Sometimes, lying awake at night, I imagine what my mutant T cells are up to. In real life, normal ones are spherical and are generally depicted looking like meat balls or balls of wool, with a halo of fine filaments. It is not clear if they can move around the body of their own accord, but I imagine them as rampaging gangs, like the droogs in the film A Clockwork Orange, moving through my blood vessels looking for mischief…
Much of the diversity of cancer largely arises, of course, from genetics. We are all genetically unique and our cancers, caused by mutations, add to the uniqueness. A work colleague once did a study of the language used by cancer doctors to talk to patients; as well as the obvious ‘tumour’, ‘growth’, ‘lump’, etc., there was ‘naughty tissue’. I laughed at the time but actually it’s rather appropriate. In my case, the naughty…
Chemotherapy is administered in a large, open Day Treatment Unit (DTU), in which around 20 patients receive treatment while seated on chairs or lying on beds. The atmosphere in the DTU could have been gruesome, given that many of its occupants are heading for their grave, but in fact it is one of cheerful efficiency, and it’s very obvious that the nurses are very much in charge. It is a female environment, with no apparent…
It became apparent to me that, for what remained of my life, I would be in the hands of the NHS, a prospect that made me apprehensive, given the fog of bad publicity and gloom that has surrounded it in recent years. Everyone I have dealt with or who has treated me in Oxford’s various hospitals has done so with the utmost kindness, respect and enormous skill. Above all, they care. The problems facing the NHS are…
I was diagnosed with Lymphoma just before Christmas 2016; specifically, I have Angio-immunoblastic T-cell Lymphoma (AITL). A recent study described the prognosis for this disease as ‘dismal’ and concluded that there has been no improvement in survival for AITL patients over the last 20 years*. It was clear to me from the beginning that this diagnosis was probably a death sentence.
I intended the present narrative…
