A Prayer for Someone Starting Chemotherapy Treatment

Maybe the first infusion is this morning, and you are sitting in the waiting room already, phone in hand, looking for words. Maybe the port went in yesterday and the bruise from it hasn't come up yet. Maybe you are not the one having treatment at all, but you love someone who is, and you want to pray for them and don't know where to start. Here is a full prayer you can use as it is, and then a look at what each part is doing, so that next time you can write your own.

The prayer, in full

God, we bring you [name] today. The chair is real, the bag on the pole is real, the hours ahead are real. We are not going to pretend this is small. We ask for the nurses' hands to be steady and their attention sharp. We ask for the doctors to know what they are doing, and for the medicine to be given rightly. We ask for [name]'s body to bear what it has to bear today, and for rest to come when the day is done. We ask for the people sitting with them in this room, and for the people who could not be here but are thinking of them anyway. We do not know what the coming months will hold. We ask you to be present in the waiting room, in the nausea, in the ordinary Tuesday afternoons this treatment is about to fill. Hold [name] the way you hold what you have made. Do not let them carry this alone. Amen.

Pray it exactly like that, with the name filled in, or use it as a shape for your own words. Either way is fine.

Why it starts by naming the day

The prayer does not open with theology. It opens with the chair, the bag on the pole, the hours ahead. That is deliberate. When someone is starting chemotherapy, the day itself is enormous, and a prayer that skips past it to bigger, vaguer things can feel like it is talking over the person's head rather than into their actual Tuesday.

The psalms do this constantly. Psalm 31 does not begin with abstraction either.

Have mercy on me, LORD, for I am in distress. My eye, my soul, and my body waste away with grief. For my life is spent with sorrow, my years with sighing. My strength fails because of my iniquity. My bones are wasted away.

Psalm 31:9-16

That psalm was written by someone under real pressure, surrounded by people who had already written him off, "forgotten from their hearts like a dead man." It names the body's failing plainly, then turns: "But I trust in you, LORD. I said, 'You are my God. My times are in your hand.'" The turn only works because the naming came first. If you skip the naming, the trust sounds hollow. So when you write your own prayer, start with what is actually happening. The infusion, the sickness bag they were given on the way out, the fact that they haven't slept. Say it plainly before you ask for anything.