Anything else, any other side effects, did you feel tired after radiotherapy?

No I don’t think so, I think tiredness comes with it if you’re stressed up, I think that, it’s just relief. No I didn’t feel anything like that, I continued to work quite, quite normally.

I was leading a very active life. I was playing golf, I was going to the health club and working out three times a week and I though, well okay it’s not stopping me doing anything that I want to do, it’s not so bad after all. The GPs I worked with kept reassuring me that, you know, it’s probably slow growing, it probably won’t affect you, you’ll probably die of something else, all the things that I’ve since found GPs rely on to put patients at their ease, because I also found out that most GPs know very little about it.

The other big problem that I found throughout my illness is that you do get very fatigued, you get very tired from time to time, well particularly after the first 3 years. I found that I had to stop doing things, I found that I got too tired to play golf so I had to stop playing golf. I couldn’t go to the health club any more, that was too tiring and I began to think at that stage well I’m deteriorating you know things are getting worse which I suppose they were because it was affecting, starting to affect my lifestyle.

Were you still working?

That was about the time that I decided to stop working, I was by then 63 years old.

And I’m doing quite a physical job all day long, and if I went back 5 months ago I thought I’d never work again but it’s amazing how once you’ve turned that corner of about 4 or 5 months how you can recover from this operation. But, I must emphasise that in my case, I had more problems with my sciatica than I did with the operation. So it was an operation that I couldn’t actually work, I think I could have done light duties if I’d have worked in an office, I could have done light duties but when it came to doing the garden I found it a little bit hard through stamina and all that. But after I started work now which was back in approximately the end of May I’ve, it’s remarkable how I’ve made a recovery and I feel so fit now and I think the 6 months off has done me a world of good.

And often I think, well, ignorance is bliss – if you don’t know, you’re not worried. And I must confess I can’t say that I am seriously worried now, it is something that comes on you in waves, you do have periods of depression when you think oh golly I’ve got this, am I going to sort of do this next year or not, and then you have to just put it in perspective and say well you are or you aren’t, it’s not in your hands, you don’t have any choice you can only live your life as it is. And certainly the specialist did say to me right at the beginning ‘Whatever you do don’t stop doing anything. So I didn’t and I still play bowls 2 or 3 times a week which I thoroughly enjoy, I do my gardening, we go out, I enjoy life and I hope I’ll keep on enjoying life a lot longer.

I suppose the thing is to meet it square on, accept the fact that there will be as many bonuses in meeting it and dealing with it as there will pitfalls of having to meet it and deal with it. From a life point of view it certainly changed my attitude and changed my outlook on life, for the better as far as I feel. Because things were very important to me, for all the wrong reasons years ago, are less significant these days, and the things that perhaps were less significant for me are very, very important. That’s your family and the ability to say yes I’m still here, I’m still here to take part in whatever life is.

So has all this affected your view of the future at all, your whole philosophy of life?

Not a great deal, it’s made me less worried about the fact that I haven’t actually got very good pension provision because I’ve worked overseas much of my life and I work in a charity, or I’ve worked for charities of one sort or another and I haven’t built up much pension so I suppose in a way that’s a bit of a relief really you know I sort of recognise that I’m probably not going to be one of the statistical, one of the people who needs a statistical age expectancy for or above the statistical age expectancy for men. I actually work for a charity that works with older people and you know I mean I do see a lot of differences in the way people enjoy or otherwise their old age. So you know I’m quite, I’m quite sort of philosophical I suppose about having, I suppose I’m more interested in sort of good quality active living for as long as possible than say you know ending up may be sort of rather chronically ill so I suppose that does influence me a little bit yeah. But I cycle by the way and I also do yoga and both of those I think keep me reasonably mentally and physically fit, I think that’s quite helpful.