Ok - here goes

So with this bloody cough getting no better I head back to the doctor. It's been about 6 weeks, antibiotics haven't worked and I'm starting to get annoyed. He takes more blood, sticks me for TB and sends me for a CT scan. The blood comes back clean. The TB comes back negative (relieved at that because we've just had a new business meeting and nothing kills a potential client relationship quicker than the chance that you may have infected the client with something that could potentially kill them)

CT scan was fun, if expensive, all warm tingly feelings and hospital gowns. Getting home and receieving a call from your doctor asking for the pleasure of your company the next day was not. I self diagnose lung cancer and head off for uneasy sleep.

Next day I walk to 30 minutes to the doctor's office, meeting some friends on the way, and am met with respectful faces and quiet ushering into a new room. It's not lung cancer. It's lymphoma. I have a mass in my chest that's blocking my airway, has caused the partial collapse of a lung and is making me cough. No idea of the staging of the disease yet. I need another CT scan to see whether it's in the abdomin and pelvis and then a needle biopsy to find out whether I have Hodgkins or Non-Hodkins disease. Chemotherapy and radiotherapy ahead anyway. Yum. He shakes my hand gravely and I leave

The wait for another CT scan is, annoyingly, 1 week.

Head home, my wife comes sleepily from the bedroom and I tell her that I don't have pneumonia - I have cancer. Her dad died of cancer 6 weeks ago. It took him fast. She copes as only she can - and I feel strangely ok. Major worry is whether I can afford this disease. My office has a policy of cutting your pay from full to just $170 a week after two months, and disability pay doesn't kick in for a year. I tell the office. They're great. The president offers me her summer home, money to pay my rent and a guarantee that the job will be here as long as I am. I resolve to work with them for ever and ever.

Head for the cinema - Pride and Prejudice - and then home. Venture online and determine that at my age there's a chance that this is Hodgkins - I cross my fingers and head for bed.

Wake up certain of my reason to survive this. I want more than 13 years with my wife. She's the most amazing, fascinating, evolving, brilliant woman I know and I really want to be part of what's next for her. I love her madly, blindly, pasionately and with a certainty that borders on manic. There's no way that this is going to beat me.

And here I am. In Brooklyn. Starting one of those god awful cancer patient blogs. But it helps.

What next? Only a whirring machine and an armload of iodine will tell.

But thanks for being interested enough to follow along.