makes so much sense I got connected with 1330, actually long before I was ever a worker.

When I was 15, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, I was definitely very hesitant at first to join.

I was a teenager.

I wanted to leave it behind me, and I figured, let me just do this once and be done with It sort of caught on, and I realized that there were actually a lot of things that I needed to talk about with my cancer, even into more survivorship than necessarily active treatment.

I've seen our members where they bring up maybe a side effect that they're kind of making a funny joke about, and someone else in the room will be like, oh my gosh, I had the same experience.

And right there you can see they now feel connected, and they now feel less alone in that journey that they've gone through.

I had a type of cancer called Ewing's sarcoma.

No one here has ever heard of it.

Clearly, I think a lot of times, especially when your friend won't tell you tha they have cancer or they sort of bring it up.

A lot of people just don't know how to react.

It's uncomfortable.

It's nerve wracking.

You don't want to say the wrong thing, but you also don't want to say nothing.

And so this mode of like comedy it allows the audience to sort of get a peek without having to ask any questions.

But then I think to they could see that their friends or people are just joking about their cancer, it allows them to know that, like, they are still just your friend just as much as they were before.

There's just this added unfortunate circumstance, our members, each week they come together and one by one they get up and they say their jokes, they do their sets, and all the members will give feedback.

They'll maybe say how to change a certain joke, whether that's just for clarification.

A lot of times all of us are so used to being in this cancer world that we use terms that we then realize, oh, like the modern perso is not going to understand this who isn't in the cancer it's really fun.

They all as much as lik their stories are all so unique.

Again, they're all in some aspects connected with one another.

So there are little moments that we all unfortunately have gone through together.

But now I'm kind of laugh at.

can't wait to find ou what weird, lasting side effects these drugs are going to have on my body, or how this is going to tangibly change me looking back on it, or what other weird roads.

This is going to continue to lead me down, Have a good night, everybody.

That's my time.