Oh, yeah, yeah. Nobody will insure me, so, you know, I can’t get house insurance, you know, for mortgages and things, which used to be, you used to have to. I don’t think you have to so much now but, so again, lucky for me because I had a partner and he was prepared to take it all on, that was fine, but if I didn’t have someone that was prepared to do that I would have had to have either not got a mortgage or I’d have had to have gone somewhere that was prepared to take me without insurance. Because I’ve now, especially now it’s three times, I’m now, I think after two times and after about ten or fifteen years I most probably just about, but now I’ve had it three times I’m most probably totally uninsurable. So, yeah, that has made a big difference, but that’s usually for anything money related.

Things like car insurance is fine. Things like, what was the other one, as I was saying before, if you go somewhere, like, for beauty treatments and stuff, they want you to either sign a disclaimer or they won’t even take you, so there are things like that. There was another one recently I went for. Oh, health insurance. Obviously, they won’t touch you with anything to do with cancer related, but if I’ve got a broken leg I’d be fine, but I don’t know, anything else. So yeah, it does mean that if anything does happen I have to rely on the NHS, the State or my job to back me up with regard to pay. So you do have to think about that.

I know some GP services you have to, you can’t always see the same one, but I think it’s always important to try and see the same one so they’ve got a continuity of your history and what you are going through etcetera, because otherwise you have to explain it all again and you get, because I think the notes will say things but they’re not necessarily, you know, someone can’t, they’re not going to read the whole load of, I think mine are about this thick, so they’re not going to go through all those every time. So it’s good to try and keep to the same GP and try not shift about, but I know that’s difficult when people are moving around the country.

I mean I’m fortunate, or not as the case may be. I mean this is one of the things that I said earlier about one of the effects has been that I have not moved away, and one of the reasons would have been because I would have been concerned about going to another hospital, another GP. Because by moving about you lose that continuity, and I think that’s really helped me and the service, and the support I’ve got. I think if I’d gone to lots of different hospitals and GPs they’d have all had different ways of dealing with me and I wouldn’t have got the consistency. So in one way it’s good that I’ve stayed, but in another way what it’s done is restrict my movement whether it’s for work or pleasure or

I’ve gone on holidays but I’ve just not moved away. So I know a friend of mine recently went on one of these sort of seven week, like, you know, worldwide tours type thing, because she never did it when she was younger. And again, that would have been something I’d have done as a youngster but by the time I could afford to go I’d already had it once and my mum just wouldn’t have let me out of the country for a week to France, let alone round the world for seven weeks. So I’ve missed out on that. I might do it later, and most probably will, but I didn’t do it then, and I think a lot of things I didn’t do because people were worried that I would fall foul of something, whether it was, you know, an odd disease in another country, or the stress of travelling, or whatever it was. So that coupled with not moving away from home is, as I say, a two edged sword. It’s meant that I’ve had consistent treatment, which has been great, but there are certain things I’ve missed out on from that point of view, but I’ll make up for it I’m sure.

There’s a term that some people use and it’s, you’ve probably heard it but it’s this term cancer survivor. What do you think of that term? I mean would you want that used to describe your situation?

It sounds like you can either choose to survive or you can’t, and I don’t know necessarily is that right? I think you can help yourself. it’s like I was saying before about being this positive about looking after yourself, about how you eat, how you keep yourself well etcetera. That can definitely I think help not only your physical, but also your outlook on life etcetera. So possibly survival from that point of view is a good term. I don’t know whether from a medical point of view, I don’t know, are you in the hands of the people that are dealing with you? Because I used to feel that, you know, I was in the hands of a good surgeon. I was in the hands of a good doctor and I had a good team of people around me etcetera.

Okay, and just in terms of whether you think about cancer. Do you ever worry about recurrences? I mean is that something that bothers you on a day-to-day basis?

Sometimes I do, yes, if I have got some twinges in places that I think either shouldn’t be there or are related to scars or tissue that I think is where they had operations before, I’ll think, Is it coming back? Isn’t it I’ll just sort of monitor it for a while. I’ll keep an eye on it. If it gets painful, or if it gets bigger, or if it’s something that’s there after a couple of weeks and I am still noticing it. Because often these things will come along for a day or two and then you forget about it, and then you think, Oh, well, that’s wasn’t that, was it. I’ve obviously overdone it or whateve. If it’s still there after a week or two weeks and I’m moaning about it and my partner says, Are you still moaning about that? You said that about a week ago about this, that and the othe. Then I think, Perhaps I ought to go and see somebod.

And that’s when I’ll go and see somebody about it, and invariably when I’ve been, luckily, so far it’s just turned out to be nothing, or they’ve just said, you know, it’s most probably a bit of scar tissu. You know, it does move about apparently, or it can, you know, as you change, you know, as you get older your body shape changes etcetera, it could be just it moving about. If it’s in the way they’re quite happy to open me up and move it about but I think I’d rather just leave it and just get on with it really. So no, apart from that, that’s the only time I tend to think about it. I don’t tend to on a day-to-day basis. It doesn’t worry me from that point of view.

Recently I was in a trawl for redundancy at work and there was an option to go for a, to take that, therefore meaning that I would then have to go and get another job.

And you have to think about by leaving somewhere that you’ve been for ten, fifteen, twenty years, to start again somewhere that you haven’t got that background and that they may have not, especially for two years, pay you sick pay and a) may not be prepared to take you on anyway if they knew about anything. It’s something you have to think about, so it does mean that you do get tied to places or organisations or places just because you have to think about what the risks are if you don’t.

What then happened was, after about two or three years of me going back full time, being normal’, working hard in my mid-twenties, I went to go for a promotion and because I’d been ill they sent me to the corporate doctor, not my doctor, their doctor. And he said that he, in his view, he didn’t think that I would be able to cope with the pressure of a promotion that would give me because I’d been ill.

And in retrospect I think that was to do with them being worried about if I did get, if I did take on the role and it did give me stress and then I went sick and then I, possibly, I wouldn’t say I’d have sued, I wouldn’t have sued them but they might have been thinking I might have gone back to them saying, You’ve given me too much to do and because I’ve been etcetera etceter. I think they were covering their back, if you like, and I was very disappointed in that because I’d said all the way along that I felt I was fit, which I was at the time actually. I was very fit because I was playing squash two or three times a week and I was quite capable of doing the job. I was doing quite a responsible job at the time and it was the next step up and it would have just been a natural progression.

And because of that, I got very resentful of the organisation, so therefore left and went on and did something else. Fortunately, after a couple of years I then went to the job that I’m in now, and I’ve been with them nearly twenty years, so it worked out okay in the end, but I could have then gone job hopping. What I do tend to do now is, if I get asked on a form whether I’ve had any treatments, sometimes I won’t say because I think that does hold you back or they will ask lots of questions or they’ll send you for a medical.