When the World Goes Quiet

It can be incredibly easy to fall into the feeling of being alone when you’re fighting cancer. No matter how kind, supportive, or well-intentioned people are, the truth is that no one truly understands what this life is like unless they’ve walked this path themselves.

This isn’t just a “hard thing” I’m going through.
It’s earth-shattering.
It’s life-altering.

I don’t think there’s a perfect way to verbalize or articulate what it feels like to be the one with cancer. Some people have supported friends or family through it. They’ve seen the appointments, the exhaustion, the fear—secondhand. And that matters. But it is fundamentally different from being the person whose body, future, and sense of safety have all been turned upside down.

In the summer of 2024, when I was diagnosed with a recurrence, I truly believed there was a clear light at the end of the tunnel. Chemotherapy. Radiation. Then done. I would wash my hands of cancer for the second time and move on with my life.

That is not how it unfolded.

Since then, I’ve been through more than I ever imagined: a lung biopsy for pathology, brain surgery, four rounds of the highest-dose chemotherapy available, a week of chemotherapy pills, five rounds of gamma knife radiation to the brain, three rounds of lung radiation, multiple at-home IV fluid infusions, emergency room visits for fevers and post-chemo illness, and countless weekly lab appointments for blood draws.

It takes a toll.

Not just on your body, but on your spirit—and on the people around you. But being the one who has to endure it all, who has to keep showing up, grinning and bearing it, is deeply exhausting and profoundly lonely. I followed every instruction. I did everything the doctors told me to do. And then, about a year ago, I was told I had months to live.

I felt completely alone in my refusal to accept that as the end of my story. Surely I couldn’t be the only one who still believed they weren’t going to die. Yet it felt isolating to want more—to not quietly shuffle off this earth at 30 years old and accept my fate.

Then I found the team at my local hyperbaric oxygen therapy center. For the first time in a while, I felt seen. I was introduced to the ketogenic diet for cancer, methylene blue (which I remain skeptical about), How to Starve Cancer by Jane McLelland, and the ACCT Med device. I realized there was an entire world of alternative and complementary approaches beyond chemotherapy—and I needed to explore them.

As time went on, I kept reading, researching, and working with my naturopaths to build a strategy that felt right for me. I began to feel better. I began to look better. And yet, I knew there was still a long, dark tunnel ahead—one with no visible light.

Now, as winter settles in and the holidays have passed, I find myself right back in that familiar place of loneliness. The phone doesn’t ring. No invitations for coffee. No casual check-ins. And layered on top of all of that is the loss of a friend I met over the summer—someone else fighting sarcoma, someone who shared my determination and optimism around alternative therapies. He passed away in December.

The one person I could talk to who truly understood this life is gone.

And once again, everything feels dark and empty and I feel alone once more.