“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.

It's got that reputation hasn't it? Switzerland runs like clockwork. Gold standard everything that leaves the rest of us, well, runners-up.

I've spoken now to so many people in so many different countries who all say post cancer treatment is basically a shambles. Country after country - the support that was your cancer patient life, gone in an instant. Yep. Gone. End. You fall off a cliff.

So this time I spoke to Catherine Schopfer and to quote her LinkedIn page "Cancer Coach | Advocate | Speaker | Helping individuals, caregivers & organisations navigate cancer with multilingual coaching, training & human-centred partnerships"

Not only has Catherine been a cancer coach for many years - that happened by chance - she did have breast cancer too. So if anyone can tell us how amazing state post cancer treatment can be, in what must be the perfect system it'll be Catherine.

And as I discovered, and you're about to hear, it's both a yes and a really big, But...

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Search for Catherine here.

https://onlinecancercoach.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/catherine-schopfer-cancer-coach/

And remember to connect with Mike at LinkedIn. He'll like that.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikekinnaird/

Toby Freeman founded the Robin Cancer Trust at 22 after losing his brother Rob to testicular cancer. Rob was 24, fit, healthy, and had been to the doctors multiple times. Sadly no-one connected the dots until it was too late.

What followed was fourteen years of talking — loudly, honestly, sometimes in a giant testicle costume — about the things young people aren't told and the conversations that don't happen. Fertility. Financial toxicity. The leaflet handed over when there's no time for anything else. And how leaflets are almost a guaranteed failure if you're trying to message young people - unless you're creative. The postcode lottery that determines whether a young person gets the right support at the worst moment of their life.

Toby pushed back on me when I said awareness was a waste of time. And yes, he was absolutely right to. But what he said next - that's the thing worth hearing.

This is Episode 50 of #CancerCanDoOne.

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How to contact Toby and find out more about support for young people.

• Website: www.therobincancertrust.org
• Instagram: @rctcharity

• Instagram: @tobytalksballs
• LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tobyfreeman

There's a side effect of cancer treatment that affects millions of people every year. It's permanent. It's devastating. And many patients, it seems, aren't told about it before treatment begins.

I had no idea this was happening. None. And I've been asking questions about cancer care for long enough that I should probably have known.

Anna Kirton is a Health Coach and Hearing Loss Advocate. She was born profoundly deaf in one ear. She knows what it means to navigate a world that wasn't designed with you in mind. But it was an oncologist's offhand question last year — do you realise some cancer patients lose their hearing due to chemotherapy — that stopped her cold.

More than 50% of cancer patients undergoing chemotherapy experience hearing damage. Around 4 million people worldwide every year. Some caused by platinum-based drugs routinely used for ovarian, lung, bladder and head and neck cancers. Permanent. Often gradual enough that patients don't notice until it's already significant. And when treatment ends and they raise it — they're referred to an audiologist, fitted with a hearing aid, and told to get on with it.

"Survival or deafness? Pretty much", says Anna. That's the choice.

We talk about what that actually means for a real person going back to work, rebuilding relationships, working out who they are after cancer. Already carrying the weight of having been a patient. Now losing their hearing on top of it. Without warning. Without preparation. Without support.

Anna lost her first husband to cancer. She knows this world from more than one angle. I suspect she wishes she didn't...

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The following is a full transcript of this episode for anyone who is deaf, hard of hearing, or who prefers to read.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1puY4Ilkjq_7s_cwfFE9LgUxTUoBBdDCUbh6F5UrzEQ0/edit?usp=sharing

Anna would really like to hear from anyone affected by deafness following cancer treatment to assist both her and her collegues greater understabding of the issue and support needed.

Contact her on LinkedIn

Her website: Think Health Coaching

Dr Liz O'Riordan is a consultant breast surgeon who got breast cancer. Three times. She knows the system from both sides of the table — the clinician giving the diagnosis in a 10 minute appointment, and the patient navigating what comes after.

She's also not afraid to push back.

In this conversation Liz challenges some of the assumptions that run through everything I do. She defends the National Health Service in the UK. She questions whether the gap people describe after treatment is as simple as I sometimes make it sound. And she asks me directly — what gap are you actually trying to close?

I didn't have a clean answer. Which turned out to be the most interesting part of the conversation.

We also talk about why awareness campaigns raise money but don't always change behaviour. Why a 10 minute appointment to tell someone they have cancer is both necessary and completely inadequate.

Why digital signposting is a partial answer to a much bigger question. Why rural communities, ethnic minorities and people in deprivation face a completely different version of the cancer system to everyone else. And why the moment treatment ends and the appointments stop is — for many people — the moment the real fear begins.

Liz doesn't sugarcoat things. She doesn't agree with everything I think. And that's exactly why this conversation matters. No easy answers...

We've known smoking causes cancer for 70 years. People still smoke. We are "cancer aware." So when did it all just become a noise? We know what cancer patients need after treatment ends. We don't fund it.

So what's the point of awareness?

Dr. Hugo De La Pena is a consultant medical oncologist in Southampton who's made unusual choices. He works full-time NHS in the UK with no private practice - refusing to participate in the two-tier system even though it costs him personally. He just believes it's the right thing to do.

He sees patients who've smoked for years despite knowing the risks. Young people with melanoma who were aware, but were sure it couldn't happen to them. In this conversation, we talk about awareness at every level. A System that's aware but refuses to fund what it can't photograph.

Personal awareness: Why people smoke despite knowing it kills them. Why awareness alone doesn't change behavior. Whether awareness without power to act becomes its own kind of harm.

Policy awareness: The UK national cancer plans acknowledges psychological support is "devastating and long-lasting" in its absence. Then funds it at £0. What does it mean to be aware of what's needed but not resource it?

Global awareness: We know 38% of cancers are preventable. We're aware climate change increases cancer rates. We're knowingly creating future cancer patients. What does that say about us? This isn't comfortable listening.

We ask: If awareness doesn't lead to change, what does? Is awareness its own industry now - something we produce and consume without expecting it to go anywhere? Does awareness let comfortable people feel like they're helping while never experiencing consequences of nothing changing?

And the question we can't escape: Can you mandate a mindset shift?

New regulations say clinical trials should be "participant-centered." The new UK cancer plan says people should be "living well with cancer." We've known for decades what needs to change. So why doesn't it?

24 minutes. One oncologist. A lot of uncomfortable questions. And no easy answers.

If you know someone who needs to hear this, then please share now and keep the cancer conversation moving in the right way.