Greetings all! As some of you may know, I’ve got some pretty interesting health stuff going on in my life right now, which is meant I’ve had to put a lot of stuff on hold. I thought that for both my and your ( family / friends / ‘fans’ ) benefit it would be good to take a minute to explain everything thats been going on with me and bring everyone up to speed. This feels very strange and arrogant that I assume enough people care for me to go to the effort of typing this all out, but it just seems the right thing to do to have everything clear and in the same place.

So the whole story starts on Mother’s Day (Sunday 26th March, a day after getting home from our little run of shows in March). All that happened at this point is that I noticed that my neck was kinda swollen. I didn’t think much of it as it wasn’t painful, and other than the lump, I felt absolutely fine. A couple of days went past, and the lump was still there. After encouragement from my family, I decided to go to see my GP (Thursday 30th March), and he informed me that I might have Lymphoma, a type of cancer which affects your lymphatic system. He booked me in for several tests (blood tests, chest x-ray, an ultrasound on my neck, and a biopsy on my neck) and two weeks later, I had a definite diagnosis of Hodgkins Lymphoma.

This feels like a good point to take a side note to discuss the word ‘cancer’. In my experience, I’ve found that people find it a very scary word – to the extent that I’ve started to feel melodramatic when telling people about my diagnosis. People hear ‘cancer’ and their minds immediately move to death and other grim conclusions. Although this is definitely one reality of cancer (and I can’t claim for a second to have seen the worse of it), I am lucky enough to sit within a surprisingly friendly bracket of it. I’m trying to be careful not to make sweeping statements like ‘CANCER ISNT AS BAD AS YOU THINK IT IS’ etc etc, I’m just trying to make the point that although cancer obviously f*cking sucks, it doesn’t always mean death and gloom, etc, and in my case I’ve actually been pretty damn lucky.

The phrase I’ve been using to describe Hodgkins Lymphoma is ‘very treatable’, and in my particular case I’ve been as lucky as you can be. The cancer is still stage 1 so we’ve caught it early, and if all progresses well then I should only have to do 2 rounds (2 months) of chemo, followed by a couple of weeks of radiotherapy before I’m cancer free and on track to be a normal human being again. On top of this, all of my family and friends and co-workers/bandmates have been beyond understanding and loving, and have made this entire process as easy as it could have been up to this point. It seems like a strange thing to say, but so far (touch wood) the entire process has kind of gone perfectly? From getting cancer onwards, everything has gone as smoothly and as perfectly as I could have wanted it to, so shout out to the universe for that I guess.

So on Tuesday 25th April I started two month of chemo. I was feeling very optimistic going into the treatment, but its pretty difficult to feel optimistic about everything when you just feel sh*t. After my first day of treatment I was throwing up so much I had to go back into hospital and spend the night on a drip – the picture at the top is me looking like a chump in my lego batman blanket on that night. That night was the worse it’s been so far, my body has kinda levelled out to a level of shit which is manageable. Boredom is becoming a pretty massive pain as well – your immune system is very weak when you’re having chemo, so being outside and around a lot of people can be leave you pretty vulnerable to infections, and chemo itself involves sitting having chemicals pumped into your arm for hours on end. (pic below). At this point, I’m a week into treatment at this point, and although its still feeling very daunting, I can definitely see the light at the end of the tunnel.

A bit of a sidetone I wanna jam in here as well while I’m ranting – THE NHS IS FUCKING AMAZING – again I can’t talk generally, but every single nurse and doctor I’ve come into contact with has been absolutely amazing, the entire process was super quick and the ward I’m being treated in is awesome. It’s definitely made this process so much easier feeling like I’m in safe hands. Massive love and respect to everyone who spends their lives looking after other people, you don’t get a tenth of the recognition you deserve!! ≤3

I’m gonna try and do another one of these in a few weeks to keep all you guys up to date with whats happening with me, but its inevitably going to have been a fairly uneventful and rubbish couple of weeks, so I might not bother. If you have any burning questions then just drop me a tweet/message/whatever and I’ll do my best to answer – for now, these are my main conclusions: