No One Is Coming

What cancer taught me about time, effort, and getting off the couch

In this week’s essay: a hard truth about time, recovery, and the moment you realise no one is coming. Regret, anger, and procrastination are for the birds.

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No One Is Coming

What cancer taught me about time, effort, and getting off the couch

Before I get to the point of this essay, here’s the setup.

Last May, I was diagnosed with stage three bullshit. Stage three means inoperable, but manageable… for a while. In my case, that “for a while” looks like this: meds for life—check. Surgery a few months in—check. A month of radiotherapy after that—check. And ongoing monitoring for the rest of my days.

Okay. You’re up to speed.

By March 2026—two months after radiotherapy and ten months into treatment—I was officially in recovery mode. I’d been warned that radiotherapy can hit the system as hard as major surgery, and that the side effects often show up weeks later. The main one: fatigue.

I didn’t really know what fatigue was.

Now I do.

A few weeks after finishing treatment, it hit. Hard. Energy became a rare resource — a precious joule ;) —that required careful budgeting and strict policing. Every potential movement underwent a cost/benefit analysis. If I needed to cross from one side of the kitchen to the other to get something, I’d check to see if I could take something with me that belonged over there, hopefully saving me a journey later in the day. If I walked downstairs and realised I’d left something upstairs, I’d have to seriously consider whether I needed it badly enough to justify the climb back up. Even sitting up became a question of necessity, and letting the dog out became an internal negotiation. Everything had a cost, and the cost was high.

It was overwhelmingly incapacitating.

Thankfully, that phase only lasted about a month. After that, things began to shift… slowly. Some days are better than others, but the trend is upward. Energy is returning, bit by bit.

Up until this point, though, I’d adopted a fairly flippant “fuck health” attitude. After a lifetime of doing the “right” things—eating well, staying fit—being handed this diagnosis left me cynical. I should have eaten more ice cream; taken more risks; why am I a pescatarian when I still crave bacon? And so on. I got cancer anyway, so what was the point of all those sacrifices?

Then, last Tuesday, something interesting happened.

I had a check-in call with my radiologist. I mentioned the fatigue and asked about timelines; when I might expect to feel like myself again.

“I still don’t feel like the man I used to be,” I said.

“You’ve had radiotherapy,” he replied. “You’ve had surgery. You’re on strong medication for life. It’s unrealistic to think you’ll return to where you were before.”

That landed.

My wife was understandably a bit bummed after the call. I did what I always do when I don’t know what to do—I took the dog out. The way I see it, dealing with Hounddog’s shit is a decent proxy for dealing with my own.

And somewhere on that walk, something clicked.

Not a slow acceptance but a decision: Whatever recovery I was going to get from time alone, I’d already had it. The rest, if there was any, wasn’t going to arrive passively. It wasn’t going to just float in on the breeze; it had to come from me.

I didn’t announce anything when I got home, but over the next few days, my wife noticed.

“You seem better,” she said.

“I can’t wait any longer,” I told her. “This is it. This is the baseline. If I’m to feel better from here, it comes from me—not time. I’ve had the surgery. I’ve had the radiotherapy. I’ve had the recovery window. I’m on the meds. Waiting for things to improve on their own—or, in time—is a waste of time.”

It is.

Waiting—for energy, for motivation, for the right moment, for things to align—is a comforting idea. It suggests that life will, at some point, present us with a version of itself that’s easier to step into. But that comfort conceals surrender.

If getting what you want depends on some future moment over which you have no control, stop waiting for it.

You want to write a book? Write it.

You want to sing in public? Do it.

If you think you need permission—from publishers, from agents, from anyone—think again: You don’t. And if you think your ambitions are on the hunt to find you, you’re mistaken.

Yesterday is old news, and tomorrow is a story we tell ourselves: a projection that offers empty promises with no accountability. And if today is anything to go by, tomorrow rarely delivers exactly what yesterday promised it would.

That’s not pessimism; it’s reality.

What does work—I now understand—is being process-driven; not waiting for a better day but making this one count; however small that looks.

Now I understand why people emerge out of serious illness and start doing things that seem extreme—running marathons, climbing mountains, changing their lives overnight. It’s not because they’ve been magically transformed; it’s because they’ve realised something simple: no one is coming to do these things for them. No amount of time will get them off the couch without their eventually having to make the effort themselves anyway. So, what are they waiting for?

It’s on them.

And the same applies to the rest of us.

If I can make it up the stairs one more time today than I did yesterday, that’s progress. If I can do one more thing—however small—that I would have talked myself out of last week, that’s progress.

Stack enough of those days together, and something significant happens. And when this practice is habituated, that's when marathons are run, and mountains are climbed.

So, here’s the reframing:

I don’t hope tomorrow will be better than today, because I have no control over tomorrow.

Instead, I take ownership of making today better than yesterday, because today is the only day I can control, so what am I waiting for?

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