Words of Inspiration

This page contains some words of inspiration and non-clinical advice that people have allowed us to share here. Some authors have cancer, others don't. We hope this page helps you, particularly if you are a cancer patient or relative.

Cancer, by Mike Smith

You stand beside them,
hand on shoulder,
voice softer than usual,
as if the word itself might shatter something.

Cancer.

You see it in their eyes,
the weight of it,
the quiet arithmetic of time,
the questions no one quite asks out loud.

You go home carrying them with you,
thinking of hospital corridors,
of long nights,
of the slow grind of fear.

And then there’s you.

Tablets with breakfast.
Appointments in neat little boxes on a calendar.
Radiotherapy slots that feel more like errands than battles.
In, out, carry on.

No drama.
No soundtrack.
No sense that anything fundamental has shifted.

You sit in waiting rooms
full of faces that seem to understand something you don’t.
Gaunt, tired, eyes that have already crossed a line
you’re not sure you’ve even reached.

And you think, quietly,
almost guiltily…

That’s cancer.

But this?
This is just treatment.

Two truths,
living side by side,
never quite touching.

One you recognise in others.
One you refuse to see in yourself.

Until, perhaps,
one day,
they stop being strangers to each other.

Radiotherapy, by Mike Smith

It’s not the drama people imagine.
No sirens, no sudden collapse.
Just a quiet, daily reshaping of life
around a clock that isn’t yours anymore.

Appointments shift like sand.
Morning becomes afternoon,
afternoon becomes waiting,
and everything else gets pushed aside
as if it never mattered much to begin with.

It’s not just you carrying it.
There’s another set of hands in the background,
steady, patient, learning the routine,
helping you prepare for something
neither of you ever planned to understand.

The table is harder than it looks.
Cold in a way that seeps through bone.
Getting up, getting down
becomes its own small battle,
one you don’t mention
because it sounds trivial
until you’re the one doing it.

Then comes the slow burn.
Not fire, not pain you can point to,
just a tenderness that grows quietly,
like something unfolding where it shouldn’t.
You notice it more each day,
even when you try not to.

And the tiredness.
Not the kind that sleep fixes.
This is heavier.
It sits in your limbs,
follows you from room to room,
waits for you at the top of the stairs
like an old debt that won’t clear.

They call it treatment.
And it is.
But it’s also endurance.
Routine.
Adjustment.

A kind of strength
that doesn’t look like strength at all.