The beautiful thing about having cancer, probably the only beautiful thing about having cancer, is that it opens your eyes, wide, to life and all its possibilities and meanings – the things that we as humans spend a lot of our time searching for. The “What the fuck’s this all about?” conundrum that is life. Especially life when you’re in your mid 20s and things have gone, er, slightly off track shall we say. The 20s are a confusing time as it is. Will I ever be successful? What even is success? What does success mean to me though? If I just drink green juices for three days will I be that thin, successful person I keep seeing on Instagram? Shall I just fuck this whole career thing off and go travelling? Work or play, work or play? Am I drinking too much? Why am I drinking so much? Is there some deeper meaning to life that I’m just not getting? Do you think I’m infertile? Fuck, what if I’m infertile and can’t have kids? Do I even want kids? Jesus, am I living in a city full of selfish wankers who just want to make money? Surely there’s more to life than this? Ahhh, fuck this, I'll order another drink. Up until about four months ago this was pretty much my internal monologue, day in day out, night out after night out. Searching, endlessly, for meaning, understanding and something I believed in.

I got cancer instead. A fast-moving, aggressive cancer at that. Or, as my consultant put it in my diagnosis report, “In a nutshell this is the description of very advanced Hodgkin’s disease with extensive lymphadenopathy above and below the diaphragm and clear evidence of skeletal, splenic, pericardial and pulmonary involvement. It is many years since I have encountered a patient presenting such advanced features.” WOW – hold on a minute, Doc. Advanced? Advanced features? Two months ago I was at a festival dancing like a twat with people I’d just met, glitter smeared all over my face. Now I’m lying in a hospital bed, a stone and a half lighter, with stage four “advanced” cancer.

At the start of this journey, or race out of hell as I’d like to rename it, my body went into survival mode. Medical jargon and new information was hurled at me 100 miles an hour, leaving no time for me to fully comprehend my situation. My body slowly started to shut down: my periods stopped, I slept constantly and my brain, the little fucking genius that it is, stopped processing information that was going to cause me too much stress or anxiety. Believe it or not, I hadn’t really grasped the idea that I had cancer and what this truly meant, the gravitas of the situation, or put quite simply, the fact that I was dying. The fact that if I hadn’t gone to the doctors when I did, if I hadn’t been diagnosed when I was, I would probably have died, and pretty fucking quickly at that. Instead, I went into survival mode, flight or fight, and fight I bloody did.