On my 32nd birthday, I threw my whole birthday cake in the garbage.

It was already, hands down, the worst birthday of my life. I’d been in Minnesota for much of the year, living at my parents’ house while my mom underwent treatment for metastatic bile-duct cancer. Today, she napped in the next room, her oxygen tank humming quietly in the corner of our kitchen. She’d just been admitted to home hospice care. My husband of three months was 1,200 miles away, packing up the apartment we’d essentially abandoned in New York for a move we’d scheduled before her cancer took a turn for the worse.

I’d spent the morning toggling between my day job and addressing what we knew would be my mother’s last Christmas cards. But I had just enough time to bake a celebratory spice cake from a box — it might cheer us all up, I thought — before the pastor came for an afternoon visit. While I mixed ingredients, my husband texted photos of open cabinets. Did we need this cable? Could we toss out this folder? I typed back one-word responses with sticky fingers; one eye was glancing at the clock, the other peeking in anxiously on my mother, my throat filling with guilt as I pictured my husband, stranded, besieged by piles of dusty junk and cardboard boxes.

The cake smelled heavenly, of ginger and allspice. But did you know that you can’t make buttercream frosting with butter that’s still cold? Reader, I did not. And when my lumpy frosting mixture violently tore off the top of my birthday cake, just minutes before I had to get the kitchen (and my mom) ready for company, I lost it. I dug my fingers into the pan and hurled cake into the trash by the fistful. Later, after the pastor left, I stood over the sink, picking crumbs out from under my fingernails and sobbing.

As you can imagine, in the years since, I have seldom watched movies or TV shows about cancer on purpose. The feelings of overwhelm and helplessness come back all too easily, spoiling evenings I mean to spend relaxing.

The wonderfully funny “Dying for Sex,” though, was worth breaking my own rule for.

Based on the award-winning podcast of the same name, the show stars Michelle Williams as Molly, a woman who’s diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer and vows to spend her final months reaching new dimensions of sexual pleasure. Molly abruptly leaves the husband who looked after her during an earlier bout with breast cancer and has since treated her as more of a patient than a wife. Instead, she puts her best friend, Nikki (Jenny Slate), in charge of her care.

In the grand canon of TV cancer storylines, caregivers’ hardships are often acknowledged only in passing. In “The Big C,” Paul Jamison cracking under the pressure of caring for his cancer-patient wife and providing for his family is a subplot in one season of the show’s four. Adam Braverman on “Parenthood” seemed to be able to do it all while his wife underwent chemo. Smith Jerrod shaved his head in solidarity — and that was pretty much the extent of his memorable contributions to Samantha Jones’s cancer arc on “Sex and the City.” By contrast, “Dying for Sex” makes the rare choice to center Nikki’s experience as a cancer caregiver alongside Molly’s experience as a cancer patient. With startling honesty, it portrays the punishing toll cancer care can inflict, even on those who find joy and meaning in providing it.

At the beginning of “Dying for Sex,” Nikki, an actress, enjoys a blossoming career and a promising new relationship. “She’s hyper-creative, forcefully loving, self-centered but not because she’s selfish,” Slate says. “She’s always there for Molly, but she’s living for herself.”

But as Nikki finds her stride as Molly’s caregiver (slash facilitator of many of Molly’s sex-capades), her subsequent sacrifices are numerous — and largely involuntary. First, she finds herself constantly harried as she tries and fails to juggle Molly’s medical appointments and her own rehearsals. A romantic encounter between Nikki and her boyfriend is abruptly derailed when Molly’s insurance ends her hours-long hold on the phone. Nikki gets fired from her role in a Shakespeare production. Her relationship disintegrates after her boyfriend forces her to take a day-long break from Molly’s care. Forced out of their shared place and without income to rent an apartment, Nikki moves in at Molly’s, turning her around-the-clock caregiving from metaphorical to literal.

Nikki has some cake-in-the-garbage moments of her own: Molly spontaneously ditches Nikki’s carefully made plans for a hospital New Year’s Eve, leaving Nikki alone in a patient room full of decorations and balloons, silently confronting how much her constant, unwavering support has cost her.