The next few days in hospital and the emotions I went through have all become a bit of a blur. Thoughts whirred around in my head at 100mph. My first real thought was simply the fragility of life. That no matter how big and confident we feel, we will always be fragile and vulnerable; there is something, somewhere more powerful than us. That was the first biggie to get my head around.

Then I started to face my own mortality. Thoughts of my funeral played over and over in my head. How I would want roses placed in my coffin, and that I’d want to be buried wearing that lace vintage dress I’d seen in a shop. Then the anger came – and it surged. It lifted its evil head and roared 'Why me? What have I done to deserve this? This is so unfair, why me, why me, why me?' This was by far the hardest part to come to terms with.

But of course you can’t think like that and we all know positive thinking saves the day. So I cried a lot, talked about it all even more and thought to myself fuck this, I’m going to kick cancer up the fucking ass and out of my fucking body. And then Doris Day’s "Que sera, sera, whatever will be will be" played in my head over and over again for about a week – fucking all I needed.

I surprised myself with how quickly I started to make sense of my fate and the road to acceptance began. I knew that the only way to get through this was to accept it, cease all control and hand my trust over to the medical professionals who were going to look after me on this long journey. And I will never, ever forget for the rest of my life my mum coming in to my hospital room and saying to me "I just know you’re going to be okay." By far the most reassuring sentence in my life to date. So simple, yet so perfect and suddenly I knew I would be – I would be okay.

DIAGNOSIS

My diagnosis was a long, hard, frustrating road. I met my wonderful consultant, Chris Kinetchli, on day four of being in hospital. He also said that due to my symptoms and my age, he was pretty certain I had Hodgkin's. But of course to confirm this I needed a scan and a biopsy. So it started with a CT scan. A very strange experience where you basically lie on a very thin bed and get moved through a weird mini tunnel. Once inside, a man talked over an intercom telling me to breathe deeply, then a nurse came out from a little room and injected me with some dye which made me feel hot all over, in particular in my genital area – so I thought for a moment I’d pissed myself and then that was it. CT scan smashed.

My biopsy was much more unpleasant. I was still in hospital, and given no warning that I was going to have it. They had managed to get me a slot and so wanted to quickly fit me in. I was wheeled down to the ultrasound lab and waited, not knowing what the hell was going to happen. Once inside the radiographer used ultrasound to locate a lymph node very close to my clavicle. Once he found it he gave me three injections of anaesthetic in my neck and then got to work. He made a small incision in my neck with a scalpel and then using a very large needle, I mean the size of a knitting needle, he prodded around in my neck to find the node. Of course this didn’t hurt, but I could feel his every move, inside my neck. I felt extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time completely trusted this stranger I had only known for 10 minutes. He took the needle out, thank fuck it was over. Oh no, no, no, no I wasn’t getting off that lightly. He did the same procedure again three times and managed to biopsy two bits of tissue to be sent to the lab. I said my thanks and got out of that room pretty bloody quickly.