Excerpts from Chapters -JUNE/JULY/FEBRUARY
More reviews:
​“Iain’s book is chock full of information pertinent to any cancer sufferer. I found the book easy to read as if Iain were talking to me one to one. The raw emotions he felt got to me. I recommend it to anyone suffering from cancer. A well written autobiography of a year in the life of a man who has not flinched from giving us every detail of his life, family, lover and friends.”
- Christine Smith, amazon.co.uk
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​“A book one should not miss reading with or without suffering cancer. It informs you from the point of view of a patient getting to know this illness, struggling with so many possibilities of curing it and deciding what's best. There is lot's of humor irrespective of the tragic situation, great to read.”
– Christian Frolich, amazon.de
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​“Honest and educational, scary and emotional.”
- Lindsey, amazon.es
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On my biopsy:
"As I stared up at the ceiling tiles with nothing else to think about than the mildly invasive sensation of something foreign entering my inner sanctum, she inserted the probe into my rectum and directed it towards my prostate using ultrasound. I could hear her explaining to her junior doctors the image that was gradually coming into focus on the computer screen. Once the tip of the probe settled on the surface of my prostate, she told me that she was ready to take the first sample and that I should relax. She fired a trigger, which caused a scalpel type device on the probe to snip off a tiny slither from the organ in question. Each time she did this there was a small explosion much like the clicking of fingers. The thought of it hurts more than the reality which doesn’t hurt at all, generating the sensation more like an itch that you cannot scratch for a couple of seconds before going away..."
​On Mind Games:
"Your own mental thought processes will be affected by your prostate cancer, your treatment and your post-cancer fallout. The trick is to embrace these thought processes and not dismiss them or hide from them. Even if they are unconventional, morally unacceptable or create self-embarrassment, they form part of the war against cancer. It’s as if a cancerous tumour and a body’s instincts for survival print their own war-propaganda and distribute them around the body and brain in an effort to gradually win each and every cell over to their side.
Every War has its Mind Games.
In the conversation between two extremes though, my mind was starting to think that I may have cancer, with the unpredictable G on my side, it was also starting to fill with poetry. This poetry was about to start playing a vital role in my campaign to wage my war..."
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On Radiotherapy with a full bladder:
"Day fifteen was plain sailing. I'd drank the right amount at the right time, arrived at the right time, been called at the right time, waited in the anteroom for five minutes feeling the need to go, then been summoned to lie down on the machine. As Juan took another five minutes to align the pin prick ink dots on my abdomen with the computer, my urge to go was fully controllable. The scan itself took ten minutes and then I swivelled myself off the machine, glanced at the dry pad and then at Juan, like James Bond discovering the hiding place of the Cullinan diamond. I hadn’t spilt a drop. I breezed down the corridor and into the bathroom like Fred Astaire and I peed with gay abandon, thinking of English village fetes, P.G. Wodehouse novels and Thomas Hardy heroines dancing around a flowery maypole..."
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