Eff Cancer: Recent Episodes
Eff Cancer
Tom Riley is dying from cancer. But that isn’t stopping him from starting a kickass podcast. Eff Cancer is a collection of dialogues with people navigating serious illness from every direction. Episodes feature deep, direct conversations with Tom’s family, other cancer patients, nurses and doctors who work with serious illness, and the people trying to advance and improve healthcare.
This show explores life, death, helping people, dealing with fear, coping with loss, and more. But these won't be downer discussions. They’ll be filled with laughter as well as honest explorations about what it means to live with serious illness. In Tom’s case that's almost always with humor.
None of us know when our final moment will come. So in the meantime, let’s focus instead on the beauty of now.
Eff Cancer. But embrace life. And, as we sign off every episode:
“Remember I love you.” (RILY)
A year ago today on July 3, 2020, Tom Riley — friend, father, husband, brother, son, cousin — was diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. And on June 5, 2021, Tom Riley — guitarist, writer, poet, podcaster, cancer advocate, observer of humanity, orator, beloved — passed away. He was 54.
In a time like this, words can feel thin, not enough somehow. So instead of a lot of words, this episode contains just a few in the way of a short poem.
When we first started this podcast, Tom sent this message:
“My only goal is to share my story and perspective, and to capture other people’s stories in a way that could be helpful to others. That’s my motivation.
This is my third act. I want it to be meaningful. And I want it to be fun.”
It was Tom, it was. And it will be. Thank you. And remember, I love you.
The middle place. Many of us have been there. Maybe even all of us have been there at one time or another. It’s not a comfortable place. It’s the in-between. The feeling of dread in your gut. In episode 3, Tom talks about his own middle place, which came unexpectedly, in the form of receiving an extra week between chemo treatments. It was the gift of extra time. But what’s the good of time, if you’re unsure how to spend it? If you can feel it slipping away even as you try harder and harder to hold on.
And then, just as suddenly as it came, it was gone. And now, a new, very unexpected feeling.The feeling of looking backwards at the middle place. And longing for it.
Memory is a funny thing. It’s tied to those kind of complicated, often not totally reliable, narratives that run on an endless loop through our brains. The more we tell ourselves the story we want to believe about an event, the more that story becomes the event, regardless of objective reality.
The only catch? When there happen to be other people around who also lived that event and remember it a little differently. In Episode 1, Tom walked us through the day before and after he found out he had terminal cancer. On today’s show, his oldest daughter Stephanie walks us through that same timeline…only, you know, the way she remembers it.
What does it feel like to discover you have stage 4 pancreatic cancer? And how do you tell others? Tom walks us through the day he received a terminal diagnosis and, additionally, the moment he had to say the words, “I have pancreatic cancer,” to his family. We also speak with a longtime friend of Tom's about hospice, the importance of having the right cancer team, and how critical it is to reach out to someone going through a crisis.
Tom Riley is living with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. But that's not going to stop him from creating a podcast exploring life, death, dealing with fear, coping with loss, and more. In this introduction to Tom, we learn about where he’s at health-wise: what his cancer levels are like, what he’s eating (or not eating) lately, and most importantly: how he’s feeling.
If you have a question or suggestion for a show topic, send us an email at hello@effcancer.com. We’d love to hear from you.