I Named My Ass Tumor Richard

By a woman with absolutely no interest in your pity, but a deep desire for your laughter, your cash, and possibly your therapist’s phone number.

I named my ass tumor Richard.

There are worse names.

For instance: Tumor.

Tumor is not a name. Tumor is a threat. Tumor is something scrawled on a whiteboard in an exam room next to words like “moderately differentiated” and “surgical margins.” Tumor doesn’t come with a nickname. Tumor doesn’t come with coping mechanisms.

But Richard does.

Richard can be resented. Ignored. Laughed at.

Richard sounds like someone who corrects women on Reddit and thinks the New Yorker has a liberal bias.

Richard sounds like someone you could hate properly.

It started as a joke. My partner began calling my dog Richard—no reason, just a placeholder name for chaotic male energy that knocks things off counters and can’t be trusted around dairy. And when the doctor said rectal mass—the kind that comes with decimal points and oncology consults—my brain took a hard left into humor. And there he was. Richard.

The name migrated from the butt of one joke to the butt of another.

Namely: me.

Specifically: my ass tumor.

Rectal cancer is not a sexy cancer.

It’s not pink ribbons and yoga fundraisers.

There are no tasteful silhouettes of the rectum embroidered on tote bags.

No TED Talk titled “From Rectum to Redemption.”

No one bakes cupcakes for ass cancer awareness month.

Why? Because no one wants to talk about butt stuff.

Until they have to.

And now I have to.

Because Richard lives in my ass, and he’s not a polite guest. He doesn’t knock. He brings friends—fatigue, lymph node involvement, bowel charts. He makes you memorize your stool types like flashcards for the world’s most disturbing pop quiz. Somewhere between my third CT scan and my fifth conversation about the “consistency” of my poop, I realized:

This isn’t just a tumor.

This is a goddamn character.

He deserves a name.

A villain arc.

Merch.

There is no pastel month for this. No “Save the Buttholes” campaign. No tasteful gala for tumors that lodge themselves in the place where dignity goes to die. You don’t whisper about it behind cupped hands in boutique Pilates studios. There are no sassy bras. No inspirational bracelets.

Ass cancer is as undignified as it gets.

It forces you to talk about your shit—literally—with strangers who wear name tags. It makes you recite the Bristol Stool Chart like scripture. There’s no privacy left in it. The body becomes a specimen. A passageway under siege. You’re told to describe your pain numerically. You’re told to prepare for discomfort. You are told many things, and few of them are comforting.

Richard is not just a tumor. He is a colonizer.

An inefficiency in the system.

A rebellion of cells against their origin story.

He is also—regrettably—mine.

And so I named him.

Because naming gives shape to the shapeless. It gives metaphor to the unmentionable. I can’t evict him. But I can mock him. I can say, “Richard is acting up,” instead of, “I’m bleeding again.”

I can say, “Richard’s a dick,” instead of, “I’m afraid I might die.”

It doesn’t make him less lethal.

But it makes him legible.

And in the land of the sick, clarity is power.

Now when I tell people, they pause, then smirk. They say, “You named it?”

And I say, “Of course I did. You name the things you live with. Even the ones that try to kill you.”

Sometimes especially those ones.

A blog post by Rachel Smak on grief, loss, and lessons from stage 3C rectal cancer