Before cancer, you’re sailing along in generally fair weather. You’re travelling in one direction. You have maps, navigation aids and provisions. You might even be part of a flotilla – you and some other boats, sailing in the same direction at the same speed. Life is fine, good even.

Then a massive storm hits – cancer.

Your boat is seriously damaged. Maybe parts of it are lost or broken. Your maps and provisions are swept overboard. In the eye of the storm, you lose all sense of direction. Your main terror is that the boat will sink.

Then your cancer care team appear. They are your lifeboat; your rescuers. They attach ropes, patch your boat up and keep it afloat; they come alongside you, and take control of the steering and direction. Slowly, they tow you back to port. Sometimes this journey towards the port is even stormier than the catastrophe itself. But you know you are not alone – you have the lifeboat staff, you make a good team.

As the lifeboat tows your boat back to port you see friends and family on the shore waving and cheering. They are so relieved to have you back.

But then your boat just stops.

You are not quite back in port. You can see the lights, and your happy loved ones. But you’re moored just outside the mouth of the harbour. Then your lifeboat, and its team, goes. They drop the ropes into the water and sail away.

You might think: I can get back to port on my own. You’ve been there before, after all. And you can see it, right there, quite close. But it all feels different now. Your boat is still damaged. You need time for repairs. You need to get a new map and provisions. And you keep looking at the sky – is the storm coming back? You listen constantly, obsessively, to the weather forecast – you hear reports of hurricanes. They may be far away, but you can’t stop yourself from feeling that they are coming for you.

This boat analogy may seem long-winded, but it accurately describes what surviving cancer can feel like – does feel like – for many people.