Edited by Jim McCrory, Tuesday 17 March 2026 at 12:55
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.
Where the Storm Pauses: Cancer and Technology
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