“I miss myself.” Three words. Dr Shibani Ray-Mazumder hears them from people who come to her once cancer treatment is over, and when she hears them, she pays attention.

I went into this conversation with the word “broken”. She put me right, politely. Not broken. Lost, more like. The person who was the manager, the one everyone came to for advice, is now second-guessing decisions they’d once have made before the kettle boiled.

Dr Shibani is a cancer psychologist based in California. She works mostly with professional women on life and work after treatment. We talk about the moment the bell rings, or not, and everyone says congratulations, and you walk out of the building wondering where the team went.

We talk about the 3am wake-up, and why trying to solve your whole life at that hour is the wrong job for that hour. We talk about why “You’re back to normal” might be the least helpful thing anyone can say, and whether you’re allowed to lose your rag over a broken dishwasher when you’re supposed to be grateful to be alive. (You are, by the way, cancer or not.)

Then there’s the question I ask pretty regularly to anyone, in every country. Why does a system that spends a fortune getting you through treatment have so little to offer once you’re out the other side? Dr Shibani's answer is pretty straightforward. It's sits with profit.

If any of this sounds like your 3am, or like someone you love, send it to one person. Just the one who needs it.

In this episode 00:54 “I miss myself” 03:04 When the decisive one starts second-guessing 05:40 The bell rings… so where’s the team? 07:23 The 3am wake-up, and what to actually do with it 09:01 “You’re back to normal” 10:04 Am I still capable of this job? 13:27 Is it OK to let friends go? 15:44 Grateful, and furious at the dishwasher 17:13 Survivor’s guilt 18:39 Why is there no after-treatment system? 21:25 Going back to work isn’t the finish line 23:12 Where’s the money in aftercare? 24:07 Three things to remember

Is there one thing you wish someone had told you when treatment ended? I’d genuinely like to hear it: cancercandoone@gmail.com

Dr Shibani Ray-Mazumder, PhD, The Cancer Psychologist: https://www.thecancerpsychologist.com/ Read more on Substack: https://substack.com/@cancercandoone

CancerCanDoOne is free and always will be. It’s made by me and a microphone, and it travels from hand to hand and ear to ear.

A year and a half ago I recorded a conversation with Dale Atkinson. I recorded a conversation with Dale Atkinson. He could manage three or four words before he had to stop and find his breath. Days after the recording the conversation around him was about palliative wards and choosing a hospice bed.

And yet two years on and he’s in front of me now, on a screen, full of beans. I could see him, but you can't on this audio only podcast.

He’s careful about what that does and doesn’t mean, more careful than most people would be in his position when it comes to detailing the treatment path he's taken, and we get into all of it — what he did, what it cost him, which incidentally was hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the death threats he had from both directions for doing it.

What frightens him now is November.

That’s when his last round of immunotherapy finishes and he’s released from the standard of care. He’s spent months working with a therapist to get ready for it, because he already knows what’s on the other side. Nobody to ring at two in the morning when something doesn’t feel right. He calls it a void, and says there are so many people screaming into it now that somebody has to do something.

Dale is inoperable and incurable. He’ll never ring the bell.

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Dale first sat down with me in April 2025, days before he went onto a palliative ward. That conversation is here: https://www.cancercandoonepodcast.co.uk/e/dales-life-and-family-brutally-changed-by-cancer-in-weeks-twice/

Most of us assume, without really thinking about it, that the cancer advice we're given was worked out by studying people like us. The age you get called for screening, maybe the drug you're offered. Somebody did the research, and this is what it found. Win.

Dr Olubukola Ayodele is a consultant medical oncologist specialising in breast cancer at University Hospitals of Leicester, and head of the Breast Cancer Clinical Trials Unit at the Leicester Cancer Research Centre. She spends a good deal of her time asking who was actually in that research. And it's not a comfortable answer.

Because the trials, the genetics, the screening thresholds and the photographs in the textbooks were largely built around one population. If you weren't in it, like black and other under represented communities, the answer you're being handed was worked out on somebody else.

Your community, she says, was simply not taken into account.

She talks here about a woman still waiting, three years on, for a screening letter that never came. About support groups where the jokes don't land, because it's not your culture so people quietly stop going.

About being told in community halls that people had assumed cancer was a white person's problem, because that's what all the pictures showed. That black community didn't see themselves in the photos.

This is #CancerCanDoOne and Dr Ayodele talks now to Mike Kinnaird about what's gone so wrong, asks why cancer data is not taking all communities into account, and ultimately, who is accountable? Or not.