Where the Storm Pauses: Cancer and Technology
I was adopted and raised by a man 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 carried a sense of dignity. He loved Dickens, and I think he trusted stories more than inventions. The world, to him, was already full enough of wonder without needing to shrink it down into atoms.
If I could sit with him again—perhaps at the edge of 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 a kind of careful distance, as though he were holding the idea up to the light to see whether it belonged to this world or another.
Because the world I now find myself in would have seemed, to him, almost like fiction.
A scientist, James Tour, once built what he called a “nanocar”—a structure so small it cannot be seen, shaped like a vehicle, coaxed into motion across a surface. Not a car in any familiar sense, not something that could carry a person or travel a road, but a suggestion. A beginning. Proof that matters itself can be persuaded into movement, into purpose, at a scale where life itself is assembled.
It is a strange thought, that something so small could be made to move at all. Stranger still that such ideas do not remain in laboratories or papers, but slowly—quietly—find their way into the human story.
Because now, in a way I never expected, that world has come close to me.
Nearly three years ago, I was diagnosed with neuroendocrine cancer. For a time, the treatments held things in place, like stones placed carefully against a rising tide. But recently, in a consultation that felt both ordinary and quietly momentous, I was told that a tumour has begun to grow again—like a weed in spring, persistent and untroubled by effort.
In my father’s time, this might have been where the road ended. A line drawn, gently but firmly. But the road, it seems, does not end in quite the same place anymore.
The doctor at the Beatson spoke of something called PRRT—Peptide Receptor Radionuclide Therapy. The name itself feels heavy, almost impenetrable, like a door with too many locks. But what it means, at its heart, is something surprisingly simple.
PRRT works by using a kind of guided medicine. Certain cancer cells—like the ones I have—carry specific “receptors” on their surface. You might think of them as tiny locks. PRRT uses a substance designed to find those locks. Attached to it is a small amount of radiation.
When this medicine is given, it travels through the body until it finds those receptors. It binds to them—like a key fitting into a lock—and delivers the radiation directly into the cancer cells. Not widely, not indiscriminately, but with a kind of quiet intention.
It is not an army sweeping through the body. It is closer to a messenger, carrying something precise to a very particular door.
And this is where the worlds begin to overlap—the imagined and the real. 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.
There is something almost gentle in that idea.
Not the gentleness of absence, or of things returning to how they were, but a different kind—the gentleness of being met where you are. Of the illness not being fought blindly, but addressed, specifically, deliberately.
I sometimes 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. Not even with the help of imagination. And yet, he trusted stories. And this, in its way, is a story too. A story of human hands learning, slowly, how to speak to the smallest parts of creation.
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.
But there are also these other moments now. Moments where the lake is still. Where the future, though uncertain, is not empty.
PRRT does not promise an ending. It offers something quieter than that. Time, perhaps. Stability. A way of holding the line, or even gently pushing it back.
And in a life where time is no longer measured in years but in distances between worlds, that matters.
It matters in ways that I find difficult to explain, but easy to feel.
Because between the storm and the quiet lake, there is a third place. Not one of certainty, but of presence. Of continuing. Of being here, still, with whatever comes next.
And 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 kind of care. A kind of intention. A quiet reaching toward life, even in its most fragile places.
Not a miracle. Not a cure, necessarily.
But not nothing, either.
And sometimes, not nothing is enough to keep going.
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. Not imagined, not remembered, but real.
I think of my father then—not as someone left behind in another time, but as someone simply ahead of me, just beyond a horizon I cannot yet cross.
And I hold, gently, to the words that have outlived centuries: that there will be a time when God will dwell with us, and there will be no more death, no more sorrow, no more pain. That the former things will pass away.
If that is true—and I believe it is—then the distances I measure now are not permanent. They are only temporary stretches of road.
The storm will not last forever. Even the still lake is not the final image.
There is something beyond both.
A place where time is no longer counted at all. Where worlds do not sit apart from one another, but are gathered into one—seamless, whole, and unbroken.
And in that place, I will see him again.
Not as memory. Not as longing.
But as presence.
And perhaps, when that day comes, all the strange and careful work of this world—the medicines, the machines, the quiet attempts to hold life together—will be seen for what they were: not answers, but bridges. Small, human ways of carrying us, step by step, toward something far greater.
Until then, I remain here—between storm and stillness, between worlds—held not only by what medicine can offer, but by what has been promised.
And that, too, is enough to keep going.
Image my Marcus Woodbridge https://unsplash.com/@marcuswoodbridge
