What happens inside your head when someone tells you they have cancer?
Be honest.
For most of us, the word immediately creates a picture.
Hospitals. Chemotherapy. Hair loss. Death.
It’s almost automatic. Your brain races ahead, writes the ending, and starts grieving before the story has even been told.
I know mine used to.
“It’s like there’s a gun pointed at your forehead, and the word CANCER is all you can read down the side of the barrel.”
Paleros
A few weeks ago, my wife and I returned to a little Greek town called Paleros — one of those special places where we’ve spent years making memories with our children. We’ve been back so many times that many of the locals know us by name.
One afternoon we bumped into one of them. He wasn’t on social media and had no idea what the previous year had looked like for us.
During the conversation, my wife casually mentioned that I’d had cancer.
The reaction stopped me in my tracks.
He physically stepped backwards. He stopped talking. Even his hand instinctively slipped his vape back into his pocket.
It was as though the word itself had entered the conversation.
Not me. The word.
And in that moment I realised something I’d never appreciated before: cancer doesn’t only affect the person diagnosed. It changes how everyone around them behaves.
The diagnosis
In September 2025 I was diagnosed with stage 4 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. My PET scan looked, as people in the cancer world often say, like I was wearing a burning jacket. The disease had spread to five organs. My bone marrow was involved. My spleen had doubled in size. A tumour the size of a grapefruit sat in my abdomen.
If you’d like to understand what that day felt like, I wrote about it here. This article isn’t about that day — it’s about everything that came afterwards.
What the research says
During treatment I read a remarkable book called Radical Remission by Dr. Kelly A. Turner. Rather than asking why cancer treatments sometimes fail, she asked a different question: why do a small number of people achieve outcomes nobody expected?
She travelled the world studying hundreds of cases and found nine themes that kept appearing, across very different people and cultures. Not identical treatments. Not identical diets. Not even identical belief systems. But the same patterns, again and again:
- Radically changing your diet
- Taking control of your health
- Following your intuition
- Using herbs and supplements
- Releasing suppressed emotions
- Increasing positive emotions
- Embracing social support
- Deepening your spiritual connection
- Having strong reasons for living
Whether every one of those factors applies to every person isn’t really the point. What struck me was something else: so many of them involve relationships. Purpose. Hope. Connection. Support.
Things that medicine can’t prescribe. Things that every one of us can influence.
Why this changed how I think about cancer
Of course modern medicine matters. My treatment almost certainly saved my life, and I will always be grateful for that.
But I also became convinced that the environment surrounding treatment matters too. Not just the biological environment inside our bodies — the emotional environment around us. The conversations. The encouragement. The belief. The feeling that somebody is standing shoulder to shoulder with you.
“Cancer may attack one body. But it affects an entire community.”
What you can actually do
So perhaps we need to change the way we talk about cancer. Not because we should pretend it isn’t serious — it is. Not because we should offer false hope — we shouldn’t. But because we shouldn’t automatically replace hope with fear either.
Modern medicine has advanced enormously. Immunotherapies, targeted treatments, and diagnostics keep improving every year. More people are surviving. More people are living well after treatment. The story is changing — our language should change with it.
If someone tells you they have cancer, don’t disappear because you don’t know what to say.
Send the message. Make the phone call. Invite them for coffee if they feel well enough. Offer to drive them to treatment. Sit with them. Listen. Sometimes say nothing at all.
Because while doctors fight the disease, friends and family help people fight everything else.
This is Part 1 of a series. In Part 2, I get practical — the daily protocol I built alongside my treatment, and the biology behind why it mattered.