One year on

This blog has now been up and running for a year - and as I stall heading for work in a bid to get on a less crowded train I'm acutely aware that at this precise moment a year ago my doctor was ushering me into a small, private and quite well furnished room to tell me that I had lymphoma. He told me that I was in for a miserable six months - regardless of which kind of lymphoma the biopsies threw up.

Of course I didn't know how miserable but my view of cancer treatment had been shaped by chick flicks and brave sporting tales and so I was expecting vomitting, weight loss, sudden dashes to the hospital, grave faces and ultimately the buying of hats and searching for that dark tie neccessitated by funerals.

Looking back on the year it wasn't nearly as bad as I'd suspected and the people around me had feared. The literature - and there's lots of it - lists all of the most dire consequences of each and every drug. The people you see in the waiting room as you get ready to be stuck for blood for the 100th time look frail and tired and afraid.

Friends fall into three groups - those who look past the cancer and insist you come for lunch, those who embrace the cancer and insist on advising you what you should be eating for lunch (usually preceeded with 'I read this article') and those who retreat to e-mail and wish you well from a safe distance.

But the weird thing is that life goes on. You're still curious as to whether that catty girl will finally get the slap she's been needing on America's Top Model. You're still anxious to see that the project you've been working on for months goes through without a hitch. You're still irritated and amused by the same things (the closest I came to dying was with laughter - at a Home Video show which aired a clip of an elderly French woman falling repeatedly into some shrubbery - had it not been for Judith's quick intervention I would have suffocated)

And I guess that that's the only message I have for anyone today coming out of a doctor's waiting room with the word lymphoma, Hodgkins or Non-Hodkins attached to them. Get yourself a doctor that you can trust, get yourself the best treatment available (I had R-CHOP Velcade) and then get on with living life - because really that's all there is.