Hanging on

The afternoon that I joyously headed off to Glastonbury, a whole four months ago, I left a little later than planned because I had a hospital appointment. That appointment confirmed my GP's suspicion, from various tests over the previous four months, that I have lymphoma (it's Waldenström macroglobulinaemia (WM), rare, diagnosed in about 350 people each year in the UK). It's not curable, though its main symptoms can be treated with chemotherapy, so the procedure is to watch and wait. Today was my first four-monthly follow-up appointment and the tests on the blood taken at my GP surgery last week show little change, so I'm signed off until February. Not a huge surprise: 75% of people with WM are alive five years after diagnosis and many live a lot longer.

I'll write about it from time to time here and I plan to go back over my blip journal and, for my own sake, write in what's happened over the last eight months, as this will obviously be one of the many threads that run through the rest of my life.

Since I first got on a motorbike, aged 22, I've been alert, every day, to the fact that I'm going to die, in one way or another, at an unknown time, and I've long hoped that almost any bit of me would give up before my brain does, so this is probably good news.

I am not panicked at the thought of death nor by the word 'cancer'. The older I've got, the more I am in awe at my extreme good fortune in experiencing life at all - from a biological point of view, me being born was vanishingly unlikely. I am now two years older than my dad was when he died and every one of those extra 738 days that I have woken up to the light, the leaves, the music and the people I care about, I have been aware of my extraordinary privilege.

The realisation that has come since my diagnosis is that because all our bodies gradually degenerate until the bits that are still functioning can no longer survive alongside the bit that is failing quickest, incurable cancer is not alien, nor an outsider, but just the name for what is decaying fastest (at the moment, as far as I know) in my body. So I am not going to have a 'battle' with my cancer: I feel it is simply the name for how my own body is slowly dying, as all bodies do. (I do realise that this is different for curable or removable cancers.) I will accept treatment for the symptoms (side-effects) that develop for as long as I want to keep listening to music, climbing walls, watching the peony buds burst open, hugging my children... I will refuse if pain or exhaustion outweigh those things.

Maybe, as death gets closer, I will change how I feel. If so, I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, on with the next five years. Or days, or whatever.