It’s the end of what is, according to lots of social media statuses (stati?) #worldcancerday – the thing is, having had it twice, every day is cancer day. Both cancers utterly changed my everyday life, for good as well as ill. Most days it’s just somewhere in the background, in my childlessness or my chronic pain or my pleasure in being, other days it slams me in the face with the very many costs of surviving.


I don’t know anyone who hasn’t had cancer or loved someone who’s had cancer – or, as many of us, both, and sometimes both at the same time. It is absurd that something so prevalent remains so feared, so often discussed in hushed tones (yes, even now), or is so often misused as a (cheap) plot point in telly/film/books. 

These ‘awareness’ days rarely address how bloody hard serious illness is to live through as patient or carer, and/or to die from. No, we don’t always want to look at the hard, and yes, fundraising often benefits more from the shiny and glossy than the dark and the tough, but we live in a culture that wants happy endings, or at the very least that we find meaning in loss and pain. 

And sometimes, some things are meaningless. Meaninglessness is also ok.

Here’s an old blog on the cost of cancer.