It’s National Cancer Survivors Day.

I personally do not consider myself a survivor: I take medicine every other day to keep the cancer at bay. I have scans multiple times a year (including tomorrow), and my particular type of cancer demands that I either take extreme precautions in the sun, or else leave the house engaging in high risk behavior. My cancer may return at any point, including decades from now. Cancer is somehow involved in decisions I make every single day.

Mary Elizabeth Williams, who chronicled her experience in a clinical trial for a game-changing drug for metastatic melanoma, once asked her oncologist, after her tumors had shrunk and she was considered to be in remission, whether she could call herself a survivor. “You can only say you’re a survivor when something else kills you,” came the reply.

So often it seems like breast cancer drives the conversation about all things cancer, and it turns out that, at least for some breast cancers, the word survivor is appropriate to use. I didn’t have breast cancer. I have metastatic melanoma. So I just wanted to pipe up on behalf of the people who never really get to say they survived: We live with cancer. We can be glad and grateful to be alive… but we will always have cancer.

(Next week’s lesson: Why saying someone with cancer is “a fighter” backfires when they die of cancer.)