This article confronts two acclaimed cancerographies dealing with breast cancer, Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Krystyna Kofta’s Lewa, wspomnienie prawej [The Left, Recollections of the Right]. The former was published in the 1980s in the United States; the latter, which contains sections from the writer’s diary written in 2002, was published the following year in Poland. Each memoir belongs to a different time and a socio- historical context; yet by discounting all the differences the article tries to identify the core pathographic readings, which are assumed to function primarily as social facts. Finally, the article argues the American critical and sociological understanding of the illness narrative is not always compatible with Polish cultural codes and conventions, and may lead to a misreading of Polish texts in that category.