The Unwelcome Guest

I’m fully aware there is something a bit performative about writing a cancer blog, I knew it from the start, and I know it now. Look at me banging on about my prostate cancer. It’s very self-regarding, but all writers like a subject and from the day in November 2017 when I received news of an unwelcome guest inhabiting my insides it’s been my subject. Or rather it used to be.

Looking back at this blog’s content you’ll see there hasn’t been much activity of late. This has been entirely intentional. I used to write and get paid for my musings by a US cancer website. I’d read every article I could find on the subject to see what new treatments might be on the way. I was a close watcher of other cancer blogs and substacks. I was a walking talking cancer commentator. After a while, and with my cancer in something of a rout and retreat I decided to walk away, enough cancer for a while. Frankly I was sick of it. Seven years was more than enough.

As readers will know I’ve always thought my cancer would likely return. Perhaps this is just another way of dealing with the superstition that if you say you’re cancer free then cancer would probably sidle up to you one day and say: Really? Yah think so?

All of which has probably got you thinking that Jim’s cancer has returned, but I’m here to tell you that so far it hasn’t.

Last year, having been free of the little bastard for five years, my treatment was passed back from Guy’s Cancer Centre to my GP. I now get a PSA test every January to see the state of play. The current reading, which I got yesterday, is a healthy 0.48 a little down from last year when it stood at 0.51. Only when it exceeds 2.0 do the alarm bells start to ring.

I always get a little nervous at this time of year with what I’ve previously described at Stats Angst. I was pondering this over the weekend. If the result was saint style as Bridget Jones used to say, then my life would wander on as it has been for the last year or so with the major worry being that I’m not practising the piano enough. If, however, the number was a shocker then things would look very different indeed. This is of course a statement of the entirely bleeding obvious, but it still had the ability to occupy my mind.

For a year I shall endeavour to worry about other things but not cancer. I still think it’s entirely possible that I’ll be back on the cancer beat at some point in the future but not today you little bastard, not today.