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.