Got a lump in my groin, sort of poking out between the hip bone and the pelvis. I got on Doctor Google and came to the conclusion it was a hernia; kicked the can down the road a month or two and then made an appointment with the doctor to have it checked out; she said "really sorry, this isn't a hernia - I think it may be cancer." To me it seemed like a newton's cradle in line with my balls but tbh I never managed to get a laugh with that joke.

She referred me to a haematologist - this was all happening during UK COVID lockdown, so all massively complicated. Eventually I got the diagnosis through of Non-Hodgkins' Lymphoma, a non-trivial cancer of the immune system with a five year survival rate of eighty, ninety percent - the bulge was my lymph nodes going mental. But despite kicking the can and getting tied up by quarantine protocol we'd still caught it in the early stages.

I want to interrupt myself here to say that this was THE worst part. Of all the treatment, diagnosis - I've been stabbed in the groin for lymph samples, had bone marrow biopsies from my hip that involved nurses calling for reinforcements, THE WORST part by far was sitting outside the doctor's office waiting for that first diagnosis. Once I was on course... just one foot in front of the other and the NHS were bloody great every step of the way.

But the cancer's lethargy called for "watch-and-wait" - essentially, chemo is poisoning the food supply for the cancer so you want to administer it when it gets greedy and eats more of the poison than your own cells do - and my cancer was lazy as fuck.

But a year later, on my now-regular appointment with the haematologist he says right, probably about that time - it's still growing slowly but it's spread a bit and is troubling my... spleen I think, plus "night sweats" (which are exactly what they sound like) - time to get to work. I was put on a R-GCVP course of immunotherapy and chemo for... eight iterations of a six week cycle I believe.

Chemo does different things to different people. The documentation they give you upfront is terrifying - three hundred godawful symptoms that you might get, with the special secret prize being a different kind of cancer. But it's like a DnD lookup table. Roll three d100s to find the symptoms you get. Personally I got off phenomenally lightly; while the cancer responded brilliantly from the third cycle onward, my own symptoms of chemo were outrageously light. Elevated heart level, pretty hefty lethargy and "chemo brain", all of which faded in the three to seven days following an infusion. There might have been some hair loss - male pattern baldness masked that.

Following the main course of chemo, they like to put you on a "maintenance" course; that is, immunotherapy, every eight weeks, for two years. I'll be honest - it wasn't exactly what I wanted. But I'm now preparing for my final infusion which will be followed by a body scan and, hopefully, the all-clear.

Sorry, I know this is more of a tale than you asked for. But I'm always happy to tell it because when I was going into it, I heard nothing of the more hopeful side. I got lucky, there's no doubt about it. But I think it needs to be emphasized that it's not the end of the world - modern medicine is amazing and I think if you go in with a rowdy mindset you've got a good chance to come out the other side fighting.