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 into a department I hadn’t visited before called the Day Treatment Unit. A first reception team directed us straight through to a second, which was where treatment would actually happen.
For the first time I saw the room.
Bright, airy, maybe twenty or thirty chairs arranged facing a bank of windows. More comfortable looking than the last time I’d spent hours attached to a drip — that deeply unpleasant chair during the calcium episode felt like a lifetime ago. At nine in the morning the treatment chairs were still mostly empty, but the waiting room was nearly full. Looking around at the people waiting I was struck by the quiet ordinariness of it — people of all ages, at different stages, all there for versions of the same thing. Treatment. The room had a particular kind of calm that comes from people who have learned to wait.
We waited too. Half an hour past our appointment time before a chair became available — more people than chairs, perhaps not quite enough staff for the morning rush. Slightly frustrating, particularly because Lucy was planning to drop me and come back later, and the sooner we could get started the sooner she could get on with her day. But manageable. Everything was manageable.
I’d prepared well for the time ahead. I had my laptop, some footage from Seth’s football party the weekend before that I wanted to edit, films to watch, podcasts downloaded. I was ready to settle in for however long it took.
The plan had been sixty to ninety minutes. It ended up being closer to two and a half hours. The first drug — nivolumab — went in without incident. Then a wait of forty-five minutes to an hour while the second drug — ipilimumab — was released from the pharmacy. Then that one too. A gap, a delay, a settling in. All perfectly fine. All manageable.
What struck me throughout was how undramatic it felt. I’d been building toward this day for weeks — through the scans, the diagnosis, the Gamma Knife, the seizure, the recovery, the steroid reduction — and here it was. A chair by a window. A drip. A laptop. Editing football footage from a ten year old’s party while two of the most powerful cancer drugs available were fed quietly into my arm.
At some point during the infusion I picked up my phone and posted something to social media. Just a sequence of symbols that meant nothing to most people and everything to anyone who grew up playing video games:
↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A
The Konami Code. The famous cheat code from gaming — enter the sequence and unlock invincibility, extra lives, hidden power. I’d been thinking about it for days. It felt exactly right. The immunotherapy wasn’t just treatment — it was a cheat code. It was reaching into the game of my own biology and unlocking something that had always been there but hadn’t been activated. My immune system, finally learning to see the melanoma as a threat. Finally learning to fight it.
The gamers got it immediately. Everyone else Googled it and smiled. That was exactly the point. 
I felt fine leaving. Genuinely, completely fine.
Lucy picked me up and we drove home. I came through the front door and immediately helped Albert and Lucy put up some football retention nets in the garden — something we’d been meaning to do. Within an hour of my first immunotherapy infusion I was sorting out football nets.
That evening three boys were in the garden — Albert, Seth, Ruben — testing the nets with considerable enthusiasm. I made porchetta with cabbage and cannellini beans. The Royal London critical illness money landed in my bank account — £50,249.62, sitting there on the screen while I stood at the stove. One of the more surreal Tuesday evenings of my life.
I went to bed feeling well. Wednesday morning, still fine. I began to think perhaps I was one of the lucky ones who’d sail through without significant side effects.
I was not quite one of the lucky ones.
By Wednesday evening a burning sensation had begun — around the prostate, the urinary tract, building slowly through the night. By Thursday morning it was clear enough that I needed to be seen. Five hours at Castle Hill. Antibiotics prescribed. Immune related prostatitis — my immune system, newly supercharged, causing inflammation in places it wasn’t supposed to. Evidence, in its painful way, that the cheat code was working.
As I write this it’s Sunday. The antibiotics haven’t fully worked yet. I’ve spent a lot of time in bed. Our friends Kate, Kev and Heather and their families came to visit — a few days I’d been looking forward to enormously — and I’ve been largely horizontal for most of it, resting while they sat in the garden and the kids slept in a bell tent outside. Not exactly the hosting I’d planned.
This is immunotherapy. Not the version I’d hoped for — feeling fine, carrying on, barely noticing. The real version. The one where your immune system wakes up and causes chaos before it learns to direct that chaos at the right target.
The cheat code is activated. The side effects are the price of activation.
I’ll pay it.
