They just dust their hands of you — Dale Atkinson

A year and a half ago I recorded a conversation with Dale Atkinson. I recorded a conversation with Dale Atkinson. He could manage three or four words before he had to stop and find his breath. Days after the recording the conversation around him was about palliative wards and choosing a hospice bed.

And yet two years on and he’s in front of me now, on a screen, full of beans.  I could see him, but you can't on this audio only podcast.

He’s careful about what that does and doesn’t mean, more careful than most people would be in his position when it comes to detailing the treatment path he's taken, and we get into all of it — what he did, what it cost him, which incidentally was hundreds of thousands of pounds, and the death threats he had from both directions for doing it.

What frightens him now is November.

That’s when his last round of immunotherapy finishes and he’s released from the standard of care. He’s spent months working with a therapist to get ready for it, because he already knows what’s on the other side. Nobody to ring at two in the morning when something doesn’t feel right. He calls it a void, and says there are so many people screaming into it now that somebody has to do something.

Dale is inoperable and incurable. He’ll never ring the bell.

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Dale first sat down with me in April 2025, days before he went onto a palliative ward. That conversation is here: https://www.cancercandoonepodcast.co.uk/e/dales-life-and-family-brutally-changed-by-cancer-in-weeks-twice/