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Blokes know their faces. And their necks. It comes from shaving. Or trimming a beard, I guess. So, when I stared in the mirror on the morning of 30th November, I knew that something was different. My extra chins had acquired a new spoiler. My neck had been pimped, overnight, but not in a uniform way. The left side looked as I expected it to look; pock-marked from five decades of acne, sure, but it curved inwards from the jawline and continued straight down to the clavicle bone. The right side however, made me look like a hamster. Immediately below my jaw, the skin protruded so much that, for a couple of inches, the jawline was almost lost; the cheek just kept going downwards for a couple of inches.

I had a lump in my neck.

What the fuck?

I pressed it, poked at it and moved it around. It was soft and malleable and it didn’t hurt. I had no idea what that meant.

I carried on with my day, wondering if it would disappear overnight, as fast as it had come.

It didn’t.

It grew.

By the second morning, I couldn’t take my eyes off it. How could I? It was enormous.

It wasn’t sticking out any further but it had spread right and left, or forward and back, I suppose. It now looked like I’d swallowed a ping-pong ball that had got stuck in the right side of my throat.

Janet was in the Midlands with her Mum for  a few days but she was due back later that day. That evening I decided to take some photos of my new friend.

The morning of Day 3 was one of relief. It hadn’t got any bigger. I took a few photos and then started the ridiculous process of trying to contact a medical practitioner.

The Anima app is the most soulless way of trying to get in touch with your doctor. It’s a list of questions, some of which you get to qualify your YES/NO answer with a few words of explanation. At the end of the process you get the chance to attach some photos before you send the whole request off. The four photos were the most powerful aspect of the whole thing, to be honest.

My phone rang a few minutes later. Could I come in at 11.45?

“I’ve got a doctor’s appointment later.”

“What for?”

I showed Janet my neck. She looked shocked.

“How long have you had that?”

“Three days. It just appeared, overnight.”

“Well, at least you’ve done something about it. Are you worried?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“A bit, I suppose.”

“Well, let’s see what they say and we’ll deal with it.”

The doctor asked if she could press it. I nodded.

“It’s soft and malleable so I don’t think it’s anything sinister. If it was cancerous it would be hard and rigid.”

I nodded again. There it was. The ‘c’ word.

“We’ll need an ultrasound scan of it, just to be sure. They’ll need a blood test first so I’ll book that here, with the nurse.”

The text with the appointment for the blood test appeared on my phone just as I got home.

Things were moving quickly. I was well aware what that meant.

The blood test was on Tuesday 9th December and the ultrasound was booked for 17th, at the Royal Berkshire Hospital in Reading.

They called my name and I squeezed Janet’s hand. There were two people in the small room; a girl wearing a mask and a lad who was just putting a mask on. The girl looked me in the eye and explained what she was going to do. She also explained that she was deaf.

The scan was not unpleasant, just some cold gel on a hand-held instrument that she moved over and around the lump. She asked me to turn my head so that she could scan the left side of my neck, as a reference, and then repeated the scan on the lump for a second time. This time I could half-see the screen she was looking at. It looked exactly like the screen you see when a pregnant woman is having an ultrasound scan. Except there was no baby in the image.

And no ping-pong ball.

She explained that she thought it was a blockage in the lymph nodes and not to worry.

By the time we got home, the follow-up appointment came through on my phone for Tuesday 30th, at 8.50am, at Townlands Hospital in Henley.

On the Monday we went racing at Newbury, our last race-meeting of our 2025 membership year. Just after we had nabbed a table in the Members Lounge, Janet became unwell. She had a searing pain in the back of her head and felt nauseous. The paramedics ran some tests and advised me to take her to hospital.

We arrived at A&E at the Royal Berks at midday.

I left at 11.30 that night, assured that they were keeping her in as a precaution and to run a lumber puncture procedure in the morning. We both knew that this meant Janet would not be with me at my follow-up consultation the next morning.

That was a tough farewell.

As it turned out, Janet sat in an armchair all night as there were no beds available.

I arrived early for my appointment and went up two floors to the Ear, Nose & Throat Department. Within two minutes I was in with a doctor and she was asking me about the History of the Lump.

Having answered her questions she explained that she was going to put a camera up my nose so that she could look at the back of my tongue and my throat. I suppose that Covid tests have prepared us for pushing things so far up our nose that we think we’ll damage our brain so this procedure wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever had. In fact, taking the camera out was worse than putting it in but, in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t too bad. It was probably better that I hadn’t known about it in advance. I probably wouldn’t have slept a wink.

[The doctor’s words are verbatim. Because I was on my own, I recorded the conversation, so that I didn’t miss anything.]

“Okay, that’s good. There’s not too much to see there. The back of the tongue is a little bit lumpy. It’s just tonsil-tissue back there, like tonsils in the back of the throat, but on the back of the tongue.

In your particular age group there is a chance that this could be related to a cancer. Usually what happens is you have a small cancer at the back of the tongue or sometimes in the tonsil, although less likely for you as the tonsils are gone, and it sends out little seeds to one of the glands in the neck. If this is what it is then it’s early, very early. So that’s one possibility.

Another possibility is it’s a different type of cancer that affects the blood system, called Lymphoma. Whatever it is, it’s early, so we’re going to find it, we’re going to catch it, we’re going to get you treatment for it, okay? And the outcomes are very good, okay? But we need to know which of these things it is first.

So that means a number of other tests. The 1st thing is a biopsy of this lump, and that means they’ll put a little bit of local anaesthetic into the skin around the area, and put a needle in, and take a sample of the lump, send it off to the lab. It’ll take them 10 days or 2 weeks to process that.

Also I want to do an MRI scan, which is a noisy one. And then we can take some really nice pictures of the inside here.

And then we should also do a 3rd type of scan that’s like a CT scan and it just scans everything. It’s a sort of full body phase to make sure we’re not missing anything.”

My brain was a bit scrambled and I told her about our big trip to New Zealand, in mid-February. She asked if we had insurance and my scrambled brain thought she was talking about private health insurance, to speed up the process.

She wasn’t. She was talking about travel insurance. I knew then that our trip was off.

“Okay, so, um, I think there is a reasonable likelihood that this is going to turn out to be cancer.  We’ll know that within about 3 weeks. So by the time we get the scans, we get the biopsy done, we get the biopsy results back, I would say I would be seeing you again in three, 3.5 weeks, something like that.

If we did prove that that’s what it was, then most of the time, the treatment for this is chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and the oncology team would want to start you on that within two to four weeks, something like that time.

All right. Is there anything you want to ask me?”

I felt like I was swimming through thick fog and starting to panic because I’m a terrible swimmer.

I asked if there was anything I could do or anything I had done to have brought it on.

“No, not at all. So either of the two, if we, you know, if we say that it’s likely to be a cancer diagnosis, there are the 2 types that we’re thinking about. 
One of them, the lymphoma, is sort of just random bad luck, as it were. There might have been something built into your genetic code that’s made you more likely to get that than anybody else. With the other one, the one that we deal with mostly here, where you get a little bit of, you know, something small at the back of the tongue and it seeds out to the neck. 
That one, that is most commonly related to something called the human papaloma rolls, if you’ve heard that in the news, HPV, and it’s what we’re vaccinating boys and girls against now when they turn 12. And it is something which the majority 90% of the population are exposed to early on in life so you know teens 20s 30s were exposed to it. 
And some people just don’t manage to clear it in the same way as other viruses and 30-40 years down the line. We see that it causes some cancers at the back of the tongue. 
So I would say that’s the most likely cause if it were that. And if it’s the lymphoma type, again, it’s it’s just completely random. And you’ve been unlucky. 
So either way, it’s nothing that you’ve done. It’s not related to previous lifestyle habits, anything like that. It’ll be totally random, totally unlucky.”

I asked about the chemotherapy, how long it lasts.

“It’s usually 6 weeks and sometimes you have some chemotherapy before the radiotherapy, sometimes you have it alongside. Generally, the treatment, the total treatment is 6 weeks or a little bit longer, 6 to 8 weeks, something like that. And it’s fairly intensive for that period of time. And then there’s a recovery period after that. We can, you know, we can cross all of these bridges, if that is the situation.

All right. So, let’s see. I will request, everything as very urgent, and it’s all gonna get done very quickly, okay?

If you have questions and things in the meantime, just ring the admin team, and one of us will get back to you. They’re all working over New Year and into next week and things. So there’s always somebody around. So if you need something, then you ring, one of us will get back to you, but it’s a bit of a waiting game, and this is probably the worst bit. We don’t know what the answer is yet, exactly, so I can’t be very specific with you about it.

And don’t go and Google stuff.

It’s the worst that you can do because you get a lot of misinformation and a lot of, you know, people’s experiences and people tend to write about the bad stuff, not the, you know, the success stories and the ones that go smoothly.”

I thanked her and left in a complete daze.

I phoned Janet and, obviously there were tears. She felt so guilty that she hadn’t been there but I assured her that I’d been fine and that the horrible circumstances were to blame, not her.

“It’s a cluster-fuck,” I said, to make her laugh.

She still wasn’t ready to be picked up so I adopted my consolation position and found a cafe for a coffee, a cake and a think.

I remember that the World Cup winning rugby player, Josh Lewsey, was at the next table, playing a game with his daughter, and that the cafe was busy and buzzy, just how I like it. I sat for a long time, thinking about what had just happened, and how I felt about it.

Was I scared? No.

Did I think I was going to die? No.

Did I think the holiday would happen, maybe next year? Yes.

I picked Janet up on the road outside the front of the hospital and there more tears and apologies, despite my protests. I knew what she meant and I’d have felt the same if the roles were reversed.

Shortly after we got home my phone rang and it was a very Italian nurse from the RBH Radiology Department wanting to book the MRI scan. I took the first time she offered; 8.15 am on the Sunday after New Year.

The following morning, they phoned to book the biopsy for the Wednesday 7th and, while we were at The Hand & Flowers for lunch, Radiology phoned again to book ‘the big one,’ the PET CT scan for the morning of the 8th. That was it; all three tests booked within two days and all happening within five days of each other. The NHS was motoring, which was exactly what we wanted.

Bring it on; let’s get this thing started.