Having cancer and enduring relapses is a bit like living through a cup competition.  With each round the competition gets that bit tougher.  In football terms it’s like starting with Brighton and Hove Albion (or “Brighton and Herb Albion” as my mother once frantically wrote trying to make a note of an FA Cup draw on Radio 2 for me sometime in the early 80’s), going on to play Arsenal and then ending up having to beat Barcelona.

My first relapse didn’t feel like too much of a shock simply because it came so quickly after Brighton had been despatched in round one (might as well really stretch this metaphor).  I finished ABVD in the Spring of 2009 and by the summer the symptoms were back and a stiffer challenge lay in wait.  The symptoms were pretty innocuous – my legs were really itchy.  The only pain I encountered was from occasionally banging my head on the desk at work when I bent down to scratch them (I’m really not kidding).

So, it was time for another round of investigations.  I went back to the same surgeon who’d done the initial biopsy and he wasn’t too keen to start poking about in the area at the base of my neck where the Hodgkin’s had reappeared: “I’m not going down there, it’s tiger country”.  It reminded me a of a conversation we’d had after the first, failed biopsy, when all this kicked off.  I never really got a full explanation of the ‘dead end’ that they came to in my chest where bits seemed to be fused together that shouldn’t have been, like overdone lasagna welded to an oven dish.

Eventually CT and PET scans confirmed the diagnosis that the cancer was back.  This time the hospital in Slough referred me on to the Churchill in Oxford, where I would mean the legend that is Dr Chris Hatton and face, appropriately enough for the “Arsenal” of Hodgkin’s, the heavy artillery.

So, the clock winds back to the Autumn of 2008 and my first experience of being part of a chemistry experiment.  I had no real idea of what chemotherapy involved, how it was administered or how it worked.  All I knew was that it made you feel sick.  Ironically, I’ve never felt ill with Hodgkin’s, it’s only the treatment that’s made me feel poorly.

The first surprise was the length of the ABVD regimen.  I thought 6 to 8 ‘cycles’ would take a matter of weeks, so I was gobsmacked when that translated into 6, or even 8 months.

I was very fortunate to be treated by the team at the Eden Unit at Wexham Park in Slough, a hospital that gets a bad press for a variety of reasons, but was and is a first class establishment in my eyes – at least from my experience of its cancer care.  A lesson I had to learn very early on was the need to be patient…there’s a reason we’re called that after all.  I got to treatment number 4 of a potential 16 part cycle and felt great that we (“we”, because it’s a team effort after all) were a quarter of the way through.  Two weeks later I felt down that we were only at treatment 5 – it didn’t feel like much of a milestone at all.  The next 7 months of fortnightly visits to Slough stretched out like an interminable chemical desert.

Eventually I got into a rhythm with the chemo.  I’d go into Wexham on a Friday morning feeling 36 years old and leave 4 hours later, feeling about 76.  I was lucky that the ABVD gave me no really difficult side effects to deal with and I was usually back at work by Wednesday of the following week.  Fortunately, my fast paced, thrill a minute roller coaster ride of a job as an accountant in Bracknell always gave me something to look forward to.  I just couldn’t wait to get back (but I’ll talk about work some other time).

I remember being in B&Q the Saturday morning after my first treatment lugging tiles around and thinking something along the lines of, ‘this is going to be a piece of cake’.  Sunday passed in a similar vein, but then Monday arrived…. .   After most chemo sessions they send you home with a party bag of drugs to try and counteract the various side effects.  The steroids I was taking kept me perky for a couple of days immediately following treatment, but that was followed by a slide into flu or hangover like symptoms for a couple of days afterwards.  The pattern repeated itself with Groundhog day-esque predicability until the treatment finished.

That was the toughest aspect of ABVD – simply the monotony of it, the routine.  The post chemo bounce back to feeling human again got a little lower each time, so each time I was getting that bit more worn down.  It was partly patience, letting go of that need to rush through and taking each day as it came that helped me get through.  You learn, very quickly, when having treatment how you have to change your own mindset, choose your mood and just take it as much as you can in your stride.  It isn’t always easy – in fact there are occasions when it’s been impossible.  I’m sure even the most positive minded people have had days when they’re just feeling too ill or too angry to distance themselves from their treatment and see the light at the end of the tunnel.  Fortunately you soon learn that those moments pass.

After 6 months the scans looked good and it was a cause of some celebration when they removed my PICC line and told me that I didn’t need the remaining 4 cycles or 8 sessions of chemo.

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a brief reprieve.  ABVD had been merely an aperitif before the main course, a skirmish before full blown hostilities….

I never had the big Hollywood, “Mr Phillips, you’ve got cancer moment”.  Each time  there seem to be a slow inexorable drift towards a diagnosis like the grinding, shifting, descending of tectonic plates.  The lump on my neck, which the GP’s at Binfield Surgery in Berkshire took it in turns to ignore, eventually led to a referral to a Haematologist in Windsor.  This was after I’d casually mentioned it again during a GP consultation for tennis elbow – thank God my guitar playing was so inept that it was causing physical disfigurement as well as aural pain.  Even then, the haematologist wasn’t impressed with the lump and Hodgkins wasn’t really mentioned until we got deeper into the process.  The scan that followed was precautionary and the feeling at the time was that this was ‘nothing serious’.

There have been numerous moments of dark, unintentional comedy along the way.  Perhaps the first was receiving a voicemail before dawn in a New York hotel room.  In a nutshell the voicemail from the consultant said something like, “There’s a problem with the scan, but I’m off to Australia so see you in 3 weeks”.  Well, what the hell did that mean?

There followed a CT scan, PET (I think), one unsuccessful and one successful biopsy operation at Harefield and we eventually stumbled to a diagnosis around the time of the Beijing Olympics.  I say this, not because it curtailed my plans to compete, more that it’s a useful temporal landmark.

The surgeon called me at home: “It’s Hodgkins, but at least it’s not something more horrible”.  “Well”, I thought, “Thank Goodness for that”.  It seemed at least, pretty horrible to me at the time.  And so we embarked upon our first voyage into sometimes choppy chemical seas.  The first chemo was a 6 month course of ABVD, but more of that anon…

Well, it took around 2 months to get here….from that moment I stepped off the scales and thought ‘shit’, or something even less polite than that, to the first visit to the Churchill Hospital in Oxford for another crack at curing Hodgkins.  A routine visit to the gp quickly snowballed into something more sinister (not a particularly evil looking snowman – sentence two and I’m already mangling my metaphors – maybe we’ll put that down to the chemicals) and here I am now a day after the first round of chemo feeling dazed, but not debilitated.

I’d often wondered what a relapse would feel like so long after the end of my last treatment.  I’d speculated that it would feel like a significantly crueller blow than my first relapse which came quite quickly after the first round of treatment had finished.  It turns out I was right.  It wasn’t a whole lot of fun.  My wife and I dealt with it in a stoical British manner, by eating out a lot and drinking as much decent wine as humanly possible.  I don’t know that the’s the recommended approach and I’m sure you won’t see that many articles in the Lancet on using 300 gallons of Rioja, Malbec and Sauvignon Blanc to take the edge off before the chemical onslaught, but then neither of my consultants seemed to discourage it.