Sitting here with coffee in the kitchen. Is this what getting better is like? I am not hung-over but my knees hurt like hell. I have just seen eight or nine blue tits on the apple tree looking for insects and darting on and off the bird feeder. In the middle of all this, a call to my mobile on Wednesday evening, as she said she would, from Felicity Carr. I am going to have ‘involved field radiotherapy’, as we discussed. The activity on my tumour is ‘almost negligible’, the MDT has pronounced. ‘But even if your scan results were completely negative, we would still have given it to you, just to make sure.’ She went on: ‘As you had such bulky disease, it’s better to be safe than sorry.’ It is fascinating how the words ‘huge’ and ‘bulky’ crop up, now I’m almost into remission, replacing ‘substantial’ and ‘high-grade’. I don’t blame them for retrospectively telling me how dangerous my disease was. After all, you don’t greet your new patient with ‘You’ve got a huge tumour there, Mr Wilson, and it’s really aggressive!’, do you?The side effects aren’t serious, Felicity told me, ‘nothing like chemo anyway.’‘What about the tiredness?’ I asked her.‘Oh, you might get tired, yes.
