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Radiotherapy

It’s not the drama people imagine.
No sirens, no sudden collapse.
Just a quiet, daily reshaping of life
around a clock that isn’t yours anymore.

Appointments shift like sand.
Morning becomes afternoon,
afternoon becomes waiting,
and everything else gets pushed aside
as if it never mattered much to begin with.

It’s not just you carrying it.
There’s another set of hands in the background,
steady, patient, learning the routine,
helping you prepare for something
neither of you ever planned to understand.

The table is harder than it looks.
Cold in a way that seeps through bone.
Getting up, getting down
becomes its own small battle,
one you don’t mention
because it sounds trivial
until you’re the one doing it.

Then comes the slow burn.
Not fire, not pain you can point to,
just a tenderness that grows quietly,
like something unfolding where it shouldn’t.
You notice it more each day,
even when you try not to.

And the tiredness.
Not the kind that sleep fixes.
This is heavier.
It sits in your limbs,
follows you from room to room,
waits for you at the top of the stairs
like an old debt that won’t clear.

They call it treatment.
And it is.
But it’s also endurance.
Routine.
Adjustment.

A kind of strength
that doesn’t look like strength at all.