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!