Everybody asks me what I do. Nobody asks me what I stopped.

Who I am writing this for

Stay with me to the end of this one. There is something waiting for you down there. It is free, it asks you for nothing, and it is exactly where I would start if I could go back and begin again.

Not only for people with cancer.

If you have an autoimmune disease. If your hormones have been wrong for years. If you have endometriosis. If you have something nobody has put a proper name to yet and you have been told it is in your head. This is for you too. Your body does not file these things into separate drawers, and neither will I.

And it is for the person who is not sick at all. The one holding somebody else up. A woman wrote to me this week about her mother, and I have been thinking about her since, because nobody writes anything for her.

Why I did not write this sooner

Nobody asked me for this. I have wanted to write it since the very first time I posted that I had no evidence of disease.

I did not, for three reasons.

The first one is the simplest and the ugliest. I still worked for other people, and cancer was always trouble. At the last company I worked for I was nearly let go after I told them I had it. Nobody says that out loud, of course. They just make your life quietly impossible until you hand in the notice yourself, which in the end is what I did.

The second is that I did not want to turn my life into a feed. I did not want people knowing what I had for breakfast. And I was still inside my own process, and you should not be teaching from inside the middle of something.

The third one is the real reason, and it is why you have not seen me shouting "cancer free" across the internet every week since the scan.

I did not want to announce something that might not be true in six months.

I am not talking about any particular person here and I am not going to name anybody. This is a pattern I have watched, not a person. Somebody announces they are cancer free. Within weeks there is a protocol for sale and a link to book a one to one. And some months later they are quietly back in a clinic.

It is the same thing as posting a man you met four weeks ago and calling him the love of your life, and then having to go back and delete every photograph. That is why you will not find a picture of a single boyfriend anywhere on my accounts. I already know how it tends to end, I already know I would be taking it down, so why would I put it up.

So I am careful with those two words, and I always will be.

What I will say is this. It is not only the scans. I know what my body feels like with cancer in it, and I know what it feels like without, and I have sixteen years of the first one to measure the second one against. That is not proof and I am not offering it to you as proof. It is simply the reason I can sleep.

And I find it hard to watch people build an income out of this illness. I am not going to do it. Everything in this series is free, all of it, for anybody, forever.

What changed is that I no longer have an employer to lose, and I have stopped caring what any of it looks like. I am going to live in my truth now.

Jesus said we would be hated for the sake of His name. He died for it. And I do not believe His disciples went to their deaths for a lie.

Before I start, what this is not

I am not going to lie to you. I am not going to sell you a protocol. I am not going to tell you to do exactly what I do.

Everything I have done to my body does not hurt my body, and that still does not make it right for yours. There are supplements you should not take if your blood pressure is high. There are others you should not take if it is low. There are therapies that do not go together. Anybody who hands you a list without saying that out loud is not being honest with you.

What I can do is put the options on the table so you can take them to your doctor and have an actual conversation, instead of sitting in that chair with nothing to say.

I am not going to solve this for you and I am not going to put sugar on a bitter herb.

That is the gap. That is the gap I never had. For four years I closed it with my own two hands, with research, with trial, with a lot of error, mostly alone. And then I understood I am not the only one standing in it. There are thousands of women in that same gap this morning who do not know where to begin.

I cannot solve your problems and I cannot cure your illness. But I know exactly where that gap is, because I have stood in it as a patient, as a caregiver, as a mother and as a single mother. My thirties and my forties have been spent with cancer.

And where you begin is the simplest thing in the world, which is exactly why nobody tells you. There is no money in telling you to stop. They want to sell you a protocol. They want your click, and plenty of them will get it by hooking you to something you should not take without supervision.

1. I stopped pretending I did not have it

This is the first one, and it costs nothing.

Stop pretending you do not have it.

Here is my timeline, so you understand what I am admitting to.

I knew in 2010. In 2011 I went to a doctor with a lump in my body and I was told I was too young to have cancer. In 2012 they finally wrote it down properly. I was thirty years old.

I stopped drinking and smoking on 16 October 2022.

Twelve years after I knew. Ten years after they put it on paper. For all of those years I was taking tamoxifen, an anti cancer medication, and drinking and smoking at the same time. My body was already full of tumours and I was pouring wine on them.

And I was being operated on. More than eight surgeries. If I count every single intervention, every time somebody went into my body, it comes to sixteen.

Sixteen. One for every year I have had this.

And a large number of them happened inside a span of two years.

I used to say "I am bigger than cancer." It sounded strong. It was a saying, not a doing and not a feeling. What it actually meant was: I am going to live my life, I do not care, I will go to the hospital and let a doctor manage my health and decide for me.

And he did decide for me, until he had completely damaged me. That is Wednesday.

Say the word

I see people everywhere now saying you should not say the word cancer. That you should call it "the C." That naming it gives it power.

That is a healing influencer cliché and it is backwards.

How are you going to fight something you will not admit exists? You are fighting a ghost. And what is in your body is not a ghost. It is an announcement. It is your body telling you that something is very wrong inside you.

There is a scene I think about a lot. A woman standing in front of a man who is possessed, and the only thing she is able to do is ask him to say the name of the thing inside him. She cannot order it out. She has no power to do that. All she can do is get him to say the name, because the naming is what breaks its hold.

That is exactly how I think about this.

You do not get power over it by refusing to look at it. You get it by saying out loud what you are actually dealing with.

Where I come from we say it differently. Take the bull by the horns.

Yes, I have cancer. There is a problem in my body. I need to fix it. What can I do to support my body?

Not why me. Not I am so unlucky, so alone, so afraid. Those are real and you are allowed to feel every one of them. Cry about it. It is horrible. You did not want this. You are scared. Feel all of it.

But feel it as something that is happening, not something you are avoiding. The faster you accept what you have, the faster you can build a plan against it.

People keep telling me that the word itself is bad energy. That I should not say it. That even the cancer centres should not say it.

Bad energy is lying to yourself. Bad energy is believing you are going to accomplish something by pretending.

“You cannot fight an enemy you refuse to name.”

And there is a second half to this one, which is that I also stopped pretending for other people.

For years my energy went into projects, companies, other people, and above all into what those people were thinking about me. That is energy. It comes out of the same account as everything else.

I have been cringe. I have lip synced on TikTok and done things I would rather not scroll back to. I have cried over men I had known for four weeks, and only years later understood that I was never crying about them. I was crying about me, because I was empty and something was wrong.

Everything was wrong. I have been finding out what, one piece at a time, for four years. And finding out has been the medicine.

What avoiding it actually looked like

I told myself cancer was not going to take my time. It could have the day of the scan and the day of the surgery, and nothing else.

So I carried all of it, the fear and the tears, and I dropped it at the hospital door. Then I walked out of surgery and went straight back to being distracted.

Which means I never processed a single thing that was happening to me. I was disconnected from my own body. My mind and my soul were somewhere else entirely, because I did not want to admit that the vessel carrying me was sick.

It was telling me. And I answered by attacking it.

You are connected to it whether you like it or not

Think about a pregnancy. There is a baby inside and it has to be connected to the mother to eat, to grow, to live. Imagine it floating in there with no connection at all. No food. No resources. It would not grow. It would die, not because there was nothing there, but because nothing was reaching it.

Your body is doing an unbelievable amount of work right now to keep you alive and you have no idea how most of it functions. It is magnificent and you did not build it.

And when it finally tells you that something is badly wrong, the answer cannot be: I am going to live my life, I am going to poison you some more.

You cannot nourish a body you have disconnected yourself from. You cannot make a good decision when you are hungry. You cannot think straight for an hour after you have been crying.

If we were not connected to our bodies, then being sad would do nothing to us at all. We would be disappointed and that would be the end of it. No tears, no chest, no stomach, nothing. There is a word for a person built like that, and it is not a word you want.

So when something is wrong in your life, your body runs the bill. Your stress goes up. You swap the cigarettes for food and the weight comes, because what you actually needed was comfort. And on top of all of it we are living inside a world that changes every hour and we let every small voice in it sit down inside our ears, and we never once stop and be alone with it.

I was not a wine lover

I used to call myself a wine lover. I was not a wine lover. I was an alcoholic. That is what I was.

I thought I loved wine. I do not love it now. I cannot be near the smell of it. Because it was never about the wine. It was about getting myself into a state where I could fit into rooms I do not naturally fit into.

The truth is I like being alone at home with my dog and my computer. I needed something to make me big enough to stand being around people for hours. It is not that I dislike people. It is that I am somebody who needs a lot of time alone, and I spent years drinking my way out of admitting it.

So maybe start there. Be alone with your illness. Stop giving it nicknames and shortcuts and initials. Stop walking around it.

2. I stopped telling the story over and over

Here is the part nobody warns you about.

You walk out of a clinic having been told you have cancer and you will probably die. And then the phone starts. What did the doctor say. What exactly did he say. And you tell it again. And again. To your family, to the neighbour, to the friend of the friend.

Every single time you tell it, you live it again.

Tell the people who need to know. Tell them once, properly. And then stop talking about it like you have it and start fighting it. It is not about telling the story.

I never went to a cancer group. I am sorry, but they are depressing. I never spoke about it in public either. There were long stretches where I was completely alone with it, and I leaned on strangers online who held me up, and I am grateful to every one of them, because I do not have a mother to call or a father to call. That is a story for another day.

If you are the one carrying somebody else

Nobody stops for one second to think about how hard it is to care for a person with cancer. It is brutal, and almost nothing is written for the people doing it.

I can tell you exactly how brutal, because I have been the caregiver of a cancer patient. The patient was me.

I have been the woman who did not call an ambulance because there was nobody to look after her dog.

I have been the one standing in her own kitchen working out where the day's energy was going to go, because there was not enough of it for both things. The soup or the shower. Not both. Choose.

I have never published any of this. I am publishing it now because I do not want the next person to go through it and then beat herself up on top of it, for not doing enough, for not doing it well, for not healing fast enough.

You are not failing. You are rationing.

And if there is a relationship in your life that has turned into a weight you are carrying uphill, this is the moment to put it down. Not because somebody on the internet told you to. Because every unit of energy you have left now has exactly one job, and that job is keeping you alive.

And it was not your fault

This is the question sitting underneath all of it, and almost nobody says it out loud. What did I do wrong. Why did this happen to me. Was this my fault.

Can an illness be a combination of things, and can some of those things be things you did? Yes. That is true and I am not going to pretend otherwise so that you feel better for an afternoon.

But there is an enormous distance between that and walking around your own house saying "I have this because I did not take care of myself."

I have my own ideas about why I got cancer, and I am going to tell you every one of them.

Here is the thing that keeps me honest about it. In exactly the same way that there are many reasons I think I got it, there are many reasons I am still alive sixteen years later, and I cannot tell you which one did it. Nobody can. That part is a mystery, and anybody selling you certainty about it is selling you something.

And remember this. A tumour does not appear in a day. It takes time to build. So I have no idea how long mine had been there before anybody found it, and neither do you. There are people walking around today with no symptom of any kind who will be gone in four months. We do not know why. Whatever you are blaming yourself for, the clock started long before you were paying attention.

Be still

The first thing you have to do is stand still and look at what you are doing to your own life.

I never did that. Not once, in years. I did not stop moving long enough to look.

Be still, and know that I am God. I am not telling you that you have to believe what I believe. I do believe it, and standing still is what started everything.

If I could go back sixteen years and hand myself one thing, it would not be a supplement. It would be a pen and this instruction: write down everything in your life that is damaging you. Every habit. Every job. Every friendship. Everything that is poisoning your spirit.

Then look at the list and ask yourself honestly.

Do you really think the friend who drains you every week is not draining you? Do you really think three bottles of wine and a packet of cigarettes is not handing the thing in your body an advantage?

Your body is telling you something is wrong. What exactly is your answer going to be?

I wish I had had the discipline sixteen years ago to sit down and ask myself one question. What am I doing against myself, and how much of it can I take away, so that I have the energy to face the thing I am actually facing.

Its name is cancer, with a capital C.

And if I do not want it to take my life, then I had better start taking this seriously and stop letting other people decide for me.

So I am going to write down every single question.

I am going to remove every single person.

I am going to fix every single feeling that is costing me anxiety every day.

The thing I want you to understand about my hand

I said earlier that it is not your fault you got sick, and I meant it. But there is a second thing, and it is not the same thing, and I am going to be hard with myself in front of you now.

Today, thank God, I do not have to deal with cancer. What I have to deal with is a left hand that does not work. It was my dominant hand. It wrote songs and it wrote code.

And I am not paralysed because cancer paralysed me.

I am paralysed because I let other people decide for me. Because I waited to be told what I needed instead of going to find out. And because even when I finally did go and look, I kept handing the decision back to people who were harming me.

Getting the illness was not my fault. What I did with the twelve years after it, that one I own.

That is the whole reason for these three posts. Not the things I do. The things I stopped doing. Because the things I stopped doing are what is keeping me alive.

Five fingers

I have five fingers that live on my dominant hand and do not answer me anymore. They are the ones that used to write, and the ones that used to code.

They have been replaced by a microphone, a dictation tool and artificial intelligence.

I am a software engineer. I have been one for thirty years and I am retired from it now, and I have never in my life been more glad that I am one. Because what I am building with my voice instead of my hand has got better every month for a year, and every time I go online I see somebody who needs exactly that and does not have it.

Cancer did not make me a better person

I have to say this because the internet will not.

Cancer did not make me a better human being. It did not make me kinder or more compassionate. That is a cliché and it is not true, at least not for me.

And it is certainly not the best thing that ever happened to me. I do not understand people who say that. It is not a gift. Nobody would choose it.

I also do not believe that cancer was trying to kill me. I believe cancer is a symptom of something that has gone badly wrong, and that for the ones who happen to be stronger, or luckier, or who get more time, it is an opening. A chance to change things and maybe come out the other side.

That is a much smaller claim than the ones people make. It is the only one I can stand behind.

Where I am standing now

Twenty two months with no evidence of disease.

And yes, I know what somebody is going to say, because a doctor will say it to you too. No evidence of disease only means the machine cannot see anything. It does not prove there is nothing there.

Fine. I am not arguing. I also do not care. I have spent sixteen years being told what my body is going to do, by people who turned out to be wrong.

Here is how wrong. This year, for reasons that belong to the rest of this story, I had to go back and read sixteen years of my own medical records. And in 2024, the doctors giving me radiation were not waiting to see whether it worked. They had already written me off in the file before the treatment began.

Ask yourself how a person is supposed to thrive inside a system that has already decided she is finished.

I am not going to tell you it is finished. It still takes a piece of my energy every single day. What changed is that every day is different now, and that is not a small thing. That is the whole thing.

“You do get out. I am writing to you from the other side of it.”

And I will tell you something I have not told anybody. I am sitting here with a clear scan in my hand and I am still behaving like I never heard those words. I do not want to go back to being the woman I was before cancer. Not for one day.

Almost everything I know, I learned in the two years since my radiation, when I put my head down and actually practised every single thing I had been reading for years. And what I found out is that the answers were already there. They were sitting in front of me. What was missing was anybody to close the distance between the answers and me.

And all of this was one thing. One. There are many more coming, and when you finally see them laid out together you are not going to find my list. You are going to find your own, because they are that simple.

Which is exactly why nobody tells you about them. There is no money in asking somebody to sit down and look honestly at how they are hurting themselves. There is a great deal of money in selling them a supplement, a therapy and a centre to go to.

I am never going to be the woman telling you how many calories she had for breakfast. What I have is sixteen years of this, four of them spent working out what to stop, a body I used as the test subject for every bit of it, and thirty years as an engineer. That is what I am building with.

So let me be exact about what it is, because this matters more to me than anything else I have written here.

It does not promise to cure you. It does not promise to get you out of cancer. I will never say either of those things, not once, and that means if this ever comes back I will not have to go and delete anything, because I never claimed it would not.

What it does is smaller and it is the thing I needed for sixteen years and never got. It puts your own file in front of you, in words you can actually read, before the appointment and not after it. So that when you sit down in that chair you are not sitting there with nothing to say.

Because this is what I want the next person to work out faster than I did. That it is fine to ask for a second opinion. That you are allowed to fire your oncologist and go and find another one. That a doctor who will not involve you in your own treatment can be replaced, like anybody else you are paying.

And that your health does not belong to other people. You are meant to be in the room for it. Not only as the one receiving the information. As the one the result belongs to.

The technology exists now. The experience is here. I am on the other side of the terror, I can regulate myself again, and I have made my peace with God. So I know exactly what this is for.

One post. One video. If it reaches one person on the other side of the world, or one woman a few streets from my house staring at her ceiling at three in the morning with no idea where to begin, then it was worth writing.

3. I stopped sitting in the chair

This one happened a few days ago, so it is fresh.

I sat in front of a doctor who decided she knew better than me. She told me what I needed. She told me how much I was able to walk.

I ended it there. She is not my doctor.

I still wake up every morning with the humility to keep doing the things I have learned, and one of them is this. If you are sitting in front of somebody who is not listening to you, who has decided what is good for you without you in the room, you are allowed to pick up your papers, stand up, say thank you and walk out.

Shop for your doctors the way you now shop for your vegetables. You already know the vegetables should come unprocessed and with as little poison on them as possible. Apply the same standard to the people deciding what happens to your body.

“Why would you put a packet of cigarettes and a bottle of wine into a body that is already sick? For me it is now exactly the same question as: why would I sit in a chair with a doctor who does not want to make me part of my own healing?”

What this post is not

It is not medical advice and it is not a plan. It is not a promise that stopping what I stopped gives you what I got, because I do not know that and neither does anybody else. Talk to your doctor before you change anything.

It is one woman writing down four years so somebody else can read them in an afternoon.

Everything I have, I give the credit to God.

Where I would start, if I were you

This is the thing I promised you at the top, and it is the whole of this post turned into something you can hold.

One page. One question. What am I doing that is hurting my body. Five places to answer it and nothing else on it.

It is what I would hand to myself sixteen years ago if I could reach back there and do it.

“Everything you add is a bet. Everything you take away is one thing less for your body to carry.”

Download it here, print it, and take it to a table with a pen. There is no email box, no name, no form and nothing asking who you are. It is free and it stays on your table.

This week

Wednesday I carry on with the story. I hope you are here.

Friday is 16 October. Four years to the day since the night it ended.

If any of this is landing with you, or you are the one carrying somebody through it, that is all I wanted. There are no cookies here and nothing follows you anywhere. I count how many times this page is opened, so I know whether any of it is being read, and that number is all I will ever know. Who you are, I will never know unless you tell me.

So if you want to stay close, come and find me.

@queendemetria_._ is me, the whole thing, the good days and the ones that are not.
@mynedpath is what I am building.