SHE’LL BE RIGHT, MATE | Dennis Freire
I arrived at the cancer hospital late afternoon, the December light already draining out of the sky.
After surgery, the cancer remained. There was no path forward that did not involve more treatment.
The building held the particular quiet of late afternoon—footsteps softened, conversations lowered, as if the day itself were tiring.
By 4:40 p.m., I was in radiation vault #1, sealed behind a door thick enough to make the room feel final. Two hours, they told me. One hour on the left lung, inferior; one on the para-aortic lymph nodes. SBRT—the language of precision, of targeting, words implying control.
They lowered me into the mold.
A rigid cast shaped to my body with an exactness that allowed no argument. The day before, foam had been pressed around me, air drawn out until it hardened into my outline. Now I slid into that same impression, a negative of myself waiting to be filled. My arms were pinned straight at my sides, hands turned inward against my hips. From navel to ankle, vacuum-sealed plastic tightened again, drawing out the last pockets of air until there was no space left to shift or adjust.
“Don’t move,” someone said, in the brisk, well-used tone of a person who had done this many times and still meant to be kind.
As if I could.
The room dimmed as the machine began its slow choreography. It circled me in deliberate arcs, pausing, recalibrating, emitting a low hum I could feel more than hear. There were no windows. No clock. Only the ceiling above me—a grid of pale tiles with a faint seam running diagonally across one panel.
I fixed my eyes there.
Time did not pass so much as accumulate. Minutes thickened, stretched, then collapsed inward. I tried to count my breaths, but even breathing became unreliable—too shallow, too irregular. My body receded in sections. First my legs, then my arms, then the sense that I could not escape. I became something held in place. Measured. Mapped.
There is a vulnerability in being held still like that. Not the chosen stillness of rest or meditation, but the kind imposed, necessary, nonnegotiable. To heal, I had to submit to a version of myself unable to respond.
At some point, I stopped trying to track time.
When it ended, it ended abruptly. The machine stilled. The lights brightened. Hands came to me—efficient, well-used—releasing the seals and helping me out of the mold as if I were something fragile but familiar.
“Take your time,” they said.
But time had already left me.
When I stood, the floor shifted sharply to the left. Or I did. It was hard to tell. My body felt misaligned, as though my center of gravity had been moved without my consent.
The technicians were ready for this. Hands at my elbows, steadying. Voices low, reassuring. They guided me down the hallway, past doors and carts and the machinery of care, into an exam room.
The nausea came without warning.
It rose fast, absolute, leaving no space for negotiation. I tried to turn, to angle myself away from the table, but my body lagged behind the intention. There was a split second where I understood what was about to happen and could do nothing to stop it.
Then I was sick.
On myself. On the table. On the clean, sterile surfaces of the room.
The smell arrived immediately—acidic, unmistakable. It cut through everything: the antiseptic air, the low hum of fluorescent lights, the quiet professionalism of the space. My eyes watered. My body folded in on itself, contracting around the thing it could not contain.
Paper towels appeared. Then more. Gloved hands moved quickly. Someone said my name. Someone else said, “It’s okay.” The words were efficient, but not unkind.
What I remember most is the soft, repetitive sound of wiping.
There is a particular kind of sorrow in being witnessed at your most uncontained.
It was acute—not merely the physical loss of control, but the exposure of it. To be seen not as a patient managing an illness, but as a body overtaken by it.
There was no distance left to maintain.
In that moment, dignity rearranged itself. It was no longer about composure or control. It was something quieter: the willingness to remain.
They cleaned me, and the table, and the room. The evidence of the moment disappeared quickly, as if it had never fully belonged there. I was taken to the emergency department for fluids and anti-nausea medication.
Only the sensation lingered—the hollowed-out feeling, the tremor in my hands, the faint metallic taste at the back of my throat.
They had warned me about dizziness, nausea and fatigue. My body was simply confirming the terms.
Back at the hotel, I went straight to bed. I slept from 7:30 p.m. until 6:30 the next morning, as if pulled under by deep tides. When I woke, it took a few moments to remember where I was, and why.
My body felt both heavy and insubstantial, as though it might drift if I didn’t anchor it.
I left the room, drawn by the prospect of movement, or at least a change of air. In the lobby, I saw a man I’d spoken to earlier.
An Australian, he said—visiting his son. Broad-shouldered, his face marked by time and weather, his nose set slightly askew from some long-ago break. There was an ease to him, and a directness that suggested he would say things as they were.
He looked at me—not staring. Assessing.
“You know cancer treatment is a positive, don’t you?” he said.
It wasn’t a question so much as a statement waiting for agreement.
I hesitated. The word positive caught somewhere between my body and my mind.
“Yes,” I said, finally. Then, correcting myself: “No. No, you’re right. It is.”
He nodded once, as if it were settled.
“Right-o,” he said. “She’ll be right, mate.”
There it was: a confidence bordering on defiance. Not denial—he didn’t seem like a man who denied reality—but a refusal to let it have the final word.
I carried the line with me the rest of the day.
The treatment table required my stillness—submission to precision, to immobility, to being acted upon. The body I brought to it was one I could not fully trust: prone to sudden revolt, to nausea, to collapse.
What he offered was not control, not certainty, but a way of standing in it.
She’ll be right.
Not she is right. Not she will be easy. But she’ll be right—as if rightness could emerge, eventually, from within the mess of it.
I thought back to the exam room, to the moment my body had undone itself in front of strangers, in front of the machinery designed to save me. There had been nothing “right” about it. Nothing orderly, nothing contained.
And yet I was still there.
The room had received me, even then.
In the days that followed, I returned to the vault again and again, fitting myself into the negative space, offering my body to its measured arcs and unseen beams. Each time, the same instructions. The same stillness. The same quiet negotiation between what I could endure and what was required.
I never grew comfortable there. But comfort was not the point.
What mattered was the holding—the mold, the table, the hands that steadied me when I stood, the presence that did not leave when I came undone.
She’ll be right, mate.
Dennis Freire has Stage IV cancer and participates in a Phase 3 clinical trial requiring monthly tests at Huntsman Cancer Institute. Freire’s prose piece “A Quiet Kind of Guts” was published by Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine. He attends Huntsman’s Wellness and Integrative Health Center’s medical writing and literature programs led by its writer-in-residence Susan Samples. His poem “You’re Here Again” appears in the Spring-Summer 2026 Intima.