My previous post still makes me laugh, but it occurs to me that optimism and humour in it may not be immediately apparent to anyone else, and that eight months on it might be presenting a somewhat misleading picture both of my situation and my general mood. Seriously, I’m having a tremendous summer.

Well, the cancer did make an unexpected move. While attention was on my lungs, an enthusiastic new tumour appeared near where the kidney had been, doubling in size between three-month scans while the lung mets remained more or less unchanged. To counter that, I went into hospital, overnight, in March, to the same ward and the same bay as when I had the radical nephrectomy last year, and had Radio Frequency Ablation to blast it into oblivion. With the larger cancers taken out of the game, my body’s own defences are doing a grand job at the moment. Successive CT scans have shown one lung met diminish from 12 to 10 to 7 mm, and the other go from 7 to 6 to 0 mm. It’s disappeared. I didn’t even know that was possible.

So, this is my summer of spontaneous regression. The whole summer without hospital appointments, without scans, and with no need to start on any drug treatment, with all the potential side effects that that will one day entail. My stamina is good. I feel fitter and stronger than I have done for a long time. To look at me, no one would suspect there is any problem, and, however it may go in the future, for these months I can almost forget about it myself.