My Journey

1. The First Sign

Life was moving at its usual pace until mid–2024, when I noticed a swelling around my umbilicus. It didn’t feel dramatic. More like something small that needed checking.

After tests, it was diagnosed as a relatively standard hernia — nothing unusual, nothing worrying, just something that needed fixing.

I accepted that. A simple problem. A simple solution.

2. The Operation That Wasn’t What It Seemed

Twelve months later, I went into hospital for a straightforward day-case operation — a 30-minute procedure to reinforce the weakened area with mesh.
Quick in, quick out, a few weeks of recovery.

But when I woke up, something felt off.

The procedure hadn’t taken thirty minutes.
It had taken almost ninety.

Nobody suggested anything had gone wrong, so I didn’t think much more of it… at the time.

3. The Call That Changed Everything

A week later, the hospital phoned.
They wanted me to come in for a CT scan because they had found “something unusual” during the operation.

Those two words stayed in my mind.

A few days later, they invited me back — this time to see the head of the colorectal department.

That alone told me things weren’t routine anymore.

Medical context for the writing on this site is outlined in My Diagnosis.

4. The Diagnosis

The news was devastating.

It wasn’t a hernia at all.
It was cancer.
And not just cancer — a rare type of cancer.

In one sentence, life split into before and after.

That was the moment the journey began — not by choice, but by reality.

5. Between Diagnosis and Surgery

After the diagnosis, everything changed — but at the same time, nothing changed fast enough.

I was referred to The Christie in Manchester on 22 July 2025.
That alone felt enormous: the sense that I was now in the hands of specialists who understood this rare cancer, who had seen it before, who knew what to do next.

But once the referral was sent, there was nothing to do except wait.

There’s a strange quiet that comes after life-changing news.
You expect chaos, urgency, alarms going off — but there’s just… time.
Too much of it.

6. The First Visit to The Christie

On 10 September 2025, I walked into The Christie for the first time for a full consultation and treatment outline.

It’s hard to describe that day.

On the surface, it was practical:

• discussions
• explanations
• timelines
• questions
• the shape of what lay ahead

But underneath, it was heavy.
The kind of heavy that doesn’t show on your face but sits in your chest, in your breathing, in the way you try to keep focused while your mind tries to wander anywhere else.

This was the first time the whole plan was laid out in front of me.
Surgery.
Recovery.
Risks.
Realities.
What they hoped to achieve.
What might happen instead.

It made everything feel undeniably real.

7. The Preparations Begin

Only five days later, on 15 September, I went for vaccinations:
Flu, Pneumonia, and Meningitis.

The kind of injections you usually associate with winter planning or travel — but now they were a shield for what lay ahead.

The next day, 16 September, I was back at The Christie for a full round of tests:

• CT scans
• Blood tests
• Pre-op assessments

Each appointment was mechanical and necessary, but each one also chipped away at the barrier between “this is happening” and “this is happening to me.”

And then came more waiting.

Waiting, I’ve learned, is a quiet form of endurance.
It doesn’t look dramatic from the outside, but internally it’s a constant negotiation with your own thoughts.

8. The Final Preparations

On 13 October 2025, everything shifted into a different kind of difficulty.

Bowel preparation with Plenvu.

Clinically, it’s just another step before surgery.
In reality, it was one of the hardest days of the entire journey so far.

Plenvu is unpleasant at the best of times — but for me, it was horrendous.
There’s no polite language that really captures what it does to your body.
It’s violent.
Draining.
Exhausting in a way that hits both physically and mentally.

You spend the day running between the bathroom and moments of fragile stillness.
Your body feels emptied out, overworked, unsteady.
Your mind is constantly jumping between fear, anticipation, and the sheer discomfort of the moment.

In some ways, it was worse than the day of the surgery itself.
Surgery happens to you.
Plenvu happens through you — and you feel every bit of it.

And by the end of that day, I wasn’t just tired.
I was depleted.
Completely rung out.

Yet there was no choice but to keep going.
The next morning was surgery.
There was no backing out, no slowing down, no pause.
Just a small, brief breath before the biggest day of my life.

9. Surgery Day — 14 October 2025

The morning of 14 October 2025 was quiet in a strange way.
Not calm — just quiet.

After the brutality of the Plenvu day, surgery almost felt abstract.
There was nothing more to prepare, nothing more to do.
Just hand yourself over, walk into the hospital, and trust the people waiting for you.

It’s a strange thing, going into surgery knowing how much rests on it.
Knowing how long the road has been to reach that single moment.
Knowing you’re stepping into something that will change your life in ways you can’t predict.

Everything funneled into that morning.
Everything after begins there.

10. The In-Between

I arrived at the hospital at around seven.

From there, I was moved into a space that felt deliberately separate from everything outside it. Not the ward. Not the theatre. A holding area of sorts — where preparation replaced choice, and the world narrowed.

From that point on, people appeared steadily. One after another. Each with something to confirm, something to explain, something that needed acknowledging or signing.

My name.
My date of birth.
What I understood was about to happen.

Consent forms. Explanations. Risks laid out clearly and carefully. Reassurances delivered with calm professionalism. Everyone needed confirmation that I knew who I was, and that I agreed to what was coming.

It was efficient. Kind. Repetitive.

I answered the same questions again and again. Not because anyone had forgotten — but because this was the system doing what it was designed to do. Each step checking the last. Each person responsible for their part before handing me on.

It felt strangely unreal.

This was the space between worlds. The last place where conversation still happened naturally. The last place where I was fully awake, fully present, and still recognisably myself.

By the time there was a brief lull — nothing to sign, nothing to confirm — the preparation was complete. The outside world already felt distant. The paperwork, the explanations, the permissions were all in place.

All that remained was to walk into the theatre.

11. Being Taken Through

The walk to theatre was stranger than I expected.

I wasn’t alone. Walking alongside me was the person who would later carry out the HIPEC stage of the operation. At the time, that detail meant very little. I knew who they were in abstract terms — a role, a responsibility — not yet the weight they would come to carry in my story.

Once inside, I sat on the edge of the bed while the epidural was inserted. It was a practical instruction, delivered calmly, and I followed it without hesitation. Then a cannula in my hand.

I remember being asked if a junior could do it.

I said yes.

That moment has stayed with me, not because it was significant, but because it was ordinary. A small act of agreement inside something overwhelmingly large. One more confirmation. One more handover of control.

After that, there is nothing.

I don’t remember the anaesthetic. No countdown. No drifting. Just absence.

The next thing I knew, more than ten hours had passed. I was waking in recovery, with no sense of how time had moved at all.

12. Waking

The recovery room was surreal.

Pain arrived before clarity. Not as a single sensation, but as something that kept breaking through the haze in sharp, insistent fragments. Around me, people were busy — purposeful, practiced, moving with familiarity that made it clear this was not an unusual day for them.

My awareness came in snippets. Brief moments of being awake, followed by slips back into something softer and less defined. I would surface, register a detail — a voice, a movement, a sensation — and then disappear again.

At some point, without any sense of transition, I was no longer in recovery. I was in critical care.

There was no journey that I remember. No handover. Just a different room, and the sudden awareness that I was tethered to machines whose purpose I didn’t understand. Lines, monitors, cables — all quietly doing their work without explanation or ceremony.

Time behaved strangely there. Minutes stretched out, heavy and slow, while the room itself carried on as normal. There was no silence. No dimmed lights. Conversations continued. Equipment beeped. Life, elsewhere, was uninterrupted.

Lying there, it became clear to me — not dramatically, not with panic — that my life had changed that day.

That thought has stayed with me.

13. What the Diary Revealed

In hospital, I kept brief notes.

They weren’t written with any intention beyond getting things out of my head and onto a page. Often they were made while tired, medicated, or in pain. Sometimes they were practical. Sometimes flippant. Sometimes strangely focused on details that, in retrospect, seem unimportant.

Reading them back later was unsettling.

Not because they were dramatic — but because of how different they were from the story memory eventually assembles. The diary doesn’t describe a clear sequence of days. It captures fragmentation. Repetition. Fixation on small physical milestones and minor discomforts. Long stretches where time seems distorted, followed by sudden jumps forward.

What stood out most was how narrow life became.

The world contracted to blood pressure readings, the ability to sit upright without dizziness, whether pain was present or merely tolerable. Energy was measured in minutes, not hours. Progress wasn’t a forward motion so much as a careful testing of limits, followed by retreat.

There’s very little reflection in those entries. No meaning-making. No sense of narrative arc. Just a body being managed, observed, and slowly coaxed back into some form of function.

That, I think, is what memory edits out.

With distance, it’s easy to compress those days into a single idea: recovery. The diary resists that. It shows how uneven, unglamorous, and ordinary the experience actually was — and how much of it was spent simply enduring, rather than improving.

Those notes exist as a record of that phase. Not to relive it, and not to dramatise it, but to acknowledge what the experience was like before there was perspective.

Some parts of this experience didn’t translate easily into reflection. While I was in hospital, I kept brief notes — often written while tired, medicated, or in pain. They’re unstructured and sometimes uncomfortable to read, but they capture the experience in a way hindsight can’t.

For anyone who wants to see that part of the journey as it was recorded at the time, the unedited hospital diary entries are available here.

14. Home Recovery

Coming home just six days after surgery didn’t feel like an ending.

There was relief, of course — familiar rooms, my own bed, the absence of constant monitoring — but it also marked the beginning of a different phase. One that was less defined, less supervised, and harder to measure.

Recovery at home has been about learning new baselines.

Physically, there is daily pain. Not severe, not alarming — but present. A low, persistent reminder that my body has been through something significant and is still adjusting. Energy is more limited now. Tasks that once passed unnoticed require pacing. Rest has become deliberate rather than incidental.

Psychologically, things have shifted too.

I’m more aware of my body than I ever was before. Sensations are noticed rather than ignored. Changes are monitored. Fatigue carries more weight. There’s a quiet vigilance that wasn’t there previously — not fear exactly, but attentiveness.

Life hasn’t stopped. It’s continued in familiar shapes: conversations, routines, plans made and adjusted. But it moves at a slightly different speed now, and within different constraints. What counts as a “good day” has changed. Progress is no longer measured by how much I can do, but by how well I manage what I choose to do.

What’s surprised me most is that this hasn’t felt like loss in the way I once imagined it might.

It’s more a process of accommodation — noticing what’s different, adjusting expectations, and carrying on anyway. Some days are easier than others. Some days the contrast with the past is sharper. But life remains recognisable. Meaning hasn’t disappeared. It’s just taken on a quieter tone.

This journey didn’t end with surgery, or with discharge, or even with recovery in the conventional sense. It continues — shaped by what happened, informed by it, but not defined entirely by it.

Life goes on.

Not unchanged, but still very much worth living.