Olubukola Ayodele, Breast Cancer Lead at University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“I’ve spent years caring for people with cancer, listening to stories that linger long after the clinic visits. Even after watching my own mother undergo treatment, I’m still struck by how hard it is to explain what the journey feels like, maybe because every journey is different. But if I had to describe it, it would go something like this.
Imagine you’re standing at the foot of a mountain. You hear rustling behind you, it’s a lion. You don’t get a chance to think or bargain. You just run. Every step up that mountain burns, but stopping isn’t an option. The fear sits in your throat. You don’t know how long the lion will chase you, only that you must keep climbing.
As you ascend, you notice others on the same mountain being pursued by lions of their own. Some lions appear smaller than yours. A quiet part of you wishes you had one of those. Then you see people crushed by enormous, brutal-looking lions and another feeling rises, relief that yours isn’t like that. Gratitude and guilt sit side by side.
When you finally reach the top, exhausted, desperate for relief, you encounter a bear. You’ve been told the bear is the only thing strong enough to stop the lion. You don’t want to face it but you choose to stand there anyway because it’s the only way forward. As the bear fights the lion, you become caught in the struggle, scratched, shaken and changed.
Eventually, the bear and the lion tumble off the edge of the mountain. People cheer. They tell you how strong you are and that you should be grateful; it’s all over now. But you’re standing there, battered and riddled with anxiety, wondering if the lion is actually gone. You can’t see it but you know the lion is clever. What if it’s waiting somewhere below, gathering strength again?
And then there are the voices you heard during the climb.
“Are you sure it was a lion you saw?”
“My aunt Jane tried this herbal remedy and got rid of the lion.”
Words meant to help, sometimes spoken out of fear or ignorance, but they land like stones in your backpack.
The part many don’t see is the quiet bravery it takes to walk back down that mountain after the fight. The way you look over your shoulder long after everyone else has moved on. The way you try to rebuild a life when you no longer feel like the same person who started the climb.
I think about my patients every day; their strength, their fear, their humour, their heartbreak. I think about my mother. And I think about how easily the world forgets that treatment isn’t just a medical process. It’s a human journey that reshapes people in ways we rarely discuss.
This journey is messy. It’s a mix of fear, HOPE, envy, guilt and determination. It doesn’t follow a neat emotional script and it rarely concludes where outsiders imagine it does. But every person on that mountain is doing the best they can with the lion they’ve been given and that truth deserves space.
To everyone who has run up that mountain, or is running now: I SEE you.”
More posts featuring Olubukola Ayodele on OncoDaily.