Cancer is one of the most common diseases of our age, and yet those who face it rarely know what’s about to happen to them beyond the broadest terms. “Cancer up Close” is an open recount of Michele Goncalves’s cancer journey from pre-diagnosis to life after treatment. As someone who favors treating my maladies as holistically as possible, I struggled with the idea of treating my stage 3 rectal cancer with chemotherapy. Chemotherapy and radiation therapy damage cancer cells but can’t distinguish these cells from normal cells and so the side-effects of this treatment can be devastating. In my mind, chemo was a toxic substance that I didn’t want within a 100-mile radius of me. In the end, I had no choice and I’m now dealing with side effects and platinum toxicity. (More on that subject in a future article.) However, as if on cue, the first surgeon I met …