Personal Blogs

Where the Storm Pauses: Cancer and Technology

It’s March 17, 2026, and I’ve just had my consultation with my doctor at the Beatson cancer hospital in Glasgow.

I was adopted and raised by a man old enough to be my grandfather and who belonged, in some quiet way, to another century. He had lived in a time when milk arrived at the door in glass bottles, set down gently from a horse and cart, as if even delivery, like the proud horse carried a sense of dignity. He loved Dickens, and I think he trusted stories more than inventions. I now find myself in a fast‑moving world that would seem, to him, almost like fiction.

If I could sit with him again—perhaps on an ordinary afternoon—and tell him what I am about to write, I think he would listen with that same patient curiosity. Not disbelief exactly, but caution.

I watch a scientist called James Tour, who has built—I’m not sure this is the correct word—a “nanocar”: a micro‑structure in the form of a vehicle small enough to enter the bloodstream and carry out essential repair work in the body. It is a strange thought, that something so small could be made to move at all. But there it is, pulled out of the realm of science fiction and made real as the sun rises.

Now, what has this to do with my conversation with the doctor?

In the first chapter I explained that I was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. For a time, the treatments held things in place, like bags of sand placed carefully against a rising storm. But yesterday, I was told that one tumour has begun to grow again. Back in my father’s day, if the first diagnosis was the end of the line, what would he have made of this latest news?

The doctor spoke of something called PRRT—Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy. It doesn’t quite roll off the tongue. The name itself feels weighty. But in essence, it is something surprisingly simple.

PRRT works by using a kind of targeted medicine. Cancer cells like mine carry specific receptors—think of them as micro parcel lockers. PRRT carries a substance designed to find those lockers, open them, and drop in a tiny amount of radiation. And unlike parcel delivery, which can be indiscriminate at times, these tiny parcels of radiation find the specific locker. It sounds similar to the nanocar to my mind: the idea that something so small, so carefully designed, can move through the body, find its target, and act. Not with drama, but with quiet purpose.

I think my father would have struggled with this—not because he lacked understanding, but because it asks us to trust in things we cannot see at all. A story of human hands learning, slowly, how to speak to the smallest parts of creation. I am not sure why, but I think of that verse where David writes, “Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book.”

Cancer remains what it is. It does not become less serious because the tools have become more refined. The storm still exists. There are still days when one wakes in that land of Oz.

PRRT does not promise a complete solution. It offers time in a life where we refuse to die.

And in a life where time is no longer measured in years but in distances between worlds, that matters.

Perhaps that is what I would say, if I could sit beside my father again. That the world has changed, yes—but not entirely. That even now, beneath all the complexity, there remains something familiar: a quiet reaching toward life, even in its most fragile places.

But there is something else, too—something that does not belong to laboratories or consultations, something that does not depend on what can be measured or delivered.

A hope that stands a little further out, beyond the reach of medicine.

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth… God Himself will be with them as their God.
He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death, or mourning, or crying, or pain, for the former things have passed away.”
Revelation 21:3–4 (BSB)

I find myself thinking, more often now, that the distance between worlds is not only something we endure, but something that will one day be closed. When the quiet absence that follows loss will give way to presence again.

I think of my father then—not as someone left behind in another time, but as someone simply sharing an eternal horizon where time merges and to be truthful, time will only be the gaps in eternal events.

Reference: Scientists say tiny ‘DNA nanobots’ could deliver medicine by travelling through the body - College of Medicine and Integrated Health

Image my Marcus Woodbridge https://unsplash.com/@marcuswoodbridge

‘I am a child of this age, the child of disbelief and doubt, until now and even to the grave. What a terrible torment this thirst for faith has taught me, and now cost me, which is stronger in my soul, the more in me the arguments to the contrary.’ ----  Dostoevsky 

Image courtesy of https://unsplash.com/@vivom

A profile of Dostoevsky reveals a man who experienced considerable injustices in life.  Diagnosed with Grand Mal Epilepsy as a teenager, a last-minute reprieve from a firing squad, exiled to Siberia, death of his second wife whom he loved, death of his child from an epileptic convulsion and the distress of raising a troubled teenager.

Scholars recognise the Karamazov book mirrors Dostoevsky’s life. That being the case, it was the existential angst that troubled Dostoevsky’s later years. Mourning the repeated inhumanity of Russian society, he inevitably turned to thoughts of Divine justice. A question that is as relevant today as it was two centuries ago.

When he was exiled to Siberia, an old widow supplied him and his fellow prisoners some hospitality. She signalled out Dostoevsky and gifted him with a Bible. He later wrote:

‘I am a child of this age, the child of disbelief and doubt, until now and even to the grave. What a terrible torment this thirst for faith has taught me, and now cost me, which is stronger in my soul, the more in me the arguments to the contrary.’ Letters XXV111/1, P.176, 

The Bible, she gave him, was still in his possession at his death.

Fascinating that The Brothers Karamazov was, despite careful reading, I never found that attributed phrase where Alisha said to his atheist brother, ‘If there is no God, then all things are permissible.’ The problem lies in the translation it seems. Nonetheless, the aphorism stands as a valuable argument for objective morality and the personal God. Why does something exist rather than not exist? Why are humans who are apparent chemicals that have come about in the big cosmic game of chance directed by this virtue called justice? Are all the evil and good deeds carried out by humans all for nothing? Are the acts carried out by Pol Pot, Putin, Stalin, and others, permissible? Will there not be a great judgement? If we are alone in this dark universe, then anything and everything goes. But the lived experience reveals otherwise.

We are governed by an invisible force that bends towards justice. We feel it in our lives daily. I say bends because we are free moral agents on a level playing field where goodness and wickedness meet. There’s too much wickedness for God to exist some might say. But isn’t the reverse also true? There’s considerable goodness. Why would any virtue exist in a universe that just happened? I see medical staff going to war-torn countries and risking life to provide care for those who are not their kin. What about Ignacio Echeverría, the 39-year-old Spanish lawyer who confronted the terrorists in the 2017 London Bridge attacks and sacrificing his athletic future and life in the process? There’s the stranger who sacrifices a kidney for the person he will never meet. The millions of charitable givers who make life more endurable for orphans in Brazil, the Philippines, Bangladesh, and other parts of the world. These acts defy the theory of reciprocity allogrooming. They describe altruism in the true sense. Just pure, unconditional love. And history is filled with such.

Back in 1979, just like Dostoevsky, I had many vexing theological questions I wrestled with. One Sunday morning, a man who looked dressed for a funeral, knocked my door and asked, ‘If you had an audience with God, what would you ask him?’

Between a blink and a wink, I asked, ‘Why so much injustice in the world?’ I was expecting this tall thin man with heavy black glasses to ferret away in view of my difficult question. But no. He read me the following:

‘We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time … For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay…’

Why would God create a beautiful planet then subject it to futility? I have thought of this most of my adult life. Here’s what I think. Are we not free moral agents? Then it’s back to that level playing field scenario. How will humans conduct themselves in the absence of a creator? The presence of injustice is a factor caused by man. This gives the illusion that there’s no God. But are humans not like the child who behaves in the parents’ presence and disobeys in their absence? Is there a place for the child who always conducts himself unselfishly, metaphorically speaking? I say that God has us in this seemingly futile situation to test our worth. Not knowing if he is there for sure, reinforces our true selves. What we value most.

C.S. Lewis wrote, ‘If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world will satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we are made for another world.’

All the books I read as a child was about a craving. The hero’s striving for something. I could not put my finger on it at the time. But it was the human impulse for justice. Something books will never satisfy. I found that hope in the further words the man read to me that day as he stood at my door:

‘He (God) will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, the old order of things has passed away.’

 Revelation 21: 4.

I shed many a tear as a child. I shed some now. But to embrace a hope where a universe will prevail and justice being at its centrepiece, I wipe my eyes. The dark and stormy night looks brighter in the end.