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.