Carpenter challenging cancer taboos with poetry

A terminal lung cancer diagnosis took away Paul Stevenson Lothian's career as a carpenter - but left him with something he never anticipated.

After months of struggling to come to terms with the disease following his stage four diagnosis, he discovered poetry helped him find his voice and gave him a new outlook on life.

The grandfather said poetry helped him stop letting "the big C" define who he was and helped him start talking openly about the situation, which he said was too often treated as taboo.

Stevenson Lothian, known as T, from Handsworth, Birmingham, said his diagnosis had "taken away his hammer and saw" but given him "a pen and his voice".

Telling BBC Radio WM that while writing had always been a hobby, it had become much more meaningful, he said: "When you put things on paper and see them in black and white, you kind of understand them.

"Writing about cancer is still a big taboo subject. It should be spoken about like the flu or a cold - it should be an open subject.

"We shouldn't let our diseases control us because we're still us at the end of the day. Just because you hear the words 'the big C', that doesn't mean we turn into the big C."

Poems stayed hidden away in a folder on a shelf for a long time, but he began performing them at open mic nights at The Hive Café in Birmingham's Jewellery Quarter.

"People actually wanted to hear my words," he said. "It's like having a room full of your own personal therapists without having to pay for them because they're willing to listen to your story and talk to you about it afterwards."

The writer said one particular moment helped change his mindset after a period of feeling overwhelmed by his illness.

Deciding to go rollerskating for the first time since his diagnosis, he expected to manage only 10 minutes, but he found himself skating for more than half an hour.

"When I looked at my phone it was 35 minutes later," he said.

"My breathing was amazing. My self-esteem had lifted. That's when I realised cancer wasn't in charge - my mind was."

Since then, he has even given his cancer a nickname "LC" - an abbreviation of lung cancer.

"[LC is] just a squatter inside me," he said. "I'm in charge. As much as it wants me to lie down and feel sorry for myself, it's going to have to do everything I want to do."

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