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 else entirely. Apparently having a brain seizure is not entirely unlike running a marathon in terms of what it does to your body. I was exhausted in a way I'd never been exhausted before. I slept for around twelve hours.
When I woke up, the curtain around my bed was closed. I was alone — Lucy had gone home, the nurses were around but not immediately visible. It was quiet. I lay there for a while, taking stock of what I could and couldn't do.
The left side wasn't working properly. Not in the way it had been weakening over the preceding days — this was different. More complete. I could feel it but I couldn't really use it. Getting up was out of the question for now. I was going to be here for a while.
The curtain eventually opened, and I met the world of Ward 35.
And I met Alan.
Alan was in the bed opposite. Born 1947. Ex policeman — twenty years on the force, which we talked about at length over the days that followed. Hull City fan, which he raised as a matter of some importance almost immediately. He wasn't particularly impressed that I didn't support them.
His position softened considerably when I explained I was originally from Essex, had supported West Ham all my life, and regularly took Albert to watch Scunthorpe. He decided this was acceptable. We were, from that moment, friends.
Alan was on his fourth cancer. Fourth. He was currently dealing with bone cancer, following radiotherapy on his thigh about four weeks earlier that hadn't, by his own assessment, done a great deal of good. He was in pain. He had a catheter in. He was largely immobile. And he was — I say this with complete affection — fairly down in the dumps when I first arrived, which was entirely understandable.
But we talked. About his life, his career, his family. His wife came in every day without fail, which told you everything you needed to know about both of them. Hull City had drawn against Millwall in the playoff semi-final and had another leg coming up, which gave us something to discuss that had nothing to do with cancer, which was a relief for both of us.
Alan was, I came to realise, at a different place in his journey to me. Four cancers does something to a person — not defeat, not giving up, but a kind of acceptance. A settling into things. He was genuinely content with the life he'd had. He was more at peace with where he was than I was, and he was more optimistic about where I was going than I sometimes managed to be myself.
There was one night that was less peaceful. A doctor came to attend to Alan's bedsores — he wasn't getting up much, and the consequences of that were unpleasant. The doctor was, by all accounts, quite rough. I had my earplugs in — I always wear earplugs at night — so I caught only fragments of what followed. Alan was not happy. He expressed this in terms that were colourful and included, I am told, a racial slur that I won't repeat here. I understood the frustration completely. The same doctor had been unnecessarily rough with my cannula. Some frustrations find an outlet, and Alan's found his that night. He apologised to me in the morning. I told him not to worry about it.
Meanwhile, I was recovering.
The progress was remarkable, looking back. Each day felt like my strength was roughly doubling. From not being able to get up at all, to getting up with support, to walking with a stick, to standing in the shower unaided, to walking to the toilet without holding anything.
That last one mattered more than I can adequately explain.
There came a point — and I debated whether to include this, but it's real and it happened and this book is nothing if not honest — where I was on a commode and required assistance afterward. Nursing assistance. The kind where someone else is involved in a process that you have managed independently since you were about three years old.
That was my line.
I had accepted the catheter. I had accepted the drips and the blood pressure checks and the observations and the cannulas and the hospital gown and all of it. But this was the moment I decided enough was enough. I was not going to let that happen again. I told the nurses, as clearly as I could, that this was my limit. They understood immediately. And from that moment, getting the catheter out and getting myself to the toilet under my own steam became my primary mission.
I achieved it. And I am unreasonably proud of that fact.
It sounds like a small thing. It wasn't.
Because that moment — that decision, that line in the sand — was the moment I stopped just existing in that hospital bed and started actively fighting my way out of it. Every physio exercise after that had more purpose. Every small improvement in strength felt like a victory I'd chosen rather than something that had just happened to me.
I also spent a lot of time reading. Research, mostly — about the treatment I was going to have, about response rates, about outcomes. There's a point, when you read enough, where you stop being afraid of the statistics and start reading them differently.
Twenty years ago, stage 4 melanoma would almost certainly have killed me. Quickly. There wasn't much to be done. Today, the picture is almost unrecognisably different. Modern immunotherapy — the combination I'm about to start — is producing response rates and long term outcomes that the medical community is still catching up with. The treatments are too new for the full data to exist yet. But what data there is points somewhere genuinely hopeful. Not just survival. Remission. In some cases, complete remission.
I'm planning for thirty years. Not two or three. Maybe one day, when I'm Alan's age — in my seventies or eighties, having had a full and good life — the fight might look different. That's fine. That's a life well lived.
But that's not today's plan. Today's plan is immunotherapy, recovery, West Ham next weekend, and Italy somewhere down the line.
Alan, I hope, is doing okay.
He was a good roommate. Better than he knew.
