It's fine. I'm fine. Everything's fine.

I survived cancer.

For a long time, I thought that was supposed to be the ending. The hard part over. The point where life simply carried on again, only with a little more gratitude and a slightly different perspective.

But the truth is, the aftermath of survival has shaped me in ways I’m still trying to untangle.

I find myself looking at life now and wondering what it was all for: the fear, the pain, the loss. Because although I made it through, others didn’t. People I cared about deeply, and people who, in my eyes, would have done far more with the life they were given than I ever have with mine.

Of course, when I take a step back, I can see all the wonderful things I have in front of me. I know I have my health, my husband, and two wonderful little furballs to keep me happy. I also have a roof over my head and a family I’d be lost without.

Two years post-treatment, I found strength and confidence in gaining my Masters, and the following year, I became part of a board designed to champion young people who will one day experience the same cruel story I did, helping to ensure they have the care and support they need to get through it.

I also had the luck of finding a job at a time when the world was still recovering from COVID, one I absolutely adored, and somewhere I genuinely felt like I was beginning to thrive.

But even then, and even now, hidden behind the smiles and false reassurances that everything is fine, part of me is still living in the trauma, tangled in the memories, the emotions, and the fear that this disease might still take me one day.

Harder still, there’s an unknown version of my life I’m not quite sure how to face yet: the possibility that I’ll never be a mum.

I did see a fertility doctor once. They were sympathetic and optimistic they could help, but there was one hurdle standing in the way first: I needed to lose weight.

And it’s true, I’ve put on a lot of weight in the years that have passed, and I absolutely hate it. But somehow, I’ve never been able to get rid of it. In fact, it has stayed almost exactly the same as it was when I sat in that appointment room nearly four years ago.

Am I not trying hard enough? Do I not want this as much as I thought?

These are the questions I ask myself daily, standing in front of the mirror critiquing every stretch mark and exaggerated curve of my body, assessing one angle and then the next. Some days I avoid photos altogether because I no longer recognise the person looking back at me.

Unfortunately, the answers never seem to come, and instead, the questions just sit there, waiting to resurface the next time I find myself face to face with my own reflection.

But the thing is, what if I do find a solution to stop my body changing further? What if I manage to lose the weight? Then what happens? More uncertainty? More challenges? More clinical processes and procedures? Because becoming a mum means IVF. It means putting my body through more pain and potential heartache.

And while I want to believe there’s hope, life hasn’t exactly played fair so far.

In fact, as recently as two months ago, I was made redundant from a job I loved, sidelined by AI and suddenly finding myself back at square one, searching for work in an economy that feels like it’s crumbling around us. And all the while, I’m watching people my age move forward into the life I always thought I’d have: getting pregnant, buying homes, building futures, while mine feels like it’s drifting further and further away from me.

And of course, not all of this is because of cancer. I know that. Life doesn’t suddenly become easy just because you survive something hard. 

Redundancy happens. People struggle. Plans change.

But ever since cancer, every setback seems to carry an extra weight, because it no longer feels like just one difficult thing in isolation. Instead, it becomes part of a much bigger story I’m constantly trying to make sense of.

Losing my job didn’t just feel like losing a job. It felt like losing stability, identity, purpose, and another version of the future I thought I was finally beginning to rebuild for myself after everything that had already happened.

And I think that’s the difficult thing about grief once it’s rooted itself so deeply within you: every new disappointment somehow becomes tangled up with all the others, until eventually they stop feeling like separate entities.

That’s what cancer has become for me. Not just an experience I went through, but the place my mind returns to when I’m angry with the world, when I feel exhausted and broken by everything life has thrown at me and the people I love. It’s where I go when I find myself asking: what next? What else is there to take?

Because the truth is, cancer didn’t simply interrupt my life for a period of time and then leave. It changed the way I see myself, the way I experience uncertainty, and the way I imagine the future. It turned things I once took for granted into question marks, and left me constantly trying to reconcile the life I thought I would have with the one I’m actually living now.

And although none of us are ever certain of what the future holds, we all carry hopes, expectations, and cherished ideas of what we thought our lives might look like, which I think is why I find myself still caught somewhere in the middle of it all, suspended between who I was, who I thought I’d become, and whoever I’m still trying to figure out how to be.

I think that’s why life after cancer can feel so lonely at times, because from the outside, survival is often treated like the happy ending. The finish line. The part where you’re expected to move on and feel grateful to still be here.

But the reality is so many are left trying to rebuild themselves while carrying a grief they don’t quite know how to explain.

Grief for a body that's changed, a future that's shifted, and years that simply disappeared.

And while there’s something deeply sad about knowing how many people quietly carry this kind of grief, there’s also something about that shared understanding that softens the loneliness of it all for those living through it.

And maybe that’s the part of cancer we don’t talk about enough: the aftermath, the identity loss, the grief that lingers long after treatment ends. Because surviving and healing are not always the same thing, and no one should have to feel alone in that.