My unwanted new journey through a cancer diagnosis

When is a blog not a blog...

Who knew that a life in which all my “out” and professional time has been taken away could be so busy?

Who knew that it could feel so unremittingly awful once the chemo takes hold each week? Oh, only every other cancer patient in the world. Not a club any of us want to belong to, but hi there....

So, I've not written for a while. I got married (yay!). I've done eight of twelve of the first combo of chemos – paclitaxel and carboplatin, and the pembro, which I'll be taking for the whole of the year – and I'm still here. All the same, everything different.

Given that I need to catch up, and also write my current moment, I'm going to be as brief as possible about the last few weeks (this writing game is difficult, especially if you don't actually write...). Having said that, it's been an extraordinary time:

Getting married: it's like a shining beacon of happy, light and peace in my heart. Something to revisit when other parts get dark. S and I got married in the daytime near to where we live, looking out to the river from a building seeped in four hundred years of history. We go to the surrounding park nearly every day with our dogs; it's part of our world. Home.

Our fifty guests were our closest friends and family, not a soul there who didn't add a burning coal to the fire in our hearts. Inevitably there could have been more; but that's why plan A had involved a party the next day for 250!

More than this. S and I did nothing to get this wedding together. Nothing. Well, write a speech and organise the music (of course I had to do the music – but even there I had help finding the right musicians). The most communal wedding ever – someone liaised with the florist, another chose the food, others did the seating plan, others did all the printing, another friend agreed to be the celebrant, and others still organised all the food, drink and details of the continued celebration back home after the lunch.

Nothing.

It was so so beautiful.

Says the control freak.