Wig Wars Winner Ruveal
Ben needs a wig! His very first cancer wig. Changes to hair are often one of the first visible losses from treatment. For many cancer survivors, a wig presents an opportunity to reclaim body image and expression.
This past week, from Tues 4/7 to Tues 4/14, every $5 donation earned 1 vote in Wig Wars. The wig with the most votes will be made into a high-quality wig by our drag artist friend, Kitti The Doll (@kitti_thedoll).
Ben will wear it to Cactus Cancer Society’s 11th Birthday celebration, where the award winner will be announced. Beyond that, whenever he feels like wearing it. To the beach. To the next MRI scan. To meet with congressional representatives on the Hill. What's the point of a wig in a box?
Drumroll, please... 🥁
Both winning hairstyles will be made into wigs! Bowie won the vote with only 6 more votes than Joe Dirt. But Eden led her Dirt gang with such verve, and Wendy & Anrina harnessed so much voodoo from their Bowie crew that we declared both wigs winners.
We raised $1,585 from Wig Wars in 8 days!!! Thank you so much to our whole team and all our supporters for turning a whimsical idea into reality. Hairstyles crowdsourced from The People ✊
Our supporters chose from six wig styles:
As of Friday, April 10th, the Secret Bonus Wig was unlocked!
For future videos of Ben in the winning wigs, follow us on Instagram (@oliviatai and @pantslessspaceman).
Why Young Adult Cancer Advocacy
Once cancer treatment is completed, the emotional reckoning begins. What’s worse than cancer is the fear of it coming back. What makes AYA (adolescents & young adult) cancer unique is that it attacks in the prime of life, and closes conventional life paths. Every day is a challenge to reconcile the conflict between the expectations society has for healthy people our age, and the reality of living with cancer.
In Ben’s case, his brain tumor diagnosis is terminal. There is no cure, and remission isn’t possible. His neuro-oncologist gave him three years. And now, here we are, approaching the three-year mark. We live our lives four months at a time, which is how often Ben gets an MRI to detect tumor regrowth. If he gets a clear scan, we breathe a sigh of relief knowing that our plans can go on uninterrupted until the next scan.
The socially isolating nature of cancer is crippling for both survivors and caregivers. Together, as a married couple, we are surviving cancer every day. Finding our community meant making cancer friends together while maintaining space for our individual selves. Caregivers, especially spousal caregivers, face losing their identity to cancer, too.
Through the AYA cancer community we found our voice and our place, where we were able to safely process the trauma of cancer. We met enough AYA friends this past year to realize everything we’re experiencing is valid. Together, we spoke about living with AYA cancer every chance we could by traveling around the country on scholarships. By being vulnerable in such public ways, we found more commonality within the AYA community than we'd hoped.
Fundraising for Cactus Cancer Society is our way of paying it back/forward to a valuable AYA resource. Plus, it allows us to toot our own horns a little for what we have been able to accomplish in service of AYAs. So, let's raise some money, meet new friends, catch up with old ones, make shark jokes, and talk about why AYA advocacy is crucial to cancer survivorship.
Winning “Young Adult Advocate of the Year” would be the cherry on top!
More and more young adults are diagnosed with cancer each year. Thus, young people surviving cancer for decades will become more and more common. Treatment in metastatic cancer is advancing quickly, but the unprecedented needs of long-term AYA cancer survivors remains unclear. This is trailblazing work: by supporting Cactus Cancer Society, you are a part of this new frontier.
Thank you,
Ben & Olivia
🏊♀️ 🦈 💦
Every dollar counts as a vote. Please contribute at your comfort level, whether it's $1, $5, or $20. No gift is too small.
Ben & Olivia will mail you these free bonuses if you give:
- $25 or more, a block print designed by Ben's bestie
- $50 or more, block print + a t-shirt designed by Ben's bestie
- $100 or more, block print + tee + a limited-edition letterpress print designed by Olivia's friends
Every dollar raised translates into real, tangible impact. For example, it costs about $50 to provide one participant with an Art Workshop supply box, which includes all the materials and shipping. Imagine the difference we could make collectively with $5,000—that’ll fund workshops for 100 young adults!
A bonus block (6x6"): designed, hand-carved into linoleum, and hand-stamped onto cardstock by Ben's bestie, Kristen (@th0t.disorder).
Inspired by campaigns to save historical landmarks from destruction, like Ben's brain.
A bonus tee in your size, silk-screened and hand-dyed in aqua blue by us and our friend, Nick. Design by Ben's bestie, Kristen (@th0t.disorder).
Inspired by the Bootleg Bart tee trend in the early-90s when people made their own unofficial, unauthorized Simpsons merch. A sample of some of the best Bartmania designs here.
A bonus limited-edition print (5.5x8.5"), letterpressed by Aardvark Letterpress — a family-run vintage print shop in Ben & Olivia's LA neighborhood. Design by Olivia's friends/colleagues, Kaci (@konekokaci) and Damian (@sketchnstorm).
Olivia commissioned this design to commemorate her First Descents surf trip with other AYA caregivers. It represents the ongoing support our trip's participants provide for each other, and how we cheered each other on as we surfed (or got thrashed by) each wave. Even cancer can't break that bond. It's also symbolic of AYA community support, how we can't survive cancer alone.
For a behind-the-scenes look at how the print was made, check out Kaci's Instagram reel!
Bonus Redemption
Please email [email protected] with your name, mailing address, and preferred tee size. If you make multiple donations, the sum total will be used to determine bonuses.
Our Core Team
Join our team and we’ll put your face on the team poster—we have enough room left to fill all the faces of frightened beachgoers! Help us complete our weekly challenges to receive bonuses from Cactus Cancer Society and reach our fundraising goal faster. Team members automatically get the bonus block print + tee.
Why "Jaws" As Our Cancer Metaphor
Ben & Olivia are gonna need a bigger boat… to help all our other AYA friends combat the mental toll and isolation of cancer.
We avoid using war terminology when it comes to cancer treatment. You don’t lose to cancer because you’re not strong enough to beat it. Instead we’d like describe our cancer journey as reckoning with a force of nature. We needed to think of a team name, so we started going through cheesy 80s-90s action films to find the right fit. The shark in "Jaws" is not really that scary, so the psychological thrill of the film rests on the fear of it. You never know when the shark will be back; you’ll be helpless in a bikini when it does. At the end, it’s the teamwork and self-sacrifice of the Orca crew members and their ingenuity and grit that wins the day.
Our Year in Advocacy
Ben said to Olivia early on during treatment: “Times like these, you either shrink or you grow.” Indeed, we have grown despite everything we’ve experienced these past three years.
I am really quite proud of Ben’s advocacy this year. Before cancer, he would not have considered himself an advocate. He didn’t regard his perspective in high enough esteem to stand up on a stage and be vulnerable about hardship. He would rather perform absurd comedy in a sketch he wrote to make himself laugh. Since cancer, Ben has gone through the medical trauma of a terminal diagnosis; injustices of the U.S. healthcare system; overwhelming support from friends from all parts of his life; isolating nature of a permanent disability in his thirties; and waning government funding for cancer research. He’s learned how to speak eloquently about these experiences in his own way and represent the AYA community to make change.
-- Olivia
Since being flung unceremoniously into the AYA community by my diagnosis, Olivia has been exploring more and more of the resources available to AYAs. She knew that we would need more support to help us understand how life was going to be like moving forward. Finding other cancer friends who can relate to the complicated feelings of this experience has been instrumental to my recovery. Not content to sit idly by, she has been my stalwart support in countless groups. Being an observer to someone else’s pain is hard. But as stressed or heartbroken or tired all of this can make her, she never falters in her dedication to do anything and everything to make this experience as joyful and painless and hopeful as she can. And, as she is a light for me, she tries to be a light for others.
-- Ben
Stupid Cancer
This year’s advocacy started with Stupid Cancer, when they featured us as their Valentine’s Day couple on their platforms and highlighted our story of getting married after diagnosis. We were regulars at their monthly discussions on AYA topics such as body image, grieving pre-cancer identities, and how to talk to kids in our lives about cancer. At CancerCon—the climax of our advocacy in 2025—we were interviewed on stage during the closing keynote session entitled “Married… with Cancer” about our perspectives as a survivor-caregiver pair.
It was Stupid Cancer’s first time featuring a couple in this format, and we used that opportunity to reflect on our experience seeking community together and individually. Particularly, how AYA caregivers need community too. When we’re communing with people just like us, we start to see exactly what we lost to cancer. We allow ourselves to grieve while helping others grieve. Rebuilding a future is difficult when you haven’t grieved what you lost. For AYA spousal caregivers, our loss of hopes and dreams can be obscured because we’re supposed to be “the healthy ones.” We talked about what it was like to find hope again as a couple despite his prognosis.
We rounded out our year of advocacy by dedicating our Christmas tree to Stupid Cancer. Olivia recently learned to crochet and decided to make a giant Grinch hand as a tree topper. The hand held an ornament that read “FUCK CANCER.” All around the tree hung pompom versions of Stupid Cancer’s mascot, Flip the Bird.
National Brain Tumor Society
In May, we joined the National Brain Tumor Society’s Head to the Hill summit in Washington, D.C. For one day, we were lobbyists for the brain tumor community. After all the freezes in medical research grants, zero federal dollars went towards Glioblastoma in 2025. We met mostly with legislative aides from the offices of our congressional representatives, but the one legislator we met with—U.S. Representative Sharice Davids of Kansas (KS-03)—agreed to cosponsor the BRAIN Act for this new congressional term. Back in 2018, when Olivia was President of Cornell Pride LGBTQIA+ Alumni Association, she presented Representative Davids with the Steven W. Siegel Award for her achievements. The trophy was on display in the representative’s office.
The BRAIN Act is the first piece of legislation developed specifically to unify the needs of researchers, clinicians, patients, and survivors in policy and awareness. Brain cancer can’t be cured without funding for clinical trials, and clinical trials are hobbled if patients have trouble accessing them. In our small group, Ben was the only patient present who could give a first-hand experience of brain cancer. His intelligence and wit was on full display as he walked legislative aides through what it’s like to live with a terminal diagnosis and for his life to depend on what’s next for medical research.
Before we left D.C., we also participated in NBTS’s video campaign to promote awareness of biomarker testing. Knowing the specific mutation responsible for his tumor growth has given him a better prognosis and helps us keep track of what research is actually relevant to his treatment options.
Elephants & Tea
Ben has always been a writer, having studied creative writing under his Literatures in English major at Cornell University. For more than a decade, he pursued comedic screenwriting in Los Angeles while working as an independent skills counselor for young adults with developmental disabilities. He never tried publishing his writing post-college because he never felt strongly enough about his work to risk rejection. So when a submission opportunity presented itself, Olivia urged Ben to take it. She convinced him that the AYA world needs his voice and that only he can articulate his experience.
Ben’s first piece of writing about cancer was published in Elephants & Tea, a periodical for AYAs. Titled “The Long Return Home”, Ben’s essay touched on the disorientation he felt upon reaching survivorship post-treatment. The cancer narrative is often more focused on the hardships of treatment and crisis, less so on what happens after you’ve “beat” cancer. When reconciling with what cancer took, Ben came to positive terms with his new self by seeing boundaries and seeing frontiers.
Ben was one of four writers featured from that September issue on “The Struggles of Survivorship” at their Chicago release party. He read his piece aloud and witnessed live reaction to his art. The audience laughed the loudest at his favorite line, “Survivorship is that dog in a hamburger factory, straining to reach the hamburgers. I, Ben McGuerty, cancer survivor, am that hamburgerless dog.” It was incredibly validating for him to have his work and perspective appreciated by a crowd that understood him exactly.
AYA@USC
Our very first AYA event was an annual retreat organized by AYA@USC, the adolescent and young adult cancer program at Ben’s hospital, University of Southern California’s Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center. We happened upon a flyer for the retreat during a follow-up for Ben’s final chemo cycle. Not many caregivers get to attend the retreat, at Camp Ronald McDonald for Good Times in Idyllwild, CA. Doing so enabled us to find our first AYA community together. We became regulars at their meetups and have grown friendships outside the program. Our search for belonging continued to branch out further into national organizations and resources. We count ourselves lucky to have a home base supported by well-funded programming and full-time staff.
Olivia persuaded Ben to join the AYA Council and its retreat committee. Pre-cancer, he wasn’t a joiner of councils or boards; he wasn’t attracted to leadership titles. At the following retreat, Ben led a workshop on cyanotype/sun printing with Olivia assisting. She helps him talk through projects and makes sure he’s thinking about the diverse needs of a diverse community. She makes sure that everyone is being seen. Afterwards, we began bridging our AYA communities by proposing that AYA@USC send a delegation to future CancerCons.
Ben found another opportunity to read his Elephants & Tea essay to an AYA audience. We brought a stack of magazine copies to give out at this past retreat. When he was making an announcement, Olivia asked the audience if they wanted to hear him read it. The audience’s reception to his piece was more subdued compared to the magazine’s release party, but that’s because it hit harder emotionally. Retreat attendees came up after to tell him how much he inspired them to write for E&T too. Ben gave away all his copies by the end of the retreat and autographed his photo in each one.
Joey Anthony Limones (1987-2025)
Joey was our first AYA friend to pass. Even with late-stage lung cancer, he was unapologetically himself. When Ben stepped off the bus at cancer camp, the meditative silence of nature was punctured with gangster rap blaring from a large speaker. Joey installed it In the golf cart he needed to get around. We spent time with him again at a LA Clippers game, our tickets sponsored by Ben’s hospital. But in the several months we hadn’t seen him, he’d entered into hospice care. He showed Olivia the IV bag of fentanyl he was hooked up to for pain management. His days were spent seeking comfort and time with his two young sons. Two weeks later, he was gone.
To attend Joey’s burial services, we embarked on a road trip with other AYA@USC friends to Bakersfield, CA. It was important to show how much he was loved by his cancer friends. How much of an impression he’d made on us, and how much he’ll be missed. It’s strange to learn so much more about him through eulogies, but this is part of being in an AYA cancer community. You’re losing friends early and they had a whole different life pre-cancer. We can only do what we can to honor it all.
At this past year’s retreat, on karaoke night, the road trip crew sang Joey’s karaoke song as a tribute—“With Arms Wide Open” by Creed. Not many people realized he was absent because he passed away. We hope this was the takeaway from our tribute: we’re going to lose AYAs, but they won’t be forgotten.
American Brain Tumor Association
We attended the national American Brain Tumor Association conference held annually in Chicago, where we found ourselves in the largest congregation of brain tumor survivors, caregivers, healthcare providers, medical researchers, and policy advocates. Even Ben’s neuro-oncologist Dr. Chow was in attendance! We came away with a closer relationship to her.
In one fell swoop, we gained so much loving support, personal contacts, and resources. We were directly introduced to research studies, clinical trials, treatment centers, and testing start-ups. Ben found a new palliative care physician, and attended presentations by clinicians and researchers explaining the most promising medical interventions in development. Our contribution to ABTA’s photo/video shoot at the conference was featured in their year-end fundraising campaign video.
First Descents
Last year, Olivia got to go on a First Descents trip gifted to caregivers of oncology patients. She traveled to the Outer Banks of North Carolina for a week of surfing and instruction. On the car ride from the airport, she met two other participants who are coincidentally caregivers for partners with the exact same diagnosis as Ben’s—promptly forming The Grade 4 Astrocytoma Wives Club. This trip was a turning point for Olivia.
Olivia finally had a group of 13 fellow-travelers in their late-thirties who would also understand the very specific frustrations and emotional challenges of caring for a spouse with cancer. They nicknamed their mint-painted beach rental “Encourage Mint” and remain in frequent contact. She went so far as to create original printed art to commemorate their time together and represent AYA community support. (You can get this print as a bonus for $100+ donations!)
The trip was essentially a vacation from cancer: a week of playtime, conversation, and not doing dishes. Afterwards, cancer kept cancer-ing as some participants’ partners faced cancer progression, landed in E.R.’s, and sought clinical trials. It is particularly difficult for caregivers of AYAs to find adequate support. None of our pre-cancer friends are going through anything remotely similar. Or, people overlook Olivia and the challenges she faces because she is not the one with cancer. Strictly, in a medical sense, this is true. But, really, caregivers are survivors, too. And Olivia is trying to build those networks.
Glio Leo
At end of 2025, we were surprised with a generous gift from Glio Leo. Shelby Kennedy, diagnosed with Glioblastoma at age 28, created this foundation to help those with GBM and other brain tumors build a community. She passed away in 2022, but her legacy lives on through this nonprofit’s mission maintained tirelessly by her family. As one of their Leos—recipients of direct assistance—Ben designed a tee with his childhood bestie Whipple (@flork_mccormick) for the Glio Leo apparel line. Funds raised by these sales will go toward supporting future Leo recipients, to be selected later this year. Ben’s tee will be available in the Glio Leo shop soon!
Stump Speeches
Ben deserves the Young Adult Cancer Advocate of the Year award because he made himself vulnerable in ways he couldn’t pre-cancer. Cancer didn’t force him to become a better person; he challenged himself to open up. Both of us did. We didn’t take on advocacy because we figured out how to beat cancer and now we’re doing a victory lap. We found community through advocacy. In turn, we hope that people see us as our imperfect selves — still learning and still scared — and allow themselves to be seen too.
-- Olivia (@oliviatai)
Look, I could go on all day, but the fact of the matter remains, Olivia deserves to be awarded as the Young Adult Cancer Advocate of the Year. Since my diagnosis, and even before, Olivia has displayed a tireless dedication to expanding and strengthening the AYA community. She truly sees herself in all of us who are struggling with the AYA cancer experience. What’s more, she does all of this advocacy in the much less visible role as a caregiver to an AYA, a role the larger public doesn’t seem to register whatsoever. I think it is long overdue that we single out a caregiver for the unceasing difficult work that comes with that identity. In everything I have laid out, you can see the pattern of Olivia’s advocacy generating huge dividends. We need to lift Olivia up so that other caregivers can see themselves as AYA advocates, too.
-- Ben (@pantslessspaceman)
