Things are looking up!

Hey cancer fans, just an update for you since I went off-grid for a while. I had my CT scan a couple of weeks ago and the results were good - all clear and nothing to see. I then had an ultrasound of the lump in front of my ear and that too is apparently fine. The consultant said it was a lymph node but the ultrasound doctor said no, it wasn't so it must be a lump of cartilage.

Whatever. I have no evidence of cancer at the moment! So I'm trying to draw a line mentally now I know it hasn't spread to my organs and I am not dying. Doing lots of things off my list for living is helping me move on - I abseiled a horrifying 420 feet down the Northampton Lift Tower (and raised £610 for charity in the process!). I got back yesterday from an absolutely brilliant holiday in Berlin where I also rode a segway for four hours and LOVED it. Why don't we commonly use segways as transport here?! I didn't get to tick off Berlin's Die Welt hot air balloon unfortunately, due to high winds (technically it's a helium balloon but same thing) but I did go to the Unsicht-bar which is a dark restaurant staffed by blind waiters and waitresses. You literally eat in darkness so intense, your eyes almost hurt - there's not even a sliver of light. And today I am going to book a holiday to Athens for March so I have something else to look forward to. I am going to stop obsessing about melanoma, stop constantly reading medical journals about treatments, and start trying to feel normal, and try to get past my conviction that I will die in the next couple of years. As odd as it sounds, it's somewhat numbing to accept you won't die imminently after all, and that you may have 40 years more to fill but I am going to try and enjoy it by getting the rest of my list experienced!

Unhelpful consultant.

Tomorrow is my scan day, and I will get the results next week. Hopefully I will be able to reassure myself that all is fine and there's nothing horrible lurking inside me. Unfortunately I found a pea-sized lump in front of my ear recently and it was examined by a plastic surgeon consultant this morning, one I've never seen before. He is certain it's nothing to worry about, that it's just an enlarged lymph node, but he is going to order an ultrasound to be on the safe side. He thought it wasn't "justified" to extend the CT to include my neck and head. 

Two things he said irritated me. The first was that only a small minority of people get distant metastases so I shouldn't worry. Er, isn't that WHAT we worry about? Show me someone with late stage 3 cancer who WOULDN'T worry if a hard lump appeared on their face. I know that it's a minority of people who become stage 4, but it's also the minority who get melanoma in the first place, then far fewer who have spread to lymph nodes and then even fewer still who get mets after a lymph node dissection. I've been in all three of those minorities so of course I am going to worry. I know what he meant but the way he phrased it made me feel ike I was being a nuisance.

The second thing he said was that it was very small so it was unlikely to be a met. Unless I'm dreadful at science, all mets (and indeed tumours) start out the size of one cell. So something pea-sized is surely quite substantial? 

My qualm is with the fact that he will deal with cancer patients day in and day out. Surely he will have some idea of the state of mind and the level of worry that they endure. There are ways of phrasing things sensitively and I don't feel he did that. He made me feel like I was silly, and that I was worrying unduly. Hopefully it is just a node like he believes but I think it's best to check it out and that should happen without being made to feel like a hypochondriac.

God, I sound like a right cow now. Sorry.

I'm getting a scan!

Bless Rachel, she did indeed take the issue to the MDT meeting and she phoned me that afternoon to say they were very happy to scan me, particularly given I was stage 1b at my last scan in April 2012 and now I am 3c. I had my 3-monthly check up last Monday too and ended up having a punch biopsy that same afternoon (well, early evening) when the other patients had been seen to. It was just a tiny speck above my knee which had appeared a week earlier. Dr S thought better out than in so she excised it and rushed it through. Thankfully it was just a freckle that was in the midst of forming. I did a proper count the other day and found nine lesions I'd like to get rid of. I shouldn't think I'll be allowed though. They'd take a good three hours to excise, and many more pathology hours to inspect. So now I am just waiting for my scan date and I hope to god it will put things to rest for me. In other news, I have started running again! I've not ran since I was diagnosed in 2011. I'm only doing a mile and a bit every other day but it's progress. I'm also eating more fruit and less sugar. Then I really will have done everything I can.

Schrodinger's Cat

I'm going to empty my head into this post so do feel free to skip it. 

After dwelling once more on what bloody stage of cancer I have, I decided to just ask my Macmillan nurse, Rachel. She concurred that I am stage 3c, not 3b. Here's everything you need to know about stage 3c in a nutshell:

Stage 3C means that there are melanoma cells in the lymph nodes and small areas of melanoma cells in the skin or lymph channels close to the main melanoma....Between 20 and 34 out of 100 people (20 to 34%) diagnosed with stage 3C melanoma will live for more than 5 years. Between 11 and 29 out of 100 people (11 to 29%) will live for more than 10 years.

(from Cancer Research UK http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/type/melanoma/treatment/stages-of-melanoma and http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/cancer-help/type/melanoma/treatment/melanoma-statistics-and-outlook)

So that's fairly shit. An average of 73% of people don't make it beyond 5 years of diagnosis. Yes, I know, that's not exactly what it says, and none of us are statistics and look on the bright side. But I don't feel bright. I feel angry to be living on death row, never knowing whether I'll get a reprieve or the lethal injection. 

Recently, I decided to find and book our dream holiday. It will be on the beautiful Seychelles, away from everyone and everything. Surrounded by nature, blue sea and sky, with the chance to snorkel with bright fish, lie on a hammock and read whilst drinking a cocktail, and experience true relaxation. Only, ironically, I can't relax because I can't book it. I can't book because I can't pay for it. And I can't pay for it because my head is loudly screaming at me "You might be dead! It's a waste of money because you won't be here. And even if you are, you might be on vem and unable to go into daylight". I'm normally a reasonably spontaneous person. I go on cheap holidays on the spur of the moment and I don't plan ahead beyond two months. This is a first for me, and it is a horrible realisation that one year from now, I may realistically be dead.

I decided the best way forward to try and afford myself some peace of mind is to ask for a scan. I just desperately want my team to look inside my body and reassure me that I am fine, that I can go on holiday, that there is nothing wrong. That's what I want so I phoned Rachel today and asked for it. She did her job and played Devil's Advocate: how would I feel in a week or a month? What if I wanted another scan then? What if a scan threw something up and meant a three month wait to find out if it was cancerous? What if it DID show cancer? I answered them all honestly. I would rather know than guess. Schrodinger's Cat, see? There either is or isn't cancer in my organs. Lots of people think the SC thought experiment proves that a cat can be both alive and dead at the same time, but that's a misconception. Actually its point is to show how ridiculous theory can be when put into practice. The point of it is, the cat is either alive or dead. The scan will show cancer or it won't. Either way, I will know and can stop wondering because I think that's the thing that torments the most. Hence my oscillating posts recently, going from thinking I'm not okay to I'm fine and back. They accurately reflect my recent state of mind. 

Rachel emailed a short while later to say I will be discussed at the MDT meeting next Tuesday. Please please let them scan me. Watching and waiting and wondering is torturous.

Melodramatic

I just read my last post back and it sounds so melodramatic. I don't have a foreboding feeling any longer and no new mets have appeared. This cancer stuff really messes with your brain some days.
In other (boring) news, I went for a run earlier, the first since I had a significant proportion of leg removed. The nerve damage didn't hurt at all so I plan on running every other day.and building up my fitness levels. Can't hurt, right?

I also realised I am ineligible for the BRIM-8 trial for vemurafenib because a) I've had two mets and b) I've not had the melanoma resected within 70 days. I am actually starting to wish now that there was a trial I could do after all. But then again there's been no sign of any cancer since May. Could it all be over? I hope so.

A quick update.

Not much has happened really since my last post. I went on a helicopter ride, which was on my List for Living - that was fun!

                         


I found out that there IS a stage 3 clinical trial of vem for BRAF positive patients - http://public.ukcrn.org.uk/Search/StudyDetail.aspx?StudyID=13620

The exclusion criteria includes in-transit mets so that would seem to make me ineligible but I am considering emailing to ask with a view to applying for a place on it. I know I said I wouldn't, but I dunno. I haven't decided.

No new mets have popped up, which is good, but I can't help but have a horrible feeling of foreboding, like I am somehow due for one. Probably because there were three months between the two recurrences so now we're in August and another three months has passed, it feels like time. My skin is so freckly that it's really hard to tell what's what. A darkish brown spot has appeared at the edge of my wide local excision scar but it looks more freckle than melanoma (based on the black appearance of the two mets.)

I decided not to phone in for an immediate removal since I have my 3-monthly appointment with Dr Stewart on September 9th. I'll ask her to check it out. In the meantime, my lovely husband has agreed to full-body check me later on for anything that looks wrong.

I don't know. I can't shake this feeling that something's wrong.

BRAF positive

I phoned Rachel, my Macmillan skin cancer nurse, yesterday. I haven't spoken to her in over a year but she remembered me well and we had a good chat. She gave me the results of the BRAF testing. My melanoma is positive for the braf mutation. That's a good thing - it widens my treatment options, should I get to that point.

I asked Rachel why they'd opted to test the original tumour. She said it's not for a clinical trial - there is no stage 3 trial available to me. It's more so they have the results if and when I become stage 4. How scary is that? But I know it's the logical approach to take and she did reassure me that they don't expect to need the results any time soon. She also said it's a minority of people with in-transit mets who become stage 4, not the majority as I feared.

So on I plod, hoping no more mets pop up (although Rachel did say she wouldn't be surprised if they did).

The Battle and The Race

On seeing a friend's sponsorship ask for Cancer Research's 'Race for Life', it dawned on me why I really hate that term, as well as "battling cancer".

It implies that the brave, the fit, the worthy, survive cancer. That the people who die of cancer didn't run fast or far enough, didn't fight hard enough, were weak and unworthy of their lives. They lost the battle against it, the race for life, and if only they'd have tried harder and fought better, they would have won.

I'm sorry but it just doesn't work that way. There is no way of battling or racing this thing. The only control I have had is going to the doctor as soon as I found it (check) and taking the treatments that have been recommended (also check). Along the way, I was repeatedly assured that it probably hasn't spread, that we caught it quite early, that we were "going for gold" by doing my groin dissection. So far, in 'fighting' this, I've gone through two general anaesthetic operations, an icecream scoop of calf removed, the loss of eighteen lymph nodes, so many local anaesthetic biopsies that I've lost count, two minor infections, one major infection that very nearly killed me, loss of all sensation in my thigh, permanent nerve damage, the resulting pain, and enough tears to fill a small pond.

Well, guess what. It still came back. Despite all the operations, despite my vigilance, despite the countless hours and the gallons of petrol taking myself to appointments, it still came back twice and it will likely come back again.


I've been counselled along the way by well-meaning people to drink lots of orange juice, to try herbal supplements, to eat more tumeric. I am the first person to admit that my diet isn't the best it could be. Although I'm vegan, I could still eat a lot more fruit and veg, and fewer doughnuts. I did used to exercise five times a week, but since my groin dissection, I have shooting pains and burning/stabbing sensations inside my thigh. Running exacerbates this so my training shoes have gone unworn for two years.

Would a better diet and more exercise kill the cancer cells? That's the only thing I can actively do to 'fight' it. How would that beat a genetic mutation and molecular defect?

Whatever happens, whether I get better, stay the same or die from this, just please don't refer to it as my 'battle'. There is no real fighting to be done, no race to win. I am not a brave cancer warrior, just a woman doing my best and following medical advice. I really hope I survive, but if I die, please don't say I "lost my fight". Say instead that I lived and tried the best I could, the same as we all do.

The grim inevitable.

Even though the last lesion was tiny, and the lovely Dr Stewart said they had to go 19 slices in before they found any abnormal cells, they did indeed find them and they were cancerous. So I'm two for two now in my spotting of recurrences. Go me.

I had already decided to be proactive and ask for regular blood tests to check LDH level from hereon in, but when Dr S phoned me last week to tell me my LDH level was okay, she also dropped a bombshell: the Whiston MDT discussed me and decided to test my melanoma for the BRAF mutation, a common genetic mutation found in half of melanomas that causes the cells to divide uncontrollably. Dr S wasn't 100% sure why they want to test me but she speculated two reasons, neither of which make me want to celebrate and both related to a new 'wonder drug' called vemurafenib - vem for short. Vem is a BRAF inhibitor, a type of biological therapy which slows or stops melanoma growth for an average of six months. It looks like a miracle drug because it melts the tumours away very quickly indeed. It can take just days to get rid of a tumour and it's very exciting news in the world of melanoma treatment which, until very recently, has been pretty static.

Possible reason one: to check whether I'm BRAF positive or negative for future reference. If I'm positive, I would be suitable for vem. At the moment it's only given to stage 4 patients. Putting two and two together, then, they suspect I will become stage 4 and they want to be ready with the vem. That's really scary.

Possible reason two: to check whether I'm BRAF positive or negative for clinical trial purposes. At the moment, vem is only routinely given to people with stage 4 melanoma in an attempt to slow down metastatic spread and prolong a good quality of life. The stage 3 trial is aiming to see whether vem given to stage 3 patients can stop the spread of cancer. That's great on paper but there are two sticking points for me.

The first is that vem is only effective for an average of six months before the tumour becomes resistant and begins to find a way to grow again. Once that happens, no more vem for you because it's ineffective (although research is currently indicating that having a 'holiday' from the drug can kickstart it working again).

The second sticking point are the side effects, which commonly include joint and muscle pain, fatigue, hair thinning or loss, photosensitivity and skin problems such as blistering, rashes and painful thickening. Aside from all that, I don't feel that two recurrences is enough to see a pattern. If I have another in a few months then I would err towards constant and aggressive recurrences but two is not a large enough sample. I may take the vem and not have another tumour pop up for a year, but that may happen regardless.

I will go to the appointment and listen to what is said so I can make a decision with all the information in front of me (if indeed I am eligible for a trial in the first place) but this moment in time is not ideal. My job is very busy and competitive - there are a million people waiting for me to be unable to do it so they can jump into my shoes. I need to be on the ball and at the top of my game. Being a tired, balding, blistery person would not help me. I want to take part in a clinical trial to help science and to help myself but I don't know that this is it. 

A very miserable feedback loop

I went through a weird phase about two weeks ago of being resolutely convinced that I was going to die. And by thinking it, I wondered if I was somehow killing myself by making my body turn that thought into an action. And then that convinced me even further that I was going to die, ad infinatum until I was nothing more than a snivelling, despondent mess. I ate a lot of junk food that week. Thankfully, I managed to snap myself out of it somehow but it was a dark place to be. Now I'm back to believing the statistics, which are 50/50. Well, kind of but not really. Let me clarify. I found out something interesting the other day. There was a public meeting about melanoma held locally, and attended by two very eminent melanoma specialists, so I popped along after work. I didn't realise, but my survival is already written into the melanoma. Whether it spreads to my organs, whether it can be fought, whether it is aggressive - all of that is pre-determined by the melanoma's genetic fingerprint. So although 50% of people at my stage die, my outlook is pre-determined. I just don't know what it is yet.

The nightmares have started again too. Last week I had four nights in a row where I dreamt I died. 

Tomorrow I find out whether the latest biopsy shows cancer. I've already resigned myself to the fact it will. 

List for Living

I've stolen the name List for Living from Helen Fawkes.  This is a list of things I've always thought would be fun to do but never got round to it because there's never time. But now it looks like I might have to deliberately find time for them, because biology doesn't seem likely to gift me with a lot of it. According to google, I've been alive for almost 13,000 days. Wow, that's actually a long time. It makes me feel even more keenly that I've not been wise with those days. So without further ado, here is my List for Living!

1. Save a million battery hens. Since I'm currently just over 10,000, it seems unlikely but hopefully I can keep my fundraising going and raise enough to save the other 990,000.
2. Move to a small place by the sea where I can have rescue animals
3. Holiday somewhere with white beaches, aqua seas, palm trees and colourful fish – DONE!
4. Snorkel with the above fish – DONE!
5. Spend an afternoon in a hammock on the above beach, with a book and a cocktail – DONE!
6. See the Northern Lights – DONE!
7. Visit as many countries as possible – CURRENTLY 31
8. Ride a motorbike – DONE!
9. Abseil – DONE!
10. Write a book – DONE!
11. Hold an exhibition of my photos
12. Experience a sensory deprivation tank – DONE!
13. Finish our garden so it’s beautiful – DONE!
14. Go in a helicopter – DONE!
15. Visit Cairo or Luxor – DONE!
16. Drive a convertible – DONE!
17. Experience weightlessness
18. Run a marathon
19. Go on a foreign holiday where I have no idea of the destination til I arrive - DONE!
20. Visit Auschwitz – DONE!
21. Go on a segway – DONE!
22. Scuba dive and see a shipwreck – DONE!
23. Ride in a hot air balloon – DONE!
24. Visit New Zealand
25. Finish playing Tomb Raider (I started it in 2000!)
26. Visit Pompei – DONE!
27. Swim with wild dolphins – DONE!
28. Visit Iceland and go to a natural hot spring – DONE!
29. Make money from photography – DONE!
30. Fly a plane – DONE!
31. Go to a rainforest – DONE!
32. Fly First Class – DONE!
33. Go caving – DONE!
34. Do a blindfolded drive
35. Drive a snow mobile – DONE!
36. Visit the Berlin Wall – DONE!
37. Indoor sky diving – DONE!
38. Enjoy a feast of cakes and desserts – DONE!
39. See a total eclipse
40. Drive a canal boat – DONE!
41. Work on a nature documentary – DONE!
42. Find a way for my animal rescuing to carry on in my name after I'm gone
43. Learn to streetdance        
44. Go to Pripyat and Chernobyl
45. Learn to play Classical Gas on guitar 
46. See a shooting star – DONE!
47. Get my Blue Peter badge – DONE!
48. Take an IQ test – DONE!
49. Appear on TV, radio and newspaper – DONE!
50. Sit in court for a day and watch proceedings – DONE!
51. See gorillas and chimps in natural environment – DONE!
52. Watch an autopsy – (SORT OF) DONE!
53. Be on Desert Island Discs
54. Watch Hamilton on Broadway – DONE!
55. Float in the Dead Sea – DONE!
56. Do jury duty
57. Convert a campervan

Now you see it...

and now you don't...

Twenty minutes after ringing my dermatologist's secretary, they'd booked me in for 8.20am the next day so I could still get to work on time. Dr Stewart was on holiday that week so the skin cancer nurse, Sue, came in early especially to remove it for biopsy. What an incredible team...I feel lucky to have them. Results are back in time for my appointment on June 10th. If you look closely at the photos, you'll see a reddish spot above the mole in the middle. That was the site of the first recurrence.

Melanoma, you'll be the death of me!

Ho ho ho, you cheeky little imp! You're like a naughty house spider. Just when we think we've put you outside and closed the window, there you are again, just an inch away from where your cancery little brother was back in February.

Except it's not a spider and it's not funny. The fucker is back. Again.

I would love to be proven wrong but another tiny black spot has appeared and is growing rapidly. It wasn't there a week ago and now it's half a millimetre. I will phone my derm tomorrow and she will no doubt take the bastard out on 10th June when I was due to see her again.

My work schedule is very busy up til that point and this bastard can fuck right off if it thinks I'm cancelling shoot days or edit days for it. It's an uninvited house guest and the least it can do is sit quietly until I make time to see to it.

Sorry if you're offended by my bad language. I am sure you understand.

A life (not) defined by cancer.

I realise that in this blog, I only talk about cancer. Obviously there's much more to me than that crap but I figured that, since you're here reading it, you've either done a search for melanoma, you've got a vested interest in cancer, or you enjoy a spot of morbid schadenfreude (nowt wrong with that, I think we all have a touch of it from time to time!) So this post is a little about the me that exists 95% of the time when I'm not talking/dealing with/thinking about the cancer. Feel free to skip it if you just want the miserable stuff; I promise I won't be offended!

Big thing #1: I'm in my early 30s and I live in the North West of England where it rains all the bloody time and everybody's first comment when they see you is "cold again, int it!" as though that's a huge change from the other 364 days of the year.

Big thing #2: I am just about to move back to the world of kids' TV production after spending a couple of years earning a crust as a fundraiser for charity. I've working with some genuinely lovely people in that time but fundraising just didn't light my fire in the same way scripting, filming and editing does. I know that sounds really superficial but there's a huge sense of achievement that comes from a million people watching and enjoying something you dreamt up and created with your own talent. I'm bloody good at it too, in all honesty. I've been nominated for a Bafta and a Royal Television Society award (my natural inclination when telling people that is to follow it up with an embarrassed 'sorry' - I'm terribly British about discussing my achievements.)

Big thing #3: I LOVE animals. Like, seriously absolutely adore animals to the point where my life wouldn't be worth living if I didn't have animals in it. The Can't Hug Every Cat song could have been written for me!

I volunteer for the British Hen Welfare Trust, a battery hen rescue organisation, and I keep the 'special' hens who are too immediately poorly/disabled to be rehomed. To that end, I have a little wonky flock of hens who are one-eyed, wonky beaked, limpy, uneven and twisty. I love them to bits. So much that I've written and published a book about them! I ought to record Can't Hug Every Chook. I also have three rescue cats, some Giant African Land Snail and four extremely geriatric goldfish. I have also previously been the proud owner of Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches (named Monty, Henry and Clive), some rescued crickets and an extremely bad-tempered hamster named Frasier.

Those are my three big things but here are some other bits:

• I used to enjoy running but find it hard now due to the nerve damage in my leg. When I can get motivated, I plan to run a marathon in aid of BHWT. 
• I'm extremely neat and tidy, in complete contrast to my husband who is a serious contender for World's Biggest Slob (but also World's Kindest Person.) 
• I am a grammar fanatic, and so I apologise for any errors of posts past. Please let me know if you spot any. I'm serious. If I cark it from this crap, I don't want to leave a legacy of homophone confusion and incorrect semi-colon useage. 
• I am a bloody good driver, for reals. 
• I don't like going out much although I do love my friends. 
• I have a notorious sweet tooth, and the to-be-expected weight battle that comes with it. 
• I love travel. I love photograpy. I spend most of my travelling doing photography which has led to a travel companion huffing at me, "Jesus Christ, it's just a bloody pebble!" 
• I am short, I look average, my eyesight is woeful without my glasses and I have very small feet. 
• I can't cook, and I have no desire to cook. Now that I'm vegan, I really ought to but I HATE the process and I don't see the point. Happily, my husband enjoys it all. 
• I am very quick-tempered but I also get over it very quickly.
• I am sleep-softie and feel like crap on less than 7 hours a night.
• I'm triffic at saving money. 
• I can't make myself go cross-eyed. 
• I'm an only child.
• I have an unhealthy fear of heights, spiders and butterflies.
• I absolutely loathe wires, cables or anything remotely technological.

While that probably doesn't give you that much clearer an image of me, I wanted to make the point that I am not defined by cancer in the slightest. Again, that's my rationale in not telling many people: I don't WANT to be defined  by it and deal with the head tilts and sympathy. I'd rather just crack on because there's so much more to life than this crap.

Great! The normal cancery news service will be resumed shortly. 

Results are negative.

I always find that statement confusing - negative usually means bad, but in this case it means good.  It took a few seconds for my head to figure that out when the lovely Dr Stewart phoned on Wednesday. "All the lesions came back negative," she said. Additionally, my bloodwork showed normal LDH levels (LDH is an enzyme produced when tissue breaks down, hence the more cancer, the more elevated the LDH.) Hooray! I'd been waiting for a couple of weeks for that news, but once again I felt that curious sense of nothingness when I should have been cheering and whooping. Not many of my real life friends know about the cancer. I've just told my friends on a forum I frequent (not a cancer forum, still don't do 'em). One of them, a lovely lady, said I must be ecstatic and crying for joy. I know I'm supposed to. I guess emotions don't always read the handbook and abide by it though, do they? The reason, I think, is that, unlike the start of cancer, when you can remember where you were and the moment you were told, there is no end to it. When you're running a marathon, you don't celebrate when you reach the 6-mile marker, do you? In fact, that's a really crap simile because cancer isn't even a marathon. Imagine if you were told to run and that you could never stop running ever again. At what point do you start crying for joy because you've ran a certain distance?  I sound like a miserable sod, I know I do, and I appreciate everyone being happy for me. But, frankly, this is my blog and I can be as honest and as miserable as I want and if you don't like, you can bugger off too. This is the one place where I'm not plastering my happy face on and being jovial and trivialising it all.

Someone else called me amazingly strong, and another person called me a fighter. And here I must confess something to you, dear reader: I am a fraud.

Right, hang on a minute, go and put the kettle on and come back with a brew because I'm about to launch into another of my 'what does it all mean?!" posts and we need a cuppa to counterbalance such seriousness. Back? Ready? Good! Now click the video below and play as appropriate background music while we delve into the boring world of introspection:

In truth, I don't know how to fight cancer. I'm not brave or amazingly strong. My February biopsy showed my immune system was fighting the cancer cells but that's not me. 'You can fight this' is something we say to give encouragement and show admiration, but when you peel away the bravado, I'm not sure what fighting cancer means to me. For people who undertake proactive, ongoing treatment, I think I get it. The fight is getting up and dressed every day and taking drugs which make you feel worse than the actual cancer. The fight is keeping your eyes locked on the light at the end of that tunnel filled with hospital appointments and pain and medical jargon and uncertainty. To a small extent, I was there last year. But I never felt like I was fighting. I feel like a faux cancer patient sometimes; someone who has sporadic surgery when the doctors tell me to have it, who copes with pain because there's no 'off' switch, who doesn't dwell purely because it's not in my nature, rather than it being a concerted effort. I'm not "fighting". And as much as my ego likes the idea of being brave and amazing in everybody's eyes, the truth is that I'm neither of those things. I'm just me, day after day.

Now that my life is more likely to be shortened, though, I have decided to do one brave thing and that is to leave my nice secure job and go back to doing what I love, making television programmes. There is no job security in TV, work is difficult to come by, the hours are long, and any surgery will be on my own time and £££. Is it the right move? Feck it. Yep, it is. I have no idea when the next tumour will pop up and bugger me if I'm going to live a life of safety just in case. I want to feel alive again and I want to love what I do again. Carpe diem!

P.S. If you didn't watch that video because you were reading, I suggest you do so RIGHT NOW. It is HILARIOUSLY bad!

"I know they're busy but..."

I have decided this is an unacceptable excuse. I have used it a lot with regards to medics previously when I've been waiting on phone calls that have never come, letters that have not arrived and appointments that have left me sitting in the waiting room for over an hour. Most previously, I used it on Thursday and Friday just gone, for the biopsy results that I was told would be delivered to me in a phone call. Whenever the phone rang on those two days, my stomach would lurch and my heart would beat faster. The first time it rang, it was my mum. The second time, the bank. The third time, a friend. By the fourth time, I felt a pang of disappointment before I even looked at the phone's screen to see who was calling.

"Was it the hospital?" asked my boss each time.

"No. I know they're busy but..."

But they should ring nonetheless. But they should not keep me on tenterhooks when I'm waiting to find out about my prognosis. But they should be professional and sodding well ring me when they said they would, even if it's to say there's no news yet.

This is one of the problems with the NHS. They deal with such a quantity of patients that we all become a diagnosis and a treatment plan. They forget that each of us has emotions and fears. It's easy to use being busy as an excuse but it really isn't an excuse. Why should it be? What if I didn't phone people when I said I would, on the premise of being busy? What if I had arranged to meet somone and then turned up 80 minutes late because I was busy? Would they smile and say "no problem"? No, they'd quite rightly be angry and upset. Why, then, do I keep telling medics it's okay to keep me waiting, that I know they're busy? What are they busy with that is more important than letting me know whether I have even more cancer or not, whether my expected lifespan diminishes yet again, whether I will need to go for yet more scans or whether I can get on with life for now?

No, being busy is not an acceptable excuse. If a doctor says they will phone with results at a particular time, then they should put aside five minutes to make that phone call. What are they there for, if not the patients?

I've been putting off writing this post.

This is a difficult post for me to write, and I've put it off 'til now because it's hard to know what to say. I found out recently that the cancer has returned. This changes quite a lot for me.

I noticed around Christmas that there was a tiny dark spot in the middle of my right thigh, about two inches away from my groin dissection scar. I didn't think too much about it, but by the start of February it had grown significantly. It was still tiny - just under 2 millimetres - but definitely bigger than it had been six weeks prior.

I phoned Dr Stewart and she immediately booked me into her surgical schedule for the next day. The spot was removed in a procedure called a punch biopsy, whereby a circular blade similar to a miniature apple corer is used to 'punch' out the skin containing the lesion. It only needs one stitch (compared with scalpel removal for larger lesions, which have needed up to 8 stitches) and it's a lot quicker to do as no cauterisation is required.

I got the results when I went for my regular check up 23 days after the procedure, and as I hadn't heard from her, I assumed everything was fine and that she'd simply forgotten to let me know the outcome. I wasn't prepared for the words "it's not good news". 

The biopsy had revealed the spot was malignant melanoma; to be specific, an in-transit metastases. Simply put, it's a met originating from the primary tumour, which means one thing: I still have cancer in my lymphatic system or my skin or both. My groin lymph nodes were removed last April and one node was shown to contain cancer. The hope was that by removing them all plus the original tumour, everything would have been caught. In some lucky people that is the case, but in other people, as with me, some cancerous cells get snared in the lymph channels as they are in transit from the primary tumour to the lymph nodes. Often they will stay hidden and quiet for months, even years, but at some point, and for some reason, they are triggered to start dividing and a tumour grows. That is what the spot was.

The reason it's a game-changer is this: we will never be able to say from now on that I am clear of cancer. As Dr Stewart told me, it's more likely than not that I will always have cancer and that melanoma will randomly appear. We will, of course, remove any mets as soon as they show up on my skin but there will always be some cancerous cells lurking in my lymphatic system, just waiting for their chance. 

So what happens now?

As long as the mets continue to grow on my skin, where they can easily be seen, then it's not too much of a problem. So long as they stay in my leg, then it's not too much of a problem. But if and when those cells leave my leg through my lymph system, if and when they start growing on my internal organs rather than on my skin...well, I don't need to spell it out, do I?

Since then I've had punch biopsies to two dark dots on my thigh and a random bump on my shin. I get the results from those soon. I suspect two will come back as fine and one will come back as melanoma. I will cross that bridge when I come to it because the thought of two recurrences inside 10 months is a grim one. No point worrying about its meaning 'til I know for sure what's what.

Thank god for cysts and fibrous tissue!

For that, dear reader, is all the lump was. It took a long time to find it out, but I am fine and it is definitely not cancer, either the melanoma type or the breast type. The node in my armpit was never mentioned again, and perhaps if I delved into the dark recesses of my brain, there's be a small modicum of worry over it. But I'm ignoring it because there are lots of reasons for mobile lymph nodes.

I probably should have updated this blog earlier because I got the result back over a week ago. I think this experience is a taste of things to come: lump discovered, emergency referrals, tests and scans, it's nothing. And if the alternative is "it's something" then I will take the former with gratitude.

PS - remember I said I was planning to become vegan? Well, I did it! 24 days in and it's pretty easy.