I now know roughly how the rest of my treatment will go - had an appointment with the surgeon on Thursday.

The general spirit of cancer care seems to be “Nuke it from orbit”, probably because researchers are only starting to explore more fine-tuned, individualized therapies.

So after having systematically made me ill for about 18 weeks, the next step is to remove the bit of flesh that started growing wild. Fortunately for me nothing mandates the removal of the whole breast, so I’m going with what is termed affectionately ‘Lumpectomy’ - a smaller intervention that will happen mid-June. This also means I won’t be staying in hospital, so yay beds for the NHS, and yay for me.

After the intervention I’ve got to heal and rest for about a month. A month?!!?? I asked, adding that as a software engineer surely I didn’t fall under ‘heavy manual labour’. But yes, a month. It’s to get me rested and ready for the next step, which is three weeks of radiotherapy. Also I heal slower because the chemotherapy.

The idea of radiotherapy didn’t really fill me with confidence - focused x-ray, for a few seconds every day on the guilty breast. Wait a minute, wasn’t radiation supposed to cause cancer?

It turns out we’re in a numbers game: extensive studies and research have found that radiotherapy does help to reduce re-occurence of the cancer statistically, and only a very very small statistic does get cancer from it. So if I’m average this it should be good for me. And let’s face it, I’m costing the NHS a lot of money, so they would definitely favour me not coming back for seconds.

All in all, in 11 weeks I could be out of the woods, and hopefully cancer will be nothing but an edifying memory that will allow me to empathise with more people. Hopefully.