Over the years I’ve had several things go wrong with me, along with the corresponding “medical” advice. Getting injured playing football or cricket: “Run it off, it’s just a knock.” I’ve been down with a dreadful case of man ’flu on many occasions: “Get on with it, it’s just a cold.” And now I’m used to thinking that way, Pavlovian Conditioning I suppose: “Get on with it, it’s just cancer.” Easier said than done, but a philosophy I try to follow.
To be fair, this is not by any means a definitive account of a journey with cancer. It is my account, and has therefore been written from my own perspective, with my own responses, my own selectivity of events and their importance, and of course about my own body. It also reflects my own interpretation of what various medical practitioners have said to me (or might have said to me). Each of us will have slightly different needs and responses to the diagnosis and their treatments, as well as our individual understandings of how those courses of treatment were arrived at.
Starting as a blog about Prostate Cancer, it has been hijacked down the line by the introduction of Anal Cancer into the mix. Not a welcome introduction, but nonetheless one that has to be acknowledged and included in the story, after all, it’s just another cancer.
Then it turns out that the prostate cancer has seeped into my bones, and I have Bone Cancer as well! But it’s just another cancer, run it off, it’ll be fine.
But that’s three diagnoses. Three strikes and you’re out? Or score three goals and you get to keep the match ball? I’ll have the match ball please.
This account has been written contemporaneously, apart from the first two chapters which were written in catch-up mode. All of this means that as you read on there may well be inconsistencies, sudden shifts in style and tense, repetition, and plenty of other literary inadequacies.
But this is how it has been for me. So far.
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