Warren P’s story

Living With the Quiet Passenger: What Cancer Taught Me About Time

In 2017, I was working in Tokyo when a routine company health check picked up blood in my stool. I didn’t think much of it as I had no other symptoms – but booked a colonoscopy to be on the safe side which revealed a tumour the size of a large grape. I was 39.

Two weeks later – a blur of fear, silence, and steeling myself – I had bowel surgery and spent six months with a colostomy bag. My doctor called it ‘early stage and curable,’ pending some ‘mop-up’ chemo. But cancer doesn’t always follow protocol.

Unseen, it had already slipped into my bloodstream and nervous system, and not long after, tumours showed up in my liver and lungs. The scan report mentioned innumerable lesions.’ I kept staring at those words. How can something be innumerable on an image? Couldn’t someone sit down and count them? Or maybe they did – and decided I didn’t need to know the number.

Fast forward six years and nearly 200 rounds of chemo later, in March I was told there were no standard treatments left. The cancer remains in my lungs, but my liver is clear. I know I could be nearing the end. That’s confronting. But it’s also clarifying.

Time feels different now – less like a stretch of road, more like a series of small rooms you pass through, one by one. I live more in moments than in plans. A coffee in the sun. Walking through the park, where the city quiets down under rows of ancient trees. The familiar comfort of routine. These things carry more weight now.

Through it all, my partner and my ten-year-old miniature pinscher – high-strung, over-attentive, but despite that, always great company – have been there.

And I’m still here. Clinical trial options remain – and there are some promising ones on the horizon. Hope remains too. I still work. I volunteer. I play squash (badly, but enthusiastically – my face turns crimson after two rallies). I still want to travel – float down the full length of the Danube, visit friends in Japan and Europe. See Vietnam again.

You carry on. Because cancer teaches you to hold contradiction: hope and grief, strength and surrender. That’s what it means to live with cancer. It doesn’t define me – but it’s there. A quiet passenger. Always just outside my line of sight.

My one piece of advice:

Don’t wait for things to be ‘okay’ again before you start living. There’s no perfect moment—only the one you’re in. The key is learning to live in the in-between: where grief and joy, fear and hope, can all sit side by side. Life doesn’t stop for cancer, and neither should you.