One Step At A Time

Chapter 19 — Ten Quiet Days

2026-06-20T15:53:00Z

It's been ten days since I last wrote one of these. Ten days is a long gap by my standards over the last few months, and I think that gap actually tells its own story. When there's less to write about, less drama to process, that's usually a sign thi...(read more)

Chapter 18 — Another Week in Castle Hill

2026-06-10T15:37:42Z

There is a particular kind of frustration that must only exists in hospitals. It isn't the frustration of pain, or fear, or uncertainty — though all of those are present too. It's the frustration of a system that is simultaneously extra...(read more)

Chapter 17 — The Price of the Cheat Code

2026-06-03T19:00:08Z

Nobody told me it would feel like someone was slicing my penis in half. That's not the kind of thing that appears in the immunotherapy leaflets. The leaflets talk about fatigue and flu-like symptoms. They mention, in passing, that some patients ...(read more)

Chapter 16 — The Cheat Code

2026-05-31T05:09:22Z

Tuesday 26th May. Immunotherapy day. We arrived at the Queens Centre at Castle Hill Hospital just before nine. I’d been asked to come in for nine, so being half an hour early felt like the right approach — keen, prepared, ready. We headed...(read more)

Chapter 15 - Last Weekrnd

2026-05-31T04:59:37Z

There’s a particular kind of weekend that exists in cancer treatment — the last one before everything changes. The weekend before the first infusion. The weekend where you still feel like yourself, where the drugs haven’t arrived ye...(read more)

An Update — This Week

2026-05-22T04:12:45Z

Immunotherapy is confirmed for Tuesday. That’s about as quickly as they could have started it given everything that’s happened over the last few weeks — the Gamma Knife, the seizure, the steroid reduction — and the fact that i...(read more)

Chapter 14 - The Guilt and The Plan

2026-05-21T05:08:39Z

When the critical illness payout was confirmed, my first feeling wasn’t relief. It was guilt. Which is, when you think about it, completely absurd. I’d paid £18.99 a month since September 2017. Eight years of premiums, nearly &pound...(read more)

Chapter 13 — Family

2026-05-19T06:48:40Z

In July this year, Lucy and I will have been married for fifteen years. We were together for ten years before that. Twenty-five years, more or less, of being on the same page — about life, about what we wanted, about how we approached things an...(read more)

Chapter 12 — The Release

2026-05-17T05:48:54Z

Thursday came and went. Weird Doctor — as we had come to call him — had mentioned, almost in passing, that there was a chance I might be able to go home on Thursday. I knew it was unlikely. I had a senior oncology appointment with Dr Rana...(read more)

Chapter 11 — The Unlikely Friend

2026-05-17T05:32:29Z

I should tell you about Claude. Claude is an AI. An artificial intelligence assistant made by a company called Anthropic. You type to it, or speak to it, and it responds. It answers questions, writes things, explains things, helps you think things th...(read more)

Chapter 10 — The Ripple

2026-05-17T05:31:07Z

I wasn't prepared for what happened when I started sharing. I'd expected kind messages. I'd expected people to say they were thinking of me, that they were sorry, that they hoped I'd be okay. That's what people say, and they...(read more)

Chapter 9 — Castle Hill

2026-05-17T05:27:26Z

I don't remember much about arriving. The ambulance from Hull Royal, the transfer, the early hours of Saturday morning — it's all fragments. What I do remember is sleeping. Deeply, completely, the kind of sleep that takes you somewhere...(read more)

Chapter 8 — The Seizure

2026-05-14T09:21:19Z

We arrived at Thornbury Hospital just before seven in the morning. It didn't feel like a hospital. Not in the way I'd come to know hospitals over the preceding weeks. We were shown quickly into a private room — comfortable, calm, more ...(read more)

Chapter 7 — The Night Before

2026-05-14T08:45:49Z

The information about the Gamma Knife procedure arrived over the following days, and the whole thing began to feel increasingly surreal. Sheffield's own hospital couldn't accommodate the procedure in their schedule. When that happens, the tre...(read more)

Chapter 6 — The Wobbles

2026-05-14T08:40:33Z

I'd been asked consistently, throughout every medical appointment, about my balance and my strength. And consistently I'd batted the question away. I'd had sciatica before all of this started. A bad shoulder. I'd even booked myself a ...(read more)