Even though I'm an optimist by nature, I usually say that I have cancer, but with no current evidence of disease. That's partly because I have breast cancer as opposed to many other cancers that tend to recur quickly or not at all. Breast cancer can return after 10 or 20 or even 30 years, so there's never a comfortable feeling that it's securely in the past. Even the treatment for cancer is saddled with language difficulties. I suspect that most people have heard of chemotherapy being referred to as poison.
Chemotherapy is medicine.
Casual conversations about cancer also cause people to speak in seemingly bizarre code. Although cancer can still make us tongue-tied, we have progressed in that it is discussed. Fifty years ago, people sometimes died of cancer without ever being told the diagnosis. But we still have a ways to go in being comfortable with the language of cancer. It is a disease that scares people more than any other.