Dear Cancer,

Usually I would start penning a letter to someone significant with “how are you?” or perhaps “hope this finds you well”, but both of these conventional niceties seem wholly inappropriate when writing to you. I don’t particularly want to know how you are doing and I certainly don’t want to encourage your well-being. It has now been three years to the day since we kicked off this unusual relationship of ours and I figured I should mark this latest and unexpected cancerversary by recording some feelings and reflections.

Three years. Who’d have thought it? Three years ago today I was lying on a trolley in an American ER being put through a battery of initial investigations. I was in horrendous pain. My kidneys had given up the ghost. I left my dignity at the automatic doors of the hospital as I underwent the necessary intimate examinations. Scared doesn’t…