So I’m watching Dalek, the Dr Who episode where Christopher Eccleston’s Doctor comes face to face with the last remaining dalek imprisoned in a basement by a mad billionaire collector.  And, as daleks do, it escapes and a lot of redshirts get killed trying to stop it with bullets.

I mean, you’ve just watched all your colleagues get zapped and all their bullets bounce off it, but still you carry on firing?  There’s a bullshit line from the Doctor about the dalek being protected by a force field and if they concentrate their power they *might* get through, but really?  Does no-one think laterally?

What would you do if faced by a dalek?

Chuck a blanket or your coat or something over its eyestalk?

Drop a five ton weight on top of it?

Pump concrete into the room where it is till it’s encased?

Good grief, arm all your soldiers with cans of silly string and spray it till it disappears under a giant multi-coloured ball of string …

But don’t just keep firing bullets at it when you can see that it doesn’t work, OK?  Feel free to leave further suggestions in comments.

You might have noticed I haven’t been around on this blog for a while.  I had cancer, basically.

In February I was feeling depressed and a fellow PhD student suggested I get a sick note to take the pressure of a university deadline off me.  So I went to my doctors and explained I was depressed and they, bless their hearts, wrote me the sick note but also said they wanted to do some tests to rule out a couple of things.  So we ruled out ovarian cancer and … then we found endometrial cancer.

It was a Grade III (which means it was the tricksy kind of bugger that’ll kill you) but, after I went and had a hysterectomy, turned out to have been at Stage 1a, which means it’s wholly contained within the womb (and the womb is an organ they can take out and throw away so #fuckcancer to you, endometrium!) and hadn’t yet spread to the blood vessels.

So my fellow student and my GP between them more than likely saved my life, or at least made the difference between a 5% survival rate at five years (for a Grade III Stage 4) and a 95% survival rate at five years, which is what you get if you’re Grade III Stage 1a.

I have to go back every three months to be checked, and at the moment I’m getting over what turned out to be major abdominal surgery – they were originally hoping to do a robot assisted piece of Living In The Future wizardry but it turned out I had to have the Old Style zip-fastener-up-the-midriff version – but I’m remarkably OK.  And remarkably grateful still to be here at all.

Repeat after me.  #fuckcancer.  And, god bless the NHS.