Douglas Flora, Executive Medical Director of Yung Family Cancer Center at St. Elizabeth Healthcare, President-Elect of the Association of Cancer Care Centers, and Editor in Chief of AI in Precision Oncology, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“Someone You Know Is Fighting a Battle You Can’t See
This has been my favorite image of 2025. I shared it months ago in a piece about scanxiety—that particular dread cancer patients feel before scans. But as we move into 2026, I find myself returning to it for different reasons.
Each person framed in their own circle. Each one the main character of their own story. Each carrying something invisible to everyone else on that beach.
One just got a diagnosis that split time into before and after. Another is watching a parent disappear into Alzheimer’s—grieving someone who’s still breathing but already gone. There’s someone managing addiction, either their own or belonging to someone they love more than their own peace of mind. Someone trying to salvage a marriage. A parent whose child’s needs are both beautiful and relentless in ways no one warned them about. Someone calculating whether medication or groceries matter more this month.
They all showed up anyway.
Your colleague who’s been distant lately. The fussy cashier. The driver who cut you off. The friend who cancelled again. We move through our days surrounded by people carrying weights we can’t see, most of them managing it with a grace that would devastate us if we knew the details.
Kindness, then, becomes less about virtue and more about probability. The person struggling isn’t the exception—they’re everywhere.
Cancer patients, I’m talking especially to you now. The word ‘oncology’ traces back to the Greek word, Onkos: which literally means burden. The etymology itself argues against isolation. Your medical team, your family, the friends who keep texting—we’re not asking to fix this for you. We’re asking to stand in it with you. The anxiety before scans, the fear that wakes you at 3 AM, the exhaustion of pretending you’re fine when you’re not. Let us carry what we can. The surprising thing about sharing pain isn’t that it disappears. It’s that it becomes more bearable when it’s not yours alone.
For everyone else: someone needs you to cross into their circle. You might already know who. That instinct you’ve been ignoring about your sister, your neighbor, your old friend—trust it. The text you’ve been meaning to send, the visit you’ve been putting off, the question you’re afraid to ask because the answer might be hard to hear. Ask anyway. Show up anyway. Presence matters more than solutions. Sometimes the most powerful thing we offer is simply refusing to let someone suffer alone.
These circles in the photograph—they look like boundaries, but they could just as easily be invitations.
When we step into each other’s lives, when we share what’s heavy, when we practice the radical act of seeing each other clearly, something shifts. The battles don’t end. But the loneliness does. The isolation fractures. The pain becomes something we carry together, distributed across many hands instead of crushing a single pair of shoulders.
None of us were meant to do this alone.”
More posts featuring Douglas Flora.